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Tornadoes can strike with little or no warning. If you live in an area where tornadoes occur, prepare ahead of time. If you are under a tornado WARNING, seek shelter immediately!

Prepare for a tornado

Drinking water:

For water and wastewater facilities:

Suggested activities to help facilities prepare. Please note, the linked information is written for hurricane preparedness but much of it will still apply to tornado preparedness activities.

Chemical, fertilizer, or hazardous waste storage:

Properly designed or modified storage facilities enhance worker safety and minimize the risk of contamination or spills into the environment. Read more about:
Requirements for Pesticide Storage
Hazardous Waste Management Facilities and Units

Planning for disaster debris:

Communities should plan ahead to handle exceptionally large amounts of disaster debris from damaged or destroyed buildings, supplies, trees or other green waste, carcasses, or other materials. Disposal problems can result from large amounts of debris but also from hazardous or toxic substances in the debris that can contaminate air, water, land, and food if not handled properly. Read more about disaster debris planning.

Recover after a tornado

People get sick or die each year from carbon monoxide or "CO" poisoning due to unsafe use of generators.

Drinking water:

For water and wastewater facilities:

Suggested activities to help facilities recover from severe weather conditions. The linked information is written for hurricane recovery but most of it will apply to tornado recovery also.

Pesticides, chemical and oil spills, hazardous waste:

Call the National Response Center 1-800-424-8802 (24 hours a day every day). For those without 800 access, call 202-267-2675.

Industries and businesses that encounter spills or discharges in the aftermath should contact the National Response Center immediately. You or your organization may have legal requirements for reporting, cleanup, or for taking other actions, depending on the specific circumstances.

National Pesticide Information Center: 1-800-858-7378. Pesticide contacts

How to report spills and possible violations

Disaster debris:

How a community manages massive amounts of disaster debris depends on the debris and any waste management options available. Burying or burning may not be acceptable unless permission or a waiver has been granted, because of the side effects of smoke and fire from burning, and potential water and soil contamination. Typical methods of recycling and solid waste disposal in sanitary landfills often cannot be applied to disaster debris because of the large volume of waste and reluctance to overburden existing disposal capacity. More information on disaster debris.

Renovation and rebuilding

Lead-safe work: By law, contractors need to use lead-safe work practices on emergency renovations on homes or buildings built before 1978. Activities such as sanding, cutting, and demolition can create lead-based paint hazards. Lead-contaminated dust is harmful to adults, particularly pregnant women, and children.

Asbestos: Anyone working on demolition, removal, and cleanup of building debris needs be aware of any asbestos and to handle asbestos materials properly. People exposed to asbestos dust can develop serious lung health problems including asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma. Although the use of asbestos has dramatically decreased in recent years, it is still found in many residential and commercial buildings and can pose a serious health risk.

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Tornadoes can strike with little or no warning. If you live in an area where tornadoes occur, prepare ahead of time. If you are under a tornado WARNING, seek shelter immediately! Suggested activities to help facilities prepare. Please note, the linked information is written for hurricane preparedness but much of it will still apply to tornado preparedness activities.

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http://www.caution.com/tornado/recovering_from_tornado.html

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A tornado effects many living things such as human ,plant life and animals. How it effects humans A tornado effects humans because they can cause injures or death.Also they can contaminate water...

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Tornadoes effect the environment by destroying buildings and trees. Tornadoes also kill animals, which effects the food chain and disrupts the whole environment. Tornadoes destroy our farms, which means there will be food shortages around the surrounding area. After everything is destroyed, humans have to rebuild. Tornadoes can cause water contamination, which poses a serious problem, as plants, animals and humans are effected by this. Debris can be very dangerous, as it could kill plants and animals very easily. Some trees take over 100 years to grow, so if they are destroyed, they will be hard to replace. Fires may occur after a tornado due to damaged power lines and gas leaks. Fire contributes to global warming by giving off carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Because of man-made global warming, scientists believe that there will be an increases in tornadoes and other severe weather. What do you think?

Here is an example of how much damage a tornado can do:

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Tornadoes effect the environment by destroying buildings and trees. Tornadoes also kill animals, which effects the food chain and disrupts the whole environment. Tornadoes destroy our farms, which means there will be food shortages around the surrounding area. After everything is destroyed, humans have to rebuild.

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Tornadoes have a massive effect on humans. Tornadoes can destroy precious valuables, that have been passed down for generations. Tornadoes can also result in food shortages and water contamination....

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Snow storm in the making, Kiev, Ukraine © Flickr/Pedro Moura Pinheiro

Storms bringing wind, snow, ice or hail or a combination of these factors have always impacted the health of forests and thus are a regular consideration in forest management plans. They can occur as catastrophic events affecting entire landscapes, the quality of wildlife habitats, and forest stand structure, which can lead to major disruptions in management goals. Alternatively they may occur as small scale disturbances that affect individual trees or groups of trees within a stand increasing the amount of dead wood and diversifying stand structure, which can have positive benefits for biological diversity.

Snow most commonly impacts trees by breaking stems but trees can also be bent or uprooted. The severity of snow damage is related to tree characteristics; factors controlling the stability of trees such as stem taper and crown characteristics are the most important. Conifers are particularly damaged by heavy snowfall, while broadleaved trees are generally more resistant to storms and snow in the late autumn and winter due to better root systems and lack of foliage.

Damaging winds vary from short-lived gusts, to strong prevailing winds, to powerful hurricanes, to brief but intense downdrafts from thunderstorms.

Approximately 2 000 hectares of forest were damaged in Estonia during the Eisma storm in August 2010 © O. Lavrentjeva

Storm damage can include initial mechanical damage from the storm, subsequent damage from other biotic or abiotic factors (i.e. insects, fire, sun, snow, ice, etc.), and loss of production. The impact of wind on forests is determined by a complex of many biotic and abiotic factors and is similar to those experienced during cyclones.

In a matter of minutes an ice storm can deposit a layer of ice heavy enough to bring down power and telephone lines and snap branches from trees. Impacts of individual storms are highly patchy and variable, and depend on the nature of the storm, its severity, frequency, timing and extent. Ice accumulation on trees can cause minor branch breakage; major branch loss, up to total crown loss; temporarily or permanently bending over of crowns; root damage (when soil is not frozen); breakage of trunks within or below the crown; and for some hardwoods, split trunks. Softwoods seem to suffer less damage than hardwoods. Recently-thinned stands can be highly vulnerable, as crowns have spread into newly-opened space but branch strength may not be fully developed. Trees damaged by ice storms or windthrow can be more susceptible to other disturbances such as insect pests or fire.

Large hailstones that can reach diameters of over 10 centimetres and can fall at speeds of over 150 km/h can also cause considerable damage to forests.

Dust storm in New South Wales, Australia, 2009 © Flickr/DabaYu

Dust storms and sandstorms are natural events that occur throughout the world, especially in dryland areas which occur in Central and South Asia, the Australian Outback, South American Patagonia, the North American Great Plains, Sahara and sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean region.

Dust storms and sandstorms are a result of wind erosion and are driven by poor land management and degradation of the dryland vegetation cover. Strong winds and favourable surface atmospheric conditions (i.e. turbulence level, stability, soil moisture) can allow for large amounts of sand and dust to be lifted from bare, dry soils into the atmosphere. Every year one and a half tonnes of sand and dust are emitted from drylands into the atmosphere where it can be transported downwind affecting regions hundreds to thousands of kilometres away depending on meteorological conditions. Dust from the Gobi Desert, for example, is carried to the Pacific coasts of North America and dust from the Sahara Desert is carried to the Caribbean islands and the Amazon basin.

Dust can have numerous impacts on human and veterinary health, the environment, agriculture, marine ecosystems, fisheries, transport, visibility, aviation, and weather and climate at larger scales. Crops can be destroyed, trees can be damaged or blown down and greenhouses and other nursery structures can be broken.

In some cases, however, the deposition of dust can produce positive results. For example, mineral-rich Saharan dust transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the Amazon rain forest in South America provides iron and phosphorus to the nutrient-poor rainforest soils acting as fertilizer.

Measures to combat the occurrence and impacts of sand and dust storms include the use of windbreaks or shelterbelts to reduce the impact of wind speeds and decrease soil erosion.

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Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

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Snow storm in the making, Kiev, Ukraine © Flickr/Pedro Moura Pinheiro Storms bringing wind, snow, ice or hail or a combination of these factors have always impacted the health of forests and thus are a regular consideration in forest management plans.

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By Abby Jackson, Sofia Kaparis, Jack Callihan, and Jonah Schwarts

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Some of the abiotic factors that were affected by the Oklahoma tornado in 2013 would be all of the bricks and steel used to make houses and elementary schools that were in the path of the tornado....