yikes!

Can we add tornados to the list...
 

The tv news is saying that about 10% of the houses in (Moore ?) Oklahoma have "safe rooms"

It seems to me that with the "tornado alley" reputation of Oklahoma and Red River Valley,
this % is very low, and I wonder if there is a belief that they are too expensive.

Safe rooms can be built to be "usable" in the daily life of the family.
So on a cost per sq ft, this is what FEMA says is average...

Since (unless the Republicans have killed them :rolleyes:) there are federal grants to help pay for construction, state tax credits, etc.

It seems to me that $10/sq ft is a lot less expensive than
the sq footage in the remainder of the house, either new or retrofit.

Yeah, building codes should be changed so that new construction in high risk areas has appropriate safe rooms. This is a failure of local and state government, which are the government entities responsible for building codes. There are lots of easy and inexpensive ways to incorporate a shelter in a new house, such as under the front steps.

You'd think people would want the the things but we all deny reality to some extent.

Everyone made it to the storm shelter except Dorothy. As a result, Dorothy has been famous for almost 100 years.

You too can enjoy her success. Have no storm shelter. Then after the next tornado, you too can see lions and tigers and beats. My My. How famous you will be once you've been to Oz.

WTF? We aint got no lions and tigers down here!

I've recently seen some docos about tornadoes and how the debris cloud can hurl objects clean through houses and stuff. I saw a nice big piece of timber (looked 2" x 4", maybe 8 feet long) that had punched through a roof, a few internal walls, an internal floor and the ceiling below, and had skewered a full sized fridge. :eek: Bricks and timber do not stop tornado debris.

Supposing a cellar is not practical, would it work to simply line one room with steel armor plate? How thick would it need to be? 1/4 inch? 1/2? an inch? How much would it cost to line a small room? Is there an additional risk of being trapped inside the strong room with a collapsed house on top of it?

For about $2k you can include a small safe room in virtually any new house. Entrapment is possible, but if you have a day or two supply of water, you can wait for rescue. A whistle can speed rescue.

Z, the US FEMA has download-able plans and drawings for several different types of "safe rooms",
ranging from cellar, to cell-lean-to, to outside cement, and to plywood.

The FEMA statements are along the lines of "adequate to protect"

I found these via Google search for: "FEMA saferoom design drawings"
But I have not been able to launch the FEMA P-320 .dwg files,
and haven't been able to figure out how to download the .pdf files.

.DWG files are probably "Drawing" files, suitable for reading with an architectural drawing program like Autodesk. Click here to get info on a reader for such files.

Plenty of pictures and info on safe rooms.

At hose prices, a safe room would seem a bit of a no brainer, but human beings are good at wishful thinking and bad at statistics. I've recently seen on TV people in tornado areas saying the didn't think they'd get a tornado because there had never been one just there before, and then see others saying they didn't think they'd get a tornado because they'd had one right there only recently. :right:

If you want something really spooky, do a google image search for "dead man walking tornado".

I heard a story the other day of an elderly couple who got a tornado shelter installed in the floor of their garage under the slab. But they refused to get in the shelter during a tornado warning last week because there was severe hail just as the warning came, and it would mean pulling their brand new Lincoln out of the garage and into the hail so that they could climb down into the shelter. Turns out the tornado never came to their house, and they made the correct decision that day. But placement of the shelter is pretty important. I really like the ones that are built in to the concrete front porch. You just lift up the welcome mat, open the hatch, and climb down inside.

In an ideal world, you would have a large comfortable shelter in the basement where you could sleep when warnings are expected during the night. Instead of going to bed in your upstairs bedroom, you just go to bed in the shelter. That way you don't have to stay awake watching the weather reports as the storms are coming through at 2 am. Virginia is a low risk area, but a couple times a year we'll have storms come through in the middle of the night and there will be associated tornado warnings. I really hate that.

I know the feeling. In Dallas, we lived in a (tornado-lure) mobile home park.
Night-time warnings were really frightening.

One night, we drove to an multi-story parking facility and spent the night
parked on the next-to-top floor, listening to the radio track a storm
from Ft Worth to Dallas.

This is El Reno, OK just 3 minutes ago.... People are being warned to get into shelter NOW !