The website for Moore, Okla., recommends “that every residence have a storm safe room or an underground cellar.” It says below-ground shelters are the best protection against tornadoes.
But no local ordinance, state law or building code requires such shelters, either in houses, schools or businesses, and only about 10 percent of homes in Moore have them.
It is a familiar story, as well, in places such as Joplin, Mo., and across the Great Plains and in the Deep South, where tornadoes are a seasonal threat but government regulation rankles.
In 2011, a monster tornado razed large parts of Joplin, killing 160 people in a state that had no storm-shelter requirements. The city consideredrequiring shelters in rebuilt or new homes but decided that doing so would be “cost prohibitive” because the soil conditions make building basements expensive, the assistant city manager, Sam Anselm, said. Even so, he estimated that half the homes that had been rebuilt included underground shelters. Schools were being rebuilt with safe rooms, he said.
Neither Plaza Towers Elementary School nor Briarwood Elementary School, which were both hit by Monday’s storm, had safe rooms. Though the roof collapsed at Briarwood, everyone at the school survived. Seven children died at Plaza Towers.
In Moore, the website explains that the city has no community shelter because a 15-minute warning is not enough time to get to safetyand because, “overall, people face less risk by taking shelter in a reasonably well-constructed residence.”
This is generally true, experts say, but not for a storm like Monday’s mile-wide tornado, which was a terrible reminder of another tornado that caused extensive damage on May 3, 1999.
Curtis McCarty, a member of the Oklahoma Uniform Building Code Commission and a builder himself, said the twister Monday would have defeated attempts to resist it aboveground. “You cannot build a structure that’s going to take a direct hit from a tornado like that that’s going to stand,” he said.
Construction standards in Moore have been studied extensively. In a study published in 2002 in the journal of the American Meteorological Society, Timothy Marshal, an engineer in Dallas, suggested that “the quality of new home construction generally was no better than homes built prior to the tornado.”
Few homes built in the town after the 1999 storm were secured to their foundations with bolted plates, which greatly increase resistance to storms; instead, most were secured with the kinds of nails and pins that had failed in 1999. Just 6 of 40 new homes had closet-size safe rooms. Mayor Glenn Lewis of Moore said that since then the town had strengthened building codes, including a requirement that new homes incorporate hurricane braces.
The also city has aggressively promoted the construction of safe rooms and other measures, with more than $12 million from state and federalemergency management funds to subsidize safe-room construction by offering a $2,000 rebate, said Albert Ashwood, the director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management.
Still, Lewis said, it has been several years since Moore has received new financing for the program. About a year and a half ago, McCarty spoke to a group of Oklahoma legislators who were considering mandating shelters for new homes, he recalled. But no legislation was proposed, he said, because of the bad economy.
A small, prefabricated sunken shelter can cost $4,000, he said, and “mandating another three or four thousand dollars on every new home can really add up when you’re trying to keep houses affordable.”
Houses in Oklahoma, Mc-Carty said, are usually builton slabs without basements or crawl spaces because the land is flat and the weather is temperate enough that digging a deep foundation is not necessary, as it is with homes built in the Northeast, where the temperatures regularly dip below freezing.
Mike Gilles, a former president of the Oklahoma State Home Builders Association, said he built safe rooms in all his custom homes, and that even many builders who build speculatively now make them standard. But asked whether the government should require safe rooms in homes, he said, “Most homebuilders would be against that because we think the market ought to drive what people are putting in the houses, not the government.” Information for this article was contributed by David A. Lieb of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 05/23/2013