A recommended diary "Who Is to Blame for the Lack of Storm Shelters" raises some interesting questions about tornado sheltering, building codes, tornado alley and public policy. Rather than try and go back and forth in the comments, I'll try and explain why the idea of building tornado shelters for all, even all schools, let alone in every home or in communities such that they are accessible is not a good idea.
A bit of background first. I worked for the Federal Emergency Mangement Agency for seven years. I responded to half a dozen tornadoes, including the tornado in Enterprise, AL that destroyed a high school, killing eight students. Later, I worked for a state's emergency management agency on Hazard Mitigation (more on that in a bit) helping communities identify and build projects that make them more resistant to disaster. Among these was a storm shelter for a new school in Wadena, MN being built after the previous school was destroyed in a tornado.
So I know a bit of what I'm talking about, at least as far as how these things get built and who pays for them. Primarily this diary will focus on public storm shelters and not those in home construction. The building code debate is one for another place, though the risk arguments I'm making here apply there as well (and likely conclude that it's not a good idea either).
Tornadoes are the most spectacular of the disasters I worked. Floods are more frequent and more wide-ranging, but tornadoes are both awesome and mysterious. They leave behind trails of destruction and woe in such a random way that it's no wonder the media love to cover them and often attribute survival to a higher power. So let's look at some data briefly.
Fatalities from tornado by year:
2012: 69
2011: 553
2010: 45
2009: 21
2008: 126
So we're looking at fewer than 1,000 deaths in the past six years. Certainly those deaths are unfortunate, and heartbreaking for the families. But you are still more likely to be hit by lightning than killed in a tornado.
Storm shelters aren't free. If they were, we should absolutely build them everywhere. But in the real world, where resources are limited, we need to be better at understanding risk and reacting appropriately.
Many here believe strongly that the US has utterly failed to properly understand the risks to the country from air terrorists, and from foreign countries. This has resulted in a giant waste of money as huge economic loss as we've turned our airports into military checkpoints and foreign countries into rubble. And it seems so obvious to us what a waste this is.
Yet here we are, with many calling for a massive expansion of storm shelters at tremendous cost. Public storm shelters for 1,000 people (think high school) can run about $1 million (there's a decent amount of variablity in construction costs, and this figure doesn't include land, but even if you double or cut the costs in half, the point remains). In Oklahoma alone there are about 1,800 public schools. So we're talking about $1.8 billion in storm shelter construction just in Oklahoma (that's 1/3 of the total state budget), just to proect school kids and their teachers while they are in school.
Extrapolating these figures throughout tornado alley and you're talking about spending easily tens of billions of dollars on a problem that kills a few hundred people.
So again, in a world with unlimited resources, this is absolutely something we should do. And if I were building a new home in tornado alley, I would certainly invest in a shelter for myself and my family. But we don't live in that world.
We live in a world where money for food for poor children is being cut. We live in a world where schools can't pay their teachers, let alone build shelters that they will almost certainly never need (because killer tornadoes are an ultra-low probability event).
I grieve for those who lost loved ones in Oklahoma. But the knee jerk response to seek to blame policymakers for the lack of shelter (and thereby implicitly for their deaths) and to demand massive expenditures in reaction is at best misguided.