I
couldn’t find the image that I wanted to, and I don’t know where it could be
found. For I first saw it as part of a
television news story about families trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered
lives after tornadoes swept across parts of Alabama, Illinois, Indiana,
Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee around a week ago.
Anyway,
what was pointed out to me in this image was clean concrete blocks piled on the
floor of what used to be someone’s living room.
No, there wouldn’t be anything too unusual about something like that in
the aftermath of a direct hit from a fairly large tornado. That is, except for the part about the blocks
previously being a part of the outside wall of the house, and being clean—as in
not having any mortar still clinging to them.
After
seeing footage of the utter destruction of several very substantial-looking
houses, the thought had zipped through more than once, but it was seeing
an unintentional close-up of those clean concrete blocks that caused me to
start paying closer attention to the possibility that much of the damage being more a
result of poor construction than the power of the storm. For I know for a fact that many homes in the last 10 years or so have
been built with only their weight keeping them on their foundations, and using
only enough mortar to keep bricks, blocks and flagstones standing fairly
straight until the interior walls are up to provide more bracing would not be out
of the question for an unscrupulous contractor trying to make as much profit as
possible.
In all
fairness, there were several older building also utterly destroyed, and one
would assume that they were built better during a time when integrity was taken
a little more seriously than it has been lately. Ah, but one of the most destructive things
about a tornado is debris being hurled about, and when one of even the
lighter-weighted (around 30 pounds) cinder blocks hits the outside wall of a
100 year-old court house at over 130 miles-per-hour, something has to give.
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