I'll certainly have a go, though I should be a bit clearer about just what I mean.
We accept that roots grow anywhere they can find conditions that are favourable to their growth, and will decline and die back where conditions become unfavourable.
Even in non-human affected environments...wilderness in other words...soil conditions can be very variable in a small area, leading to greater volumes of roots in parts of the root plate in comparison to others......so.......I'm not suggesting that trees always have neat symmetrical root structures they don't, but the lack of symmetry is not uniform or in neat patterns when we see that we can be pretty safe in saying human factors are at play.
There is little difference inthe two examples I posted, only one os more obvious than the other....and yes there are other important factors at play, especially the cohesion in the soil structure itself, affecting the resistance to wind loading in the canopy.
In the case of the school tree we can see in one pic the area we would expect to see roots growing from the stem into the surrounding soil profile.....yellow area
I would have expected to see much more damage to the path surface as roots were pulled up out of the ground, even if they were to break healthy roots will lift the soil surface first and there should be evidence of that there is very very little disturbance...therefore very very few roots growing into the area of the path.
Perhaps the path was cut down and the surface roots removed during that process or the path was only lightly scraped and years of compaction and resurfacing have created a most inhospitable environment for root growth....whatever the case the straight edge of missing roots matches the edge of the path too perfectly this is not natural, this is a major loss of structural stability in the precise part of the root plate that was critical to holding up the tree under this particular wind event.
BTW the trees can also be seen to have been trashed through years of stupid lopping, adding to their woes creating major strain to the tree system, weakening defences and commiting massive amounts of stored carbohydrates to regrowing removed portions (big portions) of live canopy.
Remember all trees will fail under the right (or wrong!) conditions, what we can say is that inadvertent illconcieved and ill informed human actions have led to this event, not just the soil and root damage but it is in my opinion in this case the major factor.