(NEXSTAR) — With parts of the U.S. facing and tornadoes — — it’s a good time to revisit storm safety.
If you live in an area known to have tornadoes, knowing your safe spot may be common sense, whether it’s a basement, an interior room on the lowest level of the building, a tornado shelter, or, if those are unavailable, But what about when you’re driving, and aren’t near any buildings to hide in? Your first instinct, especially on a highway, may be to find a bridge or overpass to park under as the storm moves through. While that may sound like a safe space to protect yourself and your car from a storm, experts warn against it for a number of reasons. Parking there can block traffic, potentially putting yourself and others at risk of collision.
Should a tornado move through the area, parking under an underpass can create an even more serious situation. As meteorologist Aaron Brackett of Nexstar’s KFOR , when winds encounter an overpass, they increase. “So even if you have a wind in a weaker tornado of 100, 150 miles per hour, you can add 40, 50, 60 miles per hour to that just from being underneath the underpass.
So, it’s actually making the tornado you’re in worse,” he says. In May 1999, many people took cover under an overpass during the deadly F5 Bridge Creek-Moore Tornado — with , the highest ever recorded — as it moved through Moore, Oklahoma. Among those was Stuart Earnest, who told KFOR in 2012 that when the tornado hit, “people started gett.
