After an April 2011 tornado outbreak killed in excess of 300 people across the South, with more than 230 of them in Alabama, hard-hit communities such as Tuscaloosa invested in community shelters that resemble submarines sunk into the ground, Myers said. Often, any actions to make storm shelters more widely available occur in the immediate aftermath of a deadly disaster.Īlabama lawmakers made shelters mandatory for new schools after a 2007 tornado killed eight students at a high school in Enterprise. "The reality is that there is no safe above ground structure in a tornado's path - this includes all buildings and homes, regardless of how they are built," Boerger said. Patricia Boerger, spokeswoman for the Manufactured Housing Institute that represents mobile home manufactures, said in an email that mobile homes destroyed by storms often are older models built in the 1970s. And sometimes the best they can do is try to get to a strong structure such as a Wal-Mart or a church," she said. "They need to be taken to a shelter during a tornado watch rather than a warning. Myers said there usually aren't a lot of options for mobile home dwellers. He figures it could hold up to 200 people at his park in Rossville. Roden said he spent a six-figure sum - he won't say exactly how much - on a shelter made of solid steel and equipped with a restroom and a generator. "When the weather man comes on TV, he says 'if you live in a mobile home, get out now!' Well, we didn't have anywhere to go." "We knew that if we had taken a direct hit at our manufactured home park that not all our residents would be alive," Roden said. The close call frightened owner David Roden into taking action. "There have been other efforts to attempt that, but the mobile home industry and mobile home park owners have put up a lot of resistance to it," namely citing high costs, said Laura Myers, who studies tornado disasters and responses as executive director of the Center for Advanced Public Safety at the University of Alabama.Ī tornado nearly six years ago demolished homes and churches just up the road from the Mountain View Estates mobile home park in northwest Georgia. The city of Wichita, Kansas, has a similar ordinance for parks built since 1994. Alabama and Illinois have laws mandating that new public schools are built with storm shelters, and Minnesota requires shelters at mobile home parks with spaces for 10 or more homes built since 1988. Three people were killed at Big Pine Estates in Albany and seven died at Sunrise Acres in rural Cook County.įor most of the U.S., installing storm shelters remains a voluntary decision whether they're for a private home, a mobile home park or a community center. Over the weekend, an unusual midwinter outbreak of dozens of tornadoes shredded two mobile home parks that didn't have shelters in southwest Georgia.
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