Tornado Warning: What to Do at Home, in a Car or Outside

When a tornado warning covers your area, go now to a basement, or to a small windowless room in the middle of the lowest floor, get as low as you can and cover your head. If you are in a mobile home, a vehicle or outdoors, your first job is different: get into the nearest sturdy building.

The kind of building you are in matters. The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) warns that most tornadoes can destroy even a tied-down mobile home, and the deaths reflect it. I went through NOAA's Storm Events Database for 2016 to 2025 and counted where each person killed directly by a tornado was: of 513 deaths, 238 (46%) were in mobile homes and 155 (30%) in permanent houses. The full table is further down.

Watch, warning, emergency: which one means move

The National Weather Service (NWS) uses three tornado alerts. Only the watch leaves you time to prepare.

Alert	What it means	What to do
Tornado watch	Tornadoes are possible in and near the watch area, usually many counties or even states	Review your plan, check your supplies and your shelter spot, be ready to move
Tornado warning	A tornado has been sighted or indicated by weather radar, for an area about the size of a city or small county	Go to your shelter now
Tornado emergency	The highest level: a violent tornado has touched down and catastrophic damage is confirmed	Take refuge in the safest place you can reach immediately

During a watch, the NWS advises following local news or a NOAA Weather Radio for updates. Warnings come from your local NWS forecast office, and what a warning tells you to do is what to follow. The SPC also notes that some tornadoes occur without a warning, so the signs further down are worth knowing.

At home: lowest floor, smallest interior room

The SPC's safety page sets out the order:

1. Basement if you have one. Get under something sturdy such as a heavy workbench, or pull a mattress or sleeping bag over yourself. Check what sits on the floor above you: a piano, refrigerator or other heavy object can fall through a weakened floor, so do not shelter under it.
2. No basement (house, dorm, apartment): the lowest floor, in a small room in the center of the building: a bathroom, a closet, under a stairwell, or an interior hallway with no windows.
3. Crouch as low as possible, face down, and cover your head with your hands. Flying and falling debris is the main danger, so put thick padding over yourself (a mattress or blankets) in case the roof and ceiling fail. A helmet helps if you have one.
4. Bathtubs: a metal tub can give partial protection. Plastic or fiberglass tubs do not; debris goes straight through them.
5. Do not open windows to "equalize pressure". The SPC calls it an old notion: a tornado will blow the windows open by itself.

The SPC also suggests keeping the padding (mattress, sleeping bags, thick blankets) in or next to your shelter spot so you can grab it in seconds, and practicing a family tornado drill at least once a year.

Mobile homes: leave, and leave early

The SPC's advice for mobile and manufactured homes starts with "Get out!" Even a home that is tied down is not as safe as an underground shelter or a permanent, sturdy building.

• Plan in advance where you will go: a shelter, or a nearby permanent building.
• If a tornado threat is forecast, the SPC suggests a plan to stay with someone in a sturdy permanent building. Under a warning, the NWS says to move from a mobile home to the closest substantial shelter.
• A shed, storage unit or tent is not a shelter either (NWS).

Office, school, store or gym

• Go to an enclosed, windowless area in the center of the building, on the lowest floor possible, then crouch down and cover your head (SPC).
• Stay out of large open rooms such as gyms, cafeterias and auditoriums, and away from glass (NWS, SPC).
• Do not use elevators. If the power goes out, you can be trapped (SPC). Interior stairwells are usually good places to shelter and, if they are not crowded, let you get down a level quickly.
• In a store you shop at often, it helps to know in advance where the restrooms and storage rooms are.

Caught in a car: shelter, drive at right angles, or get low

Drive to the nearest sturdy building if you can reach it. If the tornado catches you, park out of the traffic lanes and stay buckled with your head below the windows, or lie in a spot clearly lower than the road. The SPC puts it plainly: vehicles are extremely risky in a tornado, and there is no safe option, only slightly less dangerous ones. In order:

1. Drive to the closest sturdy shelter if you can reach it (NWS).
2. If the tornado is visible, far away and traffic is light, you may be able to drive out of its path by moving at right angles to it (SPC). If it is close and coming toward you, do not try to outrun it. The NWS tornado emergency guidance says that if you see a tornado approaching, do not attempt to outrun it in a vehicle; shelter in place.
3. If extreme winds or flying debris reach you, park as quickly and safely as you can, out of the traffic lanes. Stay in the car with your seat belt on, put your head below the windows, and cover it with your hands and a blanket, coat or cushion (SPC).
4. If you can safely get noticeably lower than the road, such as a ditch or ravine, leave the car, lie down there and cover your head with your hands (SPC, NWS).

Why an overpass is not a tornado shelter

Do not shelter under a bridge or overpass. The SPC warns that it offers little protection from flying debris and can create deadly traffic hazards. The NWS office in Norman, Oklahoma studied what happened under overpasses during the May 3, 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak and explains why:

• The wind is stronger up there. Wind speed generally drops toward the ground, so climbing up under the bridge deck moves you into faster wind, not out of it.
• The sheltered side does not stay sheltered. When a tornado passes over an overpass, the wind direction swings nearly 180 degrees, so the side that was protected as it approached is fully exposed as it moves away.
• Where an overpass was in the path, someone died. Of the seven places where tornadoes crossed interstates in central Oklahoma that day, three had an overpass directly in the path, and someone died at each of them. Under the Shields Boulevard overpass in Moore, about 12 people took shelter: one died, and all but one of the survivors were seriously injured by flying debris.
• It traps other people. Drivers parked under the bridge, then in the traffic lanes, until the interstate was blocked and the people behind them were left in the tornado's path with only a ditch, an overpass or their car.

The overpass idea spread largely through a 1991 video from the Kansas Turnpike. The NWS Norman page explains that it was a relatively weak tornado and the people under the bridge were only on the fringe of its circulation.

Outside with no building or car

If you cannot reach a sturdy building, lie flat and face down on low ground and protect the back of your head with your arms. Get as far as you can from trees and cars, which can be blown onto you (SPC).

Where tornado deaths happened, 2016-2025

These are direct tornado deaths in NOAA's Storm Events Database, grouped by the location recorded for each one. How I counted is in the Method section below.

Where	Deaths	Share
Mobile or trailer home	238	46.4%
Permanent home	155	30.2%
Other buildings (businesses, churches, other permanent and long-span-roof structures)	45	8.8%
Vehicle or towed trailer	24	4.7%
Outdoors (open areas, under trees, camping)	15	2.9%
Unknown or other	36	7.0%
Total	513	100%

Read it with care. The table counts deaths, not how many people were in each kind of place, so it does not say how dangerous each place is per person. A small number for vehicles does not make a car safe; the SPC calls vehicles extremely risky. The total also swings a lot from year to year, from 10 deaths in 2018 to 102 in 2021.

When tornado deaths happen: at night, and in March and December

The same data shows when people died. The fatality records carry no time of death, so I used the start time of each tornado record, in local standard time. A tornado that crosses county lines is recorded once per county, so this is when the tornado touched down in, or entered, the county where people died.

Two in three deaths (344 of 513, 67%) came from tornado records that began between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., while only 43% of all tornado records began in those hours. The deadliest single month in the period, December 2021, with 89 deaths, was entirely at night by this measure, but leaving it out still gives 60%. A tornado that arrives in the dark is harder to see, and a warning can arrive while you are asleep: keep your phone's emergency alerts on at night, and know the night-time signs listed further down.

The deadliest months are not the busiest ones. Tornado records peak in May, but deaths peaked in March and December:

Month	Deaths	Tornado records
January	43	633
February	23	530
March	140	1,749
April	81	2,567
May	70	3,190
June	16	1,649
July	5	1,199
August	6	1,093
September	4	561
October	7	669
November	14	481
December	104	848
Total	513	15,169

A tornado that crosses a county line is recorded once per county, so "tornado records" overstate the number of tornadoes; they still show when tornadoes are common. By state, the most deaths were in Kentucky (95), Tennessee (61), Alabama (57), Mississippi (56) and Texas (35), all in the South and Southeast.

Signs to watch for, warning or not

The SPC lists what to look and listen for besides a visible funnel:

• Strong, persistent rotation in the base of a cloud.
• Whirling dust or debris on the ground under a cloud base. Tornadoes sometimes have no funnel.
• Hail or heavy rain followed by dead calm or a fast, intense wind shift. Many tornadoes are wrapped in rain and cannot be seen.
• A loud, continuous roar or rumble that does not fade after a few seconds like thunder.
• At night: small, bright blue-green to white flashes at ground level near a storm (power lines snapping), or a persistent lowering from the cloud base lit up by lightning.

If you notice any of these, go to your shelter without waiting for an alert.

When the network is down

A storm that takes out power or mobile data can also keep a page like this from loading. A screenshot of the steps above works, and so does a short version kept in an app that runs offline.

Safe-Life, a free Android app I make for emergency preparedness, has two tornado guides: one for sheltering indoors and one for a car or open ground, based on SPC and FEMA guidance, in English and Korean. They open without an internet connection. The app was written for users in Korea, so some of its other guides use Korea's emergency numbers; the tornado guides contain none, and in the US the number to call is 911. Its go-bag checklist also works out how many days your household could hold out on the water and food you have packed; for how much water to keep, see how much emergency water to store per person.

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Method

• Data: NOAA NCEI Storm Events Database bulk CSV files ("details" and "fatalities") for 2016 through 2025, downloaded on 2026-10-17.
• Count: each fatality row was joined to its event by event ID, keeping events of type "Tornado" and fatalities marked direct ("D"). Locations are the codes in NWS Instruction 10-1605, grouped as in the table above. Anyone can repeat the count from the public files with the same join.
• Timing: fatality rows have no time, so month and hour come from the tornado record's begin date and time, which NWS Instruction 10-1605 says is entered in local standard time. "Night" means the tornado began between 18:00 and 05:59. Without the December 2021 outbreak, the night share is 60.1%.
• Cross-check: the per-person fatality rows give 513 deaths, and the death totals recorded on the tornado events give 508. The 5 extra rows belong to events whose recorded total is 0. Even if all 5 were dropped from a single group, no share in the table would move by a full percentage point.

Sources

All pages checked on October 17, 2026.

• Tornado Safety - NOAA Storm Prediction Center: sheltering at home, in mobile homes, large buildings, cars and outdoors; warning signs; padding and drills
• What's the difference between a Tornado Watch, a Tornado Warning and a Tornado Emergency? - National Weather Service: the three alert levels; do not try to outrun an approaching tornado in a vehicle
• What to do During a Tornado - National Weather Service: local news and NOAA Weather Radio, large open rooms, sheds and mobile homes, vehicles and ditches
• Highway Overpasses as Tornado Shelters - NWS Norman: wind near the ground and under an overpass, the 180-degree wind shift, the May 3, 1999 cases, the 1991 Kansas Turnpike video
• Wireless Emergency Alerts - National Weather Service: how tornado warnings reach phones
• Storm Events Database bulk data - NOAA NCEI: tornado fatalities by location, 2016-2025
• NWS Instruction 10-1605, Storm Data Preparation: direct fatality location codes

FAQ

How do I get tornado warnings on my phone? Through Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA). The NWS sends tornado warnings this way; no signup is needed, and WEA-capable phones on a participating carrier get them automatically, including while visiting another area. They arrive with a special tone and vibration, repeated twice. Keep them turned on. Safe-Life does not receive or send alerts of any kind.

Do most people survive a tornado? The SPC says even violent tornadoes have a survival rate of at least 99%, and EF5 tornadoes are very rare. No shelter guarantees safety and the strongest tornadoes can level almost any house, but most tornadoes are much weaker and "can be survived using these safety ideas", the ones in the sections above.