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Florida just bumped up the wind code requirement in this area to 170
MPH. That certainly starts getting you up into the F-3 tornado
category.
The connector requirements tie the roof, all the way down to the
foundation as a continuous system.

Sadly, even after several serious tornadoes, places in "tornado alley" like
Moore have done very little to make local houses more tornado resistant:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/us...ado-alley.html

Construction standards in Moore have been studied extensively. In a 2002
study published in the journal of the American Meteorological Society,
Timothy P. Marshal, an engineer in Dallas, suggested that "the quality of
new home construction generally was no better than homes built prior to the
tornado" in 1999.
Few homes built in the town after the storm were secured to their
foundations with bolted plates, which greatly increase resistance to storms;
instead, most were secured with the same kinds of nails and pins that failed
in 1999. Just 6 of 40 new homes had closet-size safe rooms.

I have less sympathy now for the Okies that get blown clean to Oz. At least
the ones that rejected calls for improved building codes based on claims
"it's too expensive" to build a basement. Yet the Feds (you and me and our
tax dollars) are expected to help rebuild areas affected by tornadoes and
hurricanes. How about not giving any disaster funds for rebuilds that DON'T
include basements?

What would it really cost if a large township got together and decided to
help underwrite the cost of installing small pre-fab shelters in cities and
towns along Tornado Alley? Sounds like the readiest "shovel ready" project
around. Tornado shelters are mass-produced in a pre-fab format that just
drops into a 10 by 10 by 10 hole. It seems like Californians and
earthquakes, mid-westerners are equally ambivalent about their local menace,
tornadoes.

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Bobby G.