Moore, OK Tornado took the house, left the gun safe!

Holy cow!!

Awesome! I can just hear that safe resisting the tornado - "grrrr, do your best, you son-of-a.....I'm not moving!"

That......just wow.

I'm not surprised it stayed put if it was bolted down.
But I would have expected way more paint damage then that.

Some of the cars I saw in news reports were sandblasted clean, clear down to bare steel.
Some of the trees were stripped of all bark.

I have seen similar weird things in Kansas tornados though.

After the 1966 Topeka tornado, I saw one house that had only one sheetrock bathroom wall still standing.

And on it was a towel bar, with a hand towel still hanging on it undisturbed.

rc

I grew up in OK, 'naders do strange things.

A friend of mine told of one time a tornado came over their farm right after they got home from the grocery store. They had to pretty much drop everything and hit the storm shelter, and he'd set down a 6-pack of Cokes on the back porch steps. When it was all over, the 6-pack of Coke was still there, the caps were all still on the bottles, but the bottles had been sucked empty. (back in the days of glass bottles with crimped-on steel caps and cork seals)

I can remember seeing trees with 2x4's stuck in them, trees that had been twisted so much the woodgrain opened up and straw/grass/misc. stuff had stuck in the wood and was still there when the tree untwisted, tools stuck in houses and garage roofs, some really bizarre and horrible things. Mother Nature can be downright pissy.

Does this nullify all "what safe should I buy" threads?

Does this nullify all "what safe should I buy" threads?

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No, but it should reinforce all those "bolt your safe down" threads!

Some of the cars I saw in news reports were sandblasted clean, clear down to bare steel.

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That I would have to see to believe.

Maybe Liberty Safe Co. should start manufacturing and selling personal "tornado bunker boxes" that will seat 2-4 people....

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Quote:
Some of the cars I saw in news reports were sandblasted clean, clear down to bare steel.

That I would have to see to believe.

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Totally clean, like done by a blasting shop - not likely.

But a funnel full of gravel and sand just picked up in a parking lot, and then it moves over a car? Believe it. Of course, there's gonna be a LOT more damage than just sandblasted paint.

People who've never seen what tornadoes can do really should get the chance to tour some damaged areas, it's quite sobering. Fires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides, etc. are ALL terrible, but tornadoes create their own kind of horrific damage.

Go to Google Images and type in "tornado damage".

Looks like bare metal to me.



But one photo I saw on TV was of a car with the right rear fender pretty much stripped of paint.

rc

Fella's;

"Does this nullify all the 'what safe should I buy?' threads?" No. Which isn't sour grapes on my part. But I would suggest that everybody take a good look at the way the sentence of the photo caption was constructed, and a careful examination of the photo itself wouldn't hurt either.

900F

did it survive or is he starting the rebuilding process

Looks like bare metal to me.

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Really? Looks like dirt to me. I suspect that the car may have rolled a few times, which would also likely scrap paint off in places.

I just keep going back to the series of photos linked in the OP.

And wondering if the whole thing wasn't Photo-Shopped.

Notice the trees in the back fence line still have all the leaves & branches on them.
With no fiberglass insulation, or siding & junk wrapped up in them.
And notice the grass in the yard is all still there.
And even some of the bushes next to the driveway are unscathed.

If that house got destroyed by a tornado?

It had to have been months or years ago, giving time for cleanup and vegetation to recover & grow back.

And they had to have hauled the safe in and set it there for a photo op.
Or Photo-Shopped it in.

Besides that?
The safe is just too clean to have been through any tornado that destroyed that house any time lately, unless they power-washed it first.

Nothing in the Moore tornado path looked like that on May 20, 2013 when it happened.
Or on Jun 8, 2013 when the story was published.

rc

Yep!

That is what a tree that close to the house would look like too!

rc

My Tinfoil-hat-o-meter isn't registering hoax on those pictures. IF they are then someone spent an AWFUL lot of time with photoshop getting even the smallest of details the same across all the pictures. We're talking OCD^10^10 power here.

As for debris in the trees... without knowing the exact number of days post-tornado occurence it's possible for anything that was in them to be blown out.
The cleanliness of the site could be from post-cleanup and prep to rebuild. For all we know the safe was buried under a mountain of crushed house bits. Tornadoes are a strange animal though so who knows.

I'm giving this one a high probability of being legit.

The video says the owner claimed his safe was still bolted to the floor of the house but it landed 200 yards away, scratched up. That I can believe. The safe still bolted down to the slab with no visible damage? I doubt that.

Here is why it is important to keep what you're seeing in context. To keep from picking on Liberty, I'm going to show you two photos of AMSEC safes that were in the tornado.

Safe number 1:




Safe number 2:




So which safe survived a tornado, and which one "survived a tornado"?

Well, safe #1 probably did, because the house is still standing with it in it.

Safe #2 looks like what I would expect a safe and a house in an F5 too look like.

without knowing the exact number of days post-tornado occurence it's possible for anything that was in them to be blown out.

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Its not possible for trees to grow new limbs and leaves, or grass to regrow that nice after being blown out of the ground in 18 days though.



The Moore OK tornado happened on May 20, 2013.
The story & photos were published on Jun 8, 2013.
And you simply can't clean everything up and make new green full grown trees & grass again in 2 1/2 weeks.

I have been in, or too close to three tornados in my life.
I know where there is a hedge tree here in Kansas where I grew up that still has a sheet of corrugated steel barn roofing wrapped around it.
That tornado happened in 1940 something.

rc