View attachment 11082
I think this confirms it...
It's been abundantly clear for some time now that certain people believe EF5 damage can only occur in Oklahoma (and maybe Texas) because apparently no one else knows how to properly design and construct structures capable of being "well-built."
There's a bias that has imbued the rating process of violent tornadoes since Moore 2013. I fully believe that if the 4/27 tornadoes had been rated post-Moore that not a single one would've been deemed EF5 worthy.
Downtown Birmingham could be scoured down to bedrock come April and it would be "Sorry, folks, they just don't build things like they do on the Plains."
It's almost as if there's an expectation that all structures should have been constructed as if they're in an area that has been repeatedly hit by violent tornadoes otherwise the belief is the construction quality just isn't quite good enough.
I was in a large institutional building today in Huntsville (including on the roof for a good period of time). I'm intimately familiar with the building, its design, and its quality of construction. It could be leveled tomorrow and I guarantee it wouldn't meet EF5 standards. "Sorry, folks, we can't rule out that maybe an earthquake occurred simultaneously so this is lower bound." Plus, the architect and engineers weren't from the Plains, so seems pretty obvious to me they wouldn't know how to design and construct a "well-built" building.
Do we really know that the anchor bolting was torqued to the design specifications? Maybe it was over-tightened and damaged the foundation. Maybe it wasn't torqued down enough. If there's any potential *chance* it wasn't done EXACTLY as we would like to see then LOWER BOUND.
Hyperbole, sure. But, it's all that seems to be left. There's definitely no confidence in the ratings process.