My storm chasing tour guest come from all over the world and to a person who is visiting Tornado Alley for the purpose of chasing storms, they sometimes go home with the feeling that a person must be mad to live here.   From their point-of-view, if the weather cooperates with the tour during their visitation – they’ll see extreme weather at its best, or sometimes at its worst.  But, in reality most people that live throughout the Great Plains have never seen a tornado and most never will.

Tornadoes don’t just happen everyday of course, and most occur in rural areas.   However, its the tornadoes that earn a name that everyone remembers – and those tornadoes are usually associated with damage and casualties, such as the May 3rd, 1999 outbreak, The Greensburg Tornado or The Parkersburg Tornado.   Still yet, even though that most residents of Tornado Alley will never see a tornado in their lifetimes – many are taking a chance with their lives and live in mobile homes that offer absolutely no protection whatsoever against a tornado and a lot of these mobile homes are in mobile home parks that don’t offer any form of public shelter – in a sense, it’s a game of Russian Roulette in Tornado Alley.

After the May 3rd, 1999 outbreak that killed 48 people and did $1.5 billion in damage when a series of more than 60 tornadoes hit the Southern Plains, Oklahoma passed legislation that helped mobile home parks owners and managers receive incentives to build public tornado shelters in their parks.  That legislation has since expired, and while some mobile home parks took the State of Oklahoma up on their incentive program and did the right thing by building a public shelter – many did not.

Earlier this year in February a strong tornado once again hit a mobile home park.  This time it happened in Lone Grove Oklahoma and at a time when it is not climatologically normal for tornadoes – which helped to catch many people off guard to the event.  The result was 9 deaths and more than 45 injured – 4 of those fatalities occurred at the Bar K Mobile Home Park, which did not have a public tornado shelter for its residents.

Now Oklahoma lawmakers want to end this game of Russian Roulette and require mobile home park operators to install public tornado shelters.  Rep. Pat Ownbey, along with Rep. Samson Buck recently requested a state study on the availability of shelters in mobile home parks.  Providing tax credits to mobile home park operators or mobile home owners who install a tornado shelter were among the ideas presented in the legislative study on Tuesday.

“When you look at a mobile home, there is no safe place to go,” Ownbey, R-Ardmore, said to members of the House General Government Committee.

Ownbey said requiring mobile home park owners to provide tornado shelters is a possibility “but we also have to make it realistic for those people who own these parks. I do believe that mobile home parks need shelters.”

According to Oklahoma Emergency Management Director Albert Ashwood,  “the state used federal funds after tornadoes in 1999 and 2003 to provide $2,000 rebates for those who installed a tornado shelter or built a safe room. ”

However one rule to receive federal help in rebates to build a shelter required that you own the property, and that excluded most mobile home residents who live in mobile home parks and rent the lot their mobile home is parked on.

The legislative study is looking into a state sponsored rebate program, however Oklahoma is experiencing declining revenues – which will obviously play a role on if or not such a rebate program can be afforded.   Other ideas have been purposed such as public education outreach, but in my opinion such programs are wasteful spending.

As pointed out to me by Emergency Management Director Lloyd Colston (City of Altus), more then 9,000 people were recently invited to attend a public education meeting about the highly publicized H1N1 Swine Flu at an Oklahoma City school but only 40 people showed up for the event.   Thus, public educational outreach programs have little to no effect.  And, nobody is going to want to attend events that inform them that because they live in a mobile home they are likely to be killed during a tornado.

Despite the challenges they face, I encourage Rep. Ownbey and Rep. Buck to continue pushing this very important issue and in doing so, I’m sure their work will save a lot of people who play Russian Roulette in Tornado Alley.

Related Links

This matter is also close to my own heart, I encourage you to read my story here: http://www.stormchase.com/blog/2009/02/never-attempt-to-outrun-a-tornado.html

Lone Grove, Oklahoma Tornado Damage Survey Results: http://www.stormchase.com/blog/2009/02/lone-grove-oklahoma-damage-survey-results-ef4-tornado.html

Tags: safety, tornado, weather events