11/29/24, 5:15 PM ASCE 7-22 wind load standard adds tornado chapter | ASCE

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ASCE 7-22 wind load standard adds

tornado chapter
2/14/2022 0

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By Catherine A. Cardno, Ph.D.

The new edition of ASCE’s Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for
Buildings and Other Structures (ASCE 7-22) includes for the first time a chapter
dedicated to tornado loads. The wind characteristics and interactions with
structures in tornadic storms differ markedly from traditional winds, and the ASCE
7-22 committee determined that it was time to include specifications for such
storms in the design criteria.

At its most basic definition, a tornado is a violently rotating column of air that
touches the ground, usually attached to the base of a thunderstorm, explains
Marc Levitan, Ph.D., [Link], the lead research engineer at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Windstorm Impact Reduction
Program and the chair of the ASCE 7-22 task committee that developed the
tornado provisions.

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Tornadoes form inside thunderclouds when warm, humid air rises and cool air
falls, causing spinning air currents within the cloud. When the spinning currents
drop down from the cloud and become vertical, the tornado forms. “Tornadoes
are nature’s most violent storms,” Levitan says. They can cause fatalities and
devastate neighborhoods in seconds, with winds that can exceed 300 mph. The
largest tornadoes can have damage paths wider than 1 mi and up to 50 mi or
more in length.

(Graphic courtesy of NOAA)

Tornadoes are qualitatively rated as to their destructive potential on the

Enhanced Fujita scale, which ranks them from EF0 to EF5 based on estimated
wind speed and damage. An EF0 tornado, for example, causes minor damage
and has estimated wind speeds of 65-85 mph. An EF1 causes moderate damage
with estimated wind speeds of 86-110, while an EF2 causes considerable
damage with estimated wind speeds of 111-135 mph. EF3 tornadoes cause
severe damage with estimated wind speeds of 136-165 mph, EF4s inflict
devastating damage with estimated wind speeds of 166-200 mph, and EF5s
cause incredible damage with estimated wind speeds greater than 200 mph.

The ASCE 7-22 tornado chapter covers tornado speeds of approximately EF2
intensity or less, depending on geographic location and other factors.

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While the largest tornadoes make global news due to the devastation they cause,
most tornadoes are much smaller, Levitan says. For example, he notes that from
1995 to 2016 there were, on average, 1,200 tornadoes a year in the U.S. Of those,
89% were EF0 or EF1, and 97% were rated as EF2 or lower.

And even in stronger storms, far more buildings will be affected by lower wind
speeds on the outer edges of the storm than are affected by the most devastating
central portion. This was the case in the nearly mile-wide Joplin, Missouri, EF5
tornado in 2011 that killed 158 people: 72% of the area swept by the tornado
experienced EF0-EF2 winds, while only 28% experienced EF3-5 winds, Levitan
says.

Standards versus codes

The ASCE 7 standard is updated every six years on a set cycle. While standards
are crucial first steps to eventual adoption in building codes, they are only starting
points.

Ronald Hamburger, P.E., S.E., [Link], a senior principal with Simpson Gumpertz &
Heger Inc. and the chair of the ASCE 7-22 committee, explains that while the
standards developed by ASCE and other professional organizations are good first
steps toward updating building codes, they are “not actually binding until
adopted by a building code at the city, county, or state level.”

In the United States, most cities, counties, and states adopt their local building
codes based on the International Building Code. “(This) is a model code that’s
published by the International Code Council as a guideline for communities
wishing to adopt building codes. But until locally adopted, it does not become
enforceable,” Hamburger says. Enforcement of the codes falls to the same
jurisdictions that adopt them.

Areas that use the model IBC code to create their own codes will often adopt
amended codes to better fit the needs of their specific areas or regions. “The
amendments typically are intended to account for local climatic, geologic, and
construction practice conditions,” Hamburger says. “For example, a community in
Idaho may decide to adopt the International Building Code, which has tsunami
provisions in it, and they’ll say, ‘Well, we’re not on the coast; we don’t need
tsunami provisions, so we’ll adopt it without the tsunami provisions.’”
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For these reasons, it can take some time between a new standard being
published and that standard being adopted into the IBC and ultimately making its
way into local, county, or state building codes.

ASCE’s Structural Engineering Institute has recently submitted a proposal to the

ICC to adopt ASCE 7-22 into the 2024 IBC. “Typically states and communities
take a year or two — sometimes more — to adopt the latest edition of the
International Building Code, so probably ASCE 7-22 will not be adopted in most
communities as law until 2025 or so,” Hamburger notes.

Why now?

The original version of ASCE 7 was published in 1988, and while tsunami loading
was added in the 2016 edition, “adding in an entirely new loading criteria — in
this case tornadoes — is a relatively infrequent event,” says Hamburger.

The 2011 Joplin tornado disaster was the motivation for adding the tornado
chapter to this edition of ASCE 7. Investigative work into the event by NIST took a
few years. Then NIST took “the lead in developing what they thought would be
appropriate code-adoptable criteria,” Hamburger says.

As part of this development, NIST also created new tornado hazard maps for the
United States, Levitan says.

While some engineers felt it was critical to adopt design criteria for tornadoes to
better protect buildings and people, others felt the storms were so rare that the
design criteria weren’t necessary. The intent for standards is not to design for any
disaster that could occur, Hamburger notes. Instead, “we seek to provide
economical design criteria that would create acceptable levels of protection of the
built environment, within the desires and the needs of society at large.”

Prior to the completion of ASCE 7-22, there were no generally applicable criteria
for design against tornadoes that vulnerable communities could rely on. “But now
with the completion of ASCE 7-22, there are a reliable set of criteria available that
communities can adopt if they want to,” Hamburger says.

Design criteria limits

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Tornado design criteria are unique to tornadoes and not just a subset of wind
loads. “The tornado design procedures reference parts of the wind design
chapters, but they are two separate loads, (and) they are handled separately in
the load combinations,” Levitan says.

“Wind hazards in the tornado are different than wind hazards in the straight-line
winds” because vertical updrafts, atmospheric pressure changes, and the rate of
change of wind direction are all unique to tornadic storms, Levitan explains.

Two tornadoes over the Great Plains. (NOAA Legacy Photo; OAR/ERL/Wave
Propagation Laboratory)

Tornado loads also combine differently with other environmental loads compared
to wind loads, Levitan says. For example, there are no load combinations that
include simultaneous effects of tornadoes with snow loads on roofs, as tornadoes
are warm-weather phenomena.

The tornado design criteria are also very dependent on the plan size and location
of a building. Because the footprint of tornadoes can be small, the larger a
building, the greater a chance it has of being struck, especially by the highest
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wind speeds at the center of a tornado as it moves along its path, according to
Levitan. On the flip side, enormous tornadoes can form that are a mile wide and
can engulf smaller buildings completely in the high-wind field, Levitan says.

Crucially, the design criteria for tornadoes that are included in ASCE 7-22 do not
rise to the level of safe rooms or storm shelters, Levitan is quick to point out.

“We’re not designing for EF4 or 5 tornadoes,” Levitan clarifies. “If you want to
design for life safety protection from the most intense tornadoes, put in a storm
shelter or a safe room.” Such shelters are covered in ICC 500, the ICC/National
Storm Shelter Association Standard for the Design and Construction of Storm
Shelters, and Federal Emergency Management Agency P-361, Safe Rooms for
Tornadoes and Hurricanes: Guidance for Community and Residential Safe Rooms.

Special provisions were added to the ASCE 7-22 tornado chapter for essential
facilities — such as hospitals and emergency response facilities — that need to
remain operational in the event of extreme environmental loading. These
buildings are required to maintain functionality after a design-level tornado. Even
if a fire station, for example, has a storm shelter where firefighters can retreat to
during a tornado, the destruction or damage of the fire station itself and the
equipment inside would compromise the ability of it to operate post-disaster
when it is most needed.

“Although the probability of any one building being hit by a tornado or a high-
intensity tornado is very small, tornadoes do cause billions of dollars of damage a
year in the United States,” Hamburger says. “And they do cause life loss every
year in the United States.”

"While these requirements will not protect every building against any tornado
that could strike them, they should, over time as more and more buildings are
designed using these provisions, reduce both the economic and life loss that
occurs on an annual basis in the U.S.,” he says.

STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING HURRICANE, TORNADO & CYCLONE

HAZARD RESPONSE & MITIGATION LOADS STANDARDS

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INFRASTRUCTURE

AUTHOR

Catherine A. Cardno
Ph.D.

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