When a powerful EF-4 tornado ripped through Greenfield, Iowa, last week, TJ Oder, the town’s volunteer fire chief, said his home was directly hit. Yet his family was saved by a private tornado shelter he installed when his home was built in 2014.
Oder said that when the tornado struck, he was helping prepare a triage center to treat injured neighbors and take them to the hospital while his family members were hunkered down in his personal shelter.
“My grandmother, my girlfriend and her son, and all my animals, were inside, and they all survived when the virus hit my house directly,” Oder told ABC News.
At least four people were killed and 35 others were injured in the Greenfield tornado, but across the region, many lives were saved by the proximity of a public shelter as the tornado touched down or by the way that a man like Oder was just a few steps from his home. , officials said.
“A lot of people I’ve talked to since this happened have said they’re going to rebuild and are considering putting one in,” Oder said.
Craig Ceecee, a meteorologist in Mississippi, said he created the website findyourtornadoshelter.com, which lists all available public tornado shelters in the country, while he was a doctoral student at Mississippi State University. He said his thesis focused on the availability of public tornado shelters, their use and how they are publicized.
“First of all, we need to know that they exist, which is basically where the card came from,” Ceecee told ABC News. “That’s something that I think is important in a lot of areas because a lot of people live in mobile homes, or don’t have basements, or their buildings are a lot more fragile than people think.”
Ceecee said her research found that most people did not know the location of their nearest public tornado shelter when a tornado struck and were forced to use an interior room or bathroom of their residence to escape the storm.
Over the past four decades, advances in radar technology and storm modeling have significantly improved tornado warning times, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the 1970s and 1980s, the average time it took to get to a shelter following a tornado warning was three minutes.
“Now the average time for a tornado warning is 13 minutes,” Ceecee said. “That’s still not a lot of time.”
Ceecee said some tornado-prone areas in rural counties either don’t have public tornado shelters or are miles from people’s homes, making it too dangerous to try to access them during a cloud in a rapidly approaching funnel.
“You have to make sure you get there ahead of time, and it’s open because you don’t want to be driving when a tornado is approaching. A car is extremely dangerous,” Ceecee said. “You are better off in the interior room of a house than in a car.”
Steve Strum, a meteorologist who lives in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, in the heart of what is nicknamed “Tornado Alley,” said he had a private tornado shelter dug into his garage about five years ago after his city applied for and received a FEMA block grant to help residents pay for them.
Strum said his prefabricated shelter, which can accommodate eight people, cost between $3,500 and $4,000, not including installation. He said he received about $2,500 from FEMA to help him defer costs.
“My family is only three people: my wife, my son and then we have two 90-pound Labs. So we can all fit in here,” said Strum, who has outfitted his shelter with battery-powered lights and a portable toilet . stocked him with water, food and other supplies to last more than a day.
But Strum said some smaller shelters cost as little as $2,000 and are available at some hardware stores.
“The biggest cost is actually the installation. The installation costs can be higher than the shelter itself in some cases,” Strum told ABC News.
Strum said that although he and his family have had a few near misses, they still had to use their shelter during a tornado. Before setting up the shelter, he said he and his family donned bicycle helmets and entered an interior room in their home, shielding themselves with pillows, cushions and blankets.
“We mostly got it for events where there was a storm in the middle of the night and you had to take shelter immediately,” Strum said. “Having something that’s easily accessible is kind of why we have it. So we can quickly open the door and within seconds be safe from those tornadoes that might hit around 3 a.m. and fall asleep.”
ABC News’ Jennifer Vilcarino contributed to this report.
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News Source : abcnews.go.com
