I had one of those "did I REALLY just read that moments?" I saw an a headline "Tornado Survivors Become More Confident, Study Says". So, naturally I thought "Say WHAT???", and I had to read it. I've attached the link to the story below. Now, to be fair, I haven't read the actual study so I can only comment on the news article. And you know I have a couple of things to say about that.
According to the news article, the study found that people who survive a tornado don't think that a tornado will hurt them in the future and believe they have a better chance of surviving another one. Poor Brandon was next to me when I read that and got the "and just WHO did they interview?" comment. I know tornado survivors, and I've yet to hear anyone say that they feel like they can survive another one. I personally do fear that another one is coming for me. We live in Alabama. Tornadoes, unfortunately, are a part of life here. I pray it never gets bad, but the chance of another one happening isn't zero. Heck, we were hit twice in 10.5 months. My family has been through four of them, and that's just the ones that we know about.
I should point out here that the news article also lists having a flashlight as a way that people planned to protect themselves. I should have just stopped reading right there. If only I had my trusty flashlight with me on April 27, I could have protected myself from the tornado. Yeah, nice try.
I take issue with a lot of things in this article, but I came to the conclusion that this is skewed metrics at its worst. It's a classic example of sampling from a small, non-diverse group and then applying those findings to everyone. According to the article, the subjects for the study were survivors of an April 2006 tornado in Iowa City (where the conductor of the study lived). So first, they only have survivors of one storm, meaning there's no geographic diversity. I'm sure people in the south where tornadoes are more common would have a different opinion. Second, that also means that the study paid no attention to how the rating of the tornado survived might make a difference in how people feel. That made me curious. If it was only one tornado studied and people became so confident that they could survive again, just how bad was the tornado these people survived? I survived an EF5 and I'm terrified on storms. I know other survivors who are terrified also. I looked up the tornado. It was an EF2 and there was believed to have been only one death. One death is one too many. However, I believe the study, if it was meant to be broadly applied to ALL survivors, should have found survivors of different ratings and from different areas of the country and compared how those factors affected the way people think. That would have been a much more insightful study. But, that's just my opinion.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that an EF2 isn't bad. In fact, an EF2 can destroy homes and lives. But for people to read that article and think that survivors of ALL tornadoes feel that way does a huge disservice to the actual survivors. If the people in Iowa City are more confident now, then good for them. However, please don't take a small study and broadly apply it to everyone. And if you read about studies like these please don't blindly accept them. If you want to know the truth, in the first few days after the tornado I thought that I wouldn't be scared of storms anymore. I'd survived the worst; I knew it could be done. I was high on being alive in those first few days. Then a few weeks later the first post-disaster tornado warning was issued for Limestone County at midnight. Was I confident? You tell me. I sat in the bathroom floor of my brother's house with my cat in her pet carrier, a blanket and pillow on top of my head, my daddy talking to me on my cell phone, my husband holding my hand, while I rocked back and forth crying. Surviving didn't make me more confident. It made me realize that any storm has the potential to take my life. That terrifies me. There are still people who don't take warnings seriously - and that terrifies me even more.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/tornado-survivors-optimistic-worst-disaster-study-iowa-city/story?id=18671072#.UWtp50rgaBB
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