Our home town area almost erased

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Are you talking about brick or cinderblocks??? Those are bricks. 3rd of the thickness? Find me a image to illustrate these statements (For my own curious george mentality. The more you know! I even tried educating myself here with no luck.)

[Spike]

a brick is just a lump of heated clay. get it wet and it corrodes. a 'brick' wall on its own is not that steady. anything long and vertical can be pushed over fairly easily. its strength comes from the fact that its not a single line, but from the corners and walls (note the interior wall in that pick is wooden and does not reenforce the 'exterior' wall).
If you build a wall with just brick, its going to get wet. if it stays wet, the water will freeze, bits will break off, etc. the brick comes apart just as wood does and if its still part of a wall, its a bit easier to knock it over.
most european walls are not single lines of brick, they're thick things 10+ inches wide, with insulation and waterproofing between interior breezeblocks/cinderblocks/chimpanzees and brick on the outside. combined with interior walls of pure breezeblock across the building, the wall is quite a bit sturdier than a single line of bricks. They also cost less in heating/air conditioning (due to insulation), have a much longer life time (due to water proofing), and block sound quite well too.
With the added weight of rafters going across the building, the wall is reenforced by its oposing wall in a somewhat diagonal way, which means a single point of weakness or impact along the wall doesn't cause it to topple at that point and take the rest of the wall with it - wooden structures are built with pillars, the strength is only at specific points. If that pillar fails because its hit really hard, the added weight will take it down, and the twisting motion may take down additional support structures. If the weight is supported along the length of the wall, you can bash a hole and the rest will take its weight, preventing outright collapse.

I'm struggling to gauge scale, but that wall you showed is just a single wall on one side of the building, and appears to only be about waist high. It looks like it split along the morter, which looks fairly thick in a decorative fashion.
Point is, that wall goes all along the length of the building and has nothing other than wood reinforcing it's position. Its fallen over as a single object, and further broken apart upon impact. I would assume that the roof of the house was supported upon wood, and not the brick wall which covers only a single side of the building.
Either way, the roof has been lifted off, based on the fact that its nowhere near the foundation. The bricks remain, but the wooden interior walls are nowhere to be seen.

If you're buying a house, check for gaps under the gutter. That non-destroyed american brick house has a hole which will significantly increase lift. You just won't see roofs like that on a house in the UK.
The UK does get storms strong enough to take away roofs ocasionally. Its great fun walking around in such winds. Building regulations ensure that the structure will persist long enough to be sold on to a new generation of occupants despite such storms.

As an aside, my grandparents had *really* thick walls - they actually had cupboards in the exterior walls (well, shelves behind a door on the outside wall between windows, sort of thing).

[golden_boy]

I won't dispute that any building (except bunkers perhaps) directly under an F5 tornado will be damaged, but higher building standards might still save most of the structures at the fringe and reduce the amount of debris flying around, ie reduce the overall damage.

I have to ask why people in the tornado alley still use wooden houses. It seems unwise since the risk should be well known. Cheaper, yes. But potentially hazardous.

Of course this is idle talk and I don't want to give the impression that I don't care about the losses... I do. I'm just thinking about possible improvements.

[gothiccandy]

Bobby Blevins, father and grandfather taken away by tornado | TriCities.com

Debbie was someone I worked with when we lived there, so regrettably losses were still coming in.