Tornado shelter

Perhaps it's a sign of how assimilated an Okie I've become that I didn't realise until a few days ago how amusing it would be to a Brit that, until very recently, we were seriously considering installing a tornado shelter in our house. The reason we eventually decided against it was that it is, on balance, probably an extravagance we can manage without. But in Oklahoma it's a reasonably standard thing, certainly no more unusual than putting in a loft conversion or installing a new garden shed would be in the UK. However, when I told this to a British friend the other day, she dissolved into hysterics (well, laughter anyway) at the mere idea.

Oklahoma is known as 'tornado alley'; in fact the film 'Twister' is set there, something I didn't know until recently. The fact is that there are tornados, and some of them can be very big and scary. I've already posted a description of a close shave I had a few weeks ago ('Tornado', 10 Feb). As far as I know, that's the only serious tornado there's been in OKC so far this year, although some more were predicted the other day which didn't materialise. So, given that you might perhaps expect to have one go through the city every couple of months while the season lasts (approximately February to November), I think it's pretty unlikely that you'd actually be unlucky enough to get in the way of a big one which would do serious damage to you, your house or car (or which would transport you to the mythical land of Oz - but that's only in Kansas, I believe). Unlikely, but not impossible.

But it's a fact of life if you live here, and my fellow Oklahomans - real ones, who've lived here a long time - are just used to it. As far as I can tell, most of them don't feel they need to go so far as to install a shelter, and are content to adopt their usual quite laid-back attitude to life; they just know that if one is about to hit they need to get in the bath, cover themselves with blankets, and prepare for the worst. This may seem odd given the facts of the matter, but to be fair, the IRA routinely planted bombs in London while I was a student in the early 1990s - I could, theoretically, have been blown to pieces at any point, and indeed one night, while in bed at about midnight, I heard a distant muffled bang which I found out in the morning had been an IRA bomb which went off a few miles from my house. But neither I nor my friends ever thought seriously about the danger. Mind you, this could have been because we spent a lot of time drinking beer, or so I recall.

So what of the tornado shelter? Well, they basically come and dig a big hole in your garage floor (that's garage, of course, not garage) into which they put a large steel box with a sliding lid, and then fill in the rest of the hole with concrete. The plan is that when the twister's on its way you descend into this box and sit tight while your house collapses around you, and several hundred tons of rubble falls on top of the box. When the danger's passed, you winch the lid open from inside and, hey presto, there you are. My parents said it's essentially the same as an Anderson shelter, which were common in Britain during the second world war.

You can find out more about them here. They have several entertaining and informative videos, including some marvellously scripted duologues between a potential customer and the cheery tornado shelter vendor: 'This being a tornado shelter, obviously it would have to take a lot of debris being thrown at it ... is there a way that you test for that?' 'Yeah, there sure is!' I was rooting for him to look crestfallen and say 'Er, no, sorry, we've never done that', but luckily Mr Tornado Shelter has an answer for every tricky sales question. I'm suspicious, though, because the customer appears to be dressed in the same tornado shelter clothes as the salesman.

The videos are persuasive, but personally I think drinking lots of beer might be a better option - certainly more enjoyable, and cheaper.