Avoid? Odds are extremely good that, if you live in “tornado alley” and never take any measures to avoid tornadoes, you’ll still not get hit by one your whole life. Good chance you’ll never even see one.
High-wind thunderstorms with bad hail, yes, you’ll certainly get hit by a few of those, and I would be curious how they coped with them.
Anecdata: I grew up in southeastern Iowa and have seen more tornadoes than I can remember. Every single summer you'd go to the basement at least three or four times due to tornado warnings. The Iowa State mascot is a "cyclone."
Yeah, been in at least a couple warnings (not watches—for those not from the region, a warning means a radar-detected tornado signature or a sighting from a reliable source, heading your way) a year my whole life. Don’t even know many people who’ve seen one. Never seen one myself, despite being in the set who’ll go outside when the sirens sound, if it’s daytime and the visibility’s good.
They’re scary in theory, and in-fact if you have bad luck, but the acreage directly damaged by a tornado every year just isn’t that big, considering the size of tornado country.
I doubt the natives living here had any particular strategy for avoiding tornados specifically, though they may have had beliefs and practices concerning them and certainly must have had things they did to stay safe in severe thunderstorms more generally. Not because they were incapable of coming up with such (far from it) but because direct experience with a tornado (not just seeing it, but having one come near enough for avoidance or even sheltering strategies to apply, beyond what you’d do for any stormy weather) is fairly rare.
I've seen funnel clouds probably a half dozen times. The area I'm in now got hit in the last 10 years. There have also been a couple instances of stright-line winds in the last 15 years bad enough to tear huge oak trees out of the ground. The severely impacted area is fairly small, but it certainly would have been a concern for people loving in this area.
That is correct. I have lived in Tornado Alley for a half century. Serious tornadoes have landed all over my local area over the years, but I have also never even seen so much as a funnel cloud. They can be devastating though, but are also very localized and do not last long. That said, I do take tornado alerts seriously.
I've passed through neighboring regions only a handful of times in my life and rarely failed to see at least a funnel. Spookiest was a funnel at the edge of a dust storm: it dipped up and down like a spring toy and looked almost alive.
I've also witnessed two waterspouts: one large, thankfully at a distance, and another at about a half-mile.
Dust devils are also another thing. I’ve spent tens of hours driving in the southwest and mountain west and have seen several. Years and years living in, and hundreds of hours on long drives through, tornado ally and adjacent still-tornado-heavy areas, and I’ve never seen a tornado.
if "western" films have any accuracy, you push your horse to lie down, back to the storm, and you lie against him in between his feet, under a buffalo skin
Um, no. No horse is lying down during a hailstorm. They're under a tree or some kind of shelter. If they can't find shelter, they're standing up, butt to the wind, head down and ready to bolt at any second.
Horses are get spooked in zero wind by inanimate objects that they just saw the prior week, in the same spot.
Horses get increasingly skittish the higher the wind gets, even in "normal" conditions - I guess it makes it so they can't smell things downwind of them, so it's an evolutionary thing.
When wind gets high, horses get really spooked.
No way in hell would I put myself between or anywhere near horse legs during a tornado. That's just asking to die. From the horse, not the tornado.
The last 24 hours it's been very windy and raining hard. The same horse that I pull out for extra feed twice a day, every day for months saw me in a jacket with my hood up and refused to have anything to do with me until I pulled the hood down and then he figured "ok, I know that guy."
I once had the misfortune to be riding a horse when a hailstorm broke out. The horse closed his eyes and almost ran off a cliff; thankfully he hit a fence first and turned away from that.
you don't know it's a hailstorm till you're in it, prior to that it's just a storm you see coming across the plain. And while a singular horse does get skittish, the idea here I think is that the horse finds the calm presence of its owner to be soothing.
High-wind thunderstorms with bad hail, yes, you’ll certainly get hit by a few of those, and I would be curious how they coped with them.