tornado question
 

i live in the northeast; namely massachusetts. we rarely get a tornado and myself i have never experienced one. i saw on the news that a horn blows alerting people to a real threat of a tornado. what does one do to prepare? where do you go when you hear the horn? how long do you have after the horn sounds? is it on your doorstep or a 1/2 hour away?

I don't live near a horn but it means take cover NOW. Here in rocky Tennessee we don't have many basements. Cover is in an inner room of the house. Ideally a bathroom or inner closet. But unlike hurricanes it is here and gone in no time at all. Not a storm that will linger on for hours or days

why a bathroom or a closet, uh inner closet. what does that mean?

A small room with no windows (think broken glass flying through the air), offers more protection than a larger room.
I have water, candles and the like on hand. No guarantee those would survive the tornado, but if they do i have them.
Sometimes a home is just damaged, not totally destroyed.

An inner room is one which does not have walls around the perimeter of the building, hence a hall, closet near the center of the house. We, in hurricane country, use the hall which in the center of the house and close the doors. We've been blessed not to have been hit head on by tornadoes, but they have passed close to us.... a frightful experience. As for the hurricanes, the lasting winds and rain can be scary. I remember Hurricane Hilda in '64 being one fo the worse to hit us, but there have been others that were also pretty bad. Thankfully we escaped Katrina's full force.

I grew up in "Tonado Alley" western Kansas. Without a basement, your bathroom tub is a good place. Our cellar had an outside entrance and one time daddy put us in the tub and laid a mattress over us. Usually tho, we stood on the back porch and watched the storm.

Here in Oklahoma we have lots of tornados!!! But because of thick clay soils, very few basements in homes. So many people have underground tornado shelters. The old fashioned ones like my grandparents had are underground dirt cellars with timber supports, also used as food storage root cellars. Today, they can be concrete type boxes buried in the back yard with metal doors, or underground inside the garage. Ours is a large steel box, 4' wide, 8' long and 5'tall, with a sliding door/roof, set in ground in the garage. We store water, emergency food and a medical kit in it, along with battery operated lanterns.
Nowadays with the advanced weather radars, we usually have warnings on TV about dangerous weather conditions a day or several hours in advance--called a tornado watch. Most people also have weather warning radios in our homes that go off with loud buzzers when the local area is under a tornado warning. Finally, the local communities have the public weather sirens that go off when a tornado has been verified on land. But we all watch the tv for the weather conditions, and if it looks likely, we pack critical items, take the dog and get inside the underground shelter before the sirens go off! As long as we still have electricity and wifi, we take the iPad in the shelter and a radio so we know what is going on while we are down there. The winds and rains are usually quite loud in storms like these, so we stay in the shelter till it passes or we can hear all clear announcements on the radio/ipad.
It sounds scary, and it is, but just something we are used to doing.

oh my. so how often are tornadoes occurring? is there a specific season? certain weather conditions?

They can occur any time of the year, but are most common in the spring and early summer around here. Historically may is the month for the most frequent and most severe, with April and June close seconds. When the storm conditions are right, multiple tornados can drop down, it is common for several to form in the area at the same time. Keeps the TV weather folks real busy tracking them all to keep people informed. There will often be 10 or more within a 200 mile radius in really active storms.
I don't know the technicalities, but it seems most tornados are caused when warm moist air collides with a cold front, and with big active thunderstorms. The rise and fall of the warm/cold air causes what they call 'wall clouds', then the circulation forms and the tornados spin down out of the clouds and travel along the surface of the land. Small ones may be only 100' wide with winds around 100mph, but the massive F4 tornadoes are a mile or Two across with 200-250 mph winds----those are the killers and just leave bare house foundations behind them.

Everything Jeanne said is spot on. The tornado sirens are really mostly outdated now, but small towns still have them, and some communities even in bigger cities. Areas that have the sirens have multiple sirens placed around so as many can hear as possible. We have sirens in my town and one is just a few blocks from my home. We aren't just "Tornado alley" of the west or even of the U.S., we are Tornado alley of the world!