How do you survive a tornado?

Tornado winds reach above 90 metres per second in the strongest events, but the mechanism of injury is almost always debris rather than wind pressure on a person. That is why the guidance is entirely about putting mass between yourself and the outside: a basement or storm shelter if available, otherwise an interior room on the lowest floor with no windows, ideally with a mattress or heavy blanket over you. Mobile and manufactured homes offer very little protection and the advice is to leave them for a substantial building. Two persistent myths are worth killing: opening windows to equalise pressure does nothing useful and wastes time, and highway overpasses are dangerous rather than protective because they funnel wind and debris. Vehicles are a poor option, but if caught in the open with no structure available, official guidance is to get below the level of the roadway and cover the head.

What changes the figure

• Walls between you and the outside are the entire strategy
• Opening windows does not help and costs time
• Overpasses concentrate wind and debris rather than sheltering from them

Physiology, not instruction. Every figure here is a population range under particular conditions, and individual variation is large — temperature, exertion, fitness and health move all of them substantially. Nothing on this page is medical advice.

Situations

• Can you survive a plane crash? Usually — across all US airline accidents studied, more than 95 per cent of occupants survived.
• How long do you have to escape a sinking car? Usually 30 seconds to a couple of minutes of floating — and the window is the way out, not the door.
• Can quicksand pull you under? No. Quicksand is roughly twice as dense as a human body, so you float — you sink to about waist depth and stop.
• How far from a nuclear blast do you have to be to survive? It scales with yield: for a one-megaton airburst, survival is unlikely within about 5 km and likely beyond about 10-12 km.
• How long can you survive in a hot car? Under an hour on a warm day for a child — the interior gains about 20 °C in the first ten minutes.
• How long does it take to drown? Under a minute to lose consciousness — and it is almost silent, which is why so many drownings happen in sight of others.
• What happens if a lift cable snaps? Essentially nothing — lifts hang from multiple ropes and have a speed-triggered brake that grips the rails.
• What height can you survive falling from? Survival is common below about 6 metres and rare above 20 — but people have survived falls from thousands.
• How likely are you to survive a shark attack? Very likely — of roughly 60 to 80 unprovoked bites worldwide each year, fewer than ten are fatal.
• What happens if you fall into lava? You would not sink — lava is about three times denser than a body — but you would not survive the heat either.
• What should you do if you are caught in a rip current? Rips pull you out, not under. Swim parallel to the beach until you are out of the flow, then come in.
• Could you survive inside a whale? You cannot be swallowed by almost any whale — their throats are too narrow — and a stomach offers no air.
• How long do you have to escape a burning house? Around three minutes from the alarm sounding in a modern furnished home.
• Can you survive a tsunami? Yes, by moving inland and uphill immediately — 30 centimetres of moving water can knock an adult off their feet.