Experts Cite Economic, Societal Cost of Tornadoes

March 13, 2011 -- She died in her bed.

Brittany May, 17, was asleep at 2 a.m. in Lady Lake, Fla., on Feb. 2, 2007, when a monstrous tornado blew a tree onto her family's mobile home and killed her.

"I've never had to bury a child," her stepmother, Lisa May, said. "I'm going to speak for her mother, and me and her father: This is the hardest thing that any of us will have to do."

Brittany was one of 21 victims of a savage tornado outbreak that slashed across central Florida that month.Tragically, she was in an unusually vulnerable situation: She lived in a mobile home in the Southeast, during a nighttime tornado outbreak in February. That's the deadliest time and place for twisters, according to Economic and Societal Impacts of Tornadoes, a book just published by the American Meteorological Society.

The USA is heading into the prime months for tornadoes, according to the National Weather Service. The private forecasting firm AccuWeather warns that this spring's tornado season will be more active than normal. AccuWeather meteorologist Paul Pastelok says areas of greatest concern lie from Arkansas and Missouri into Tennessee and Kentucky.

"People are 10 times more likely to die in a mobile home than if the same tornado hit a regular home," says book co-author Kevin Simmons, an economist at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.

Simmons says mobile homes constitute only 7% of the USA's housing stock, but his research found that 43% of all tornado deaths are to people in mobile homes, which can be no match for a tornado's violent winds, clocked as high as 300 mph.

Simmons and co-author Daniel Sutter of the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg became interested in tornadoes in 1999, when, living in Oklahoma, they both witnessed one of the most devastating in U.S. history: the May 3 Moore, Okla., twister that killed dozens of people and cost $1.1 billion in damage, according to the Storm Prediction Center.