Rare Twisters Strike South Africa

'Rare South African Tornadoes'

Article:
"Rare South African tornadoes killed at least two people and left hundreds more homeless. The tornadoes struck on Sunday, roaring through the towns of Duduza, Ficksburg and Nigel east of Johannesburg.

Officials say nearly a thousand homes were damaged and trees and power lines were also brought down.

On average, South Africa gets a tornado every other year. The tornado season usually starts in November."

The Engineering Perspective
The term 'rare' should tell you all you need to know. South Africa is really not prepared for tornados at all. As the article said thousands of houses were destroyed and trees and power lines were also brought down. If you watch the video posted at the end, you can see that the tornado doesn’t look like its ripping through areas of high population, so the estimate of 1000 houses damaged is quite high. These people probably would’ve never expected a tornado of this magnitude to strike them, and will probably not do a whole lot to take preventative measures in the future.

The Behavioral Perspective
I think in looking at this from a behavioral perspective there was really nothing that they did wrong that increased the severity of this hazard. The only thing I could think of is since these homes were in rural countryside, maybe there was no short-term system of warning. In terms of long term planning they probably won’t change a lot because this area doesn't generally get hit by hazards such as this one.

The Development Perspective
I guess it’s difficult to assess this disaster in a long term developmental approach. This wasn’t a case of low income families being forced to move onto tornado ridden flat land. This wasn’t a case of human exploitation of the land leading to more severe disasters. This was simply a case of these people happening to have their houses in the wrong part of South Africa.

The Complexity Approach
So I guess this is where the Swiss cheese and chaos theory stuff is located. So I suppose the series of factors which led to the severity of this disaster would be: Lack of response time due to the rural environment, Homes not structurally sound due to rarity of tornados, or the government slow to respond with aid due to being unprepared for this type of hazard/disaster.

Interesting Fact: This tornado was an F-2, the ones that came through Joplin were F-5's. And proportionately in terms of death and destruction the Joplin tornado was probably still a lot worse.

Link to Tornado Video: http://wxch.nl/n0WjLI