Should my garage door be open or closed during a tornado warning?
Closed. Every time. The old advice to open doors or windows and equalize pressure is a myth debunked by every storm engineering body; houses aren't damaged by pressure imbalance but by wind and debris getting inside. An open garage door hands the storm a 112-square-foot entrance to pressurize the house and lift the roof. Close it, skip the garage, get to shelter.
Where the open-the-door myth came from, and why it's wrong
For decades, folklore held that a tornado's low pressure makes closed houses explode, so venting them saves the roof. Research after the 1970s tornado outbreaks, and again after May 3, 1999 and May 20, 2013 here in the metro, killed that theory: structures fail because wind gets inside and loads surfaces from within, not because sealed air pops them. NOAA and FEMA guidance both say the same thing now: close everything, and don't waste sheltering time doing anything else. Opening the garage door doesn't relieve pressure; it creates it, by letting 100-plus mph air pack the garage and shove upward on the roof deck and outward on the walls. The full failure sequence is worth two minutes of your reading time in why the garage door is a house's weak point in wind.
Your actual tornado-warning checklist for the garage
- Door closed, opener locked out. Close it as the storm approaches, then stay out of the garage; it's the most dangerous room in the house in wind, full of the biggest opening and the most projectiles.
- Vehicles inside if time safely allows, and parked with clearance from the door, since standard doors that fail collapse inward.
- Know your manual release before you need it. Metro-wide power outages follow every major storm, and the red release cord plus a lift by hand is how you'll get a car out afterward. If the door's too heavy to lift with the cord pulled, the springs are out of balance now, which is a fixable problem today and an emergency later.
- Shelter placement caveat: thousands of metro homes have their storm shelter installed in the garage floor. If yours does, get in early and mind that a failed door can drop debris on the lid; keep the pry tool inside the shelter that manufacturers recommend.
Before the season, not during the warning
The time to think about the door is April, not while the sirens run. Options in ascending order of protection: verify the current door's track fasteners and hardware are tight during a tune-up, add a retrofit brace package as covered in our bracing answer, or step up to a factory wind-rated door when replacement time comes. And if a storm leaves your door crumpled at 11 p.m. with rain still falling, our emergency crew runs 24/7 across all 21-plus metro cities with no after-hours surcharge; securing the opening the same night is usually possible.
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Related Questions
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