On Tornado, Shelters and Toxic Waters
By Lisbeth Coiman
The only sure shield against EF5 tornado winds and flying debris is a shelter, above or underground. For reasons that few understand outside of the state, only a fraction of Oklahoma homes have shelters.
Most of Oklahoma older homes have basements. It was a common practice to build a cold cellar to protect food from the summer heat. Our basements are not like the ones up north. Basically, we do not use our few basements as living rooms as they do in Wisconsin or Minnesota. Ours are humid, have mold, spiders and other pests. There are also many bomb shelters from the cold war era, similar to the one in the film "The Day After". They were created as temporary living spaces, some with bathrooms. They are like tiny apartments underground, and have been abandoned long ago, when we shifted our fears from atomic bombs to terrorist attacks. Bomb shelters are still very good in case of a tornado emergency.
New shelter construction has several routes. First build your own in a new or existing construction. Prices range from 3 to 8 thousand dollars. Second, you fill out an application for a shelter-building grant; wait until your county is declared a disaster area for the grant to kick in. The city calls you and tells you to build according to some specs, take pictures, pay, and wait till they reimburse you. You are automatically entered in a shelter register. When there is a disaster, the first responders know where to look for you.
Above ground shelters are boxes that occupy some space in your garage. They are good enough to protect you against the strongest storm. Underground shelters can be placed in your garage (the car sits above) or in the yard. You need a yard big enough to accommodate a bobcat to maneuver and dig the hole.
The Problem with Underground Shelters
I think underground shelters are the best shields against EF5 magnitude tornados, but it would be a mistake to encourage everybody in Oklahoma to build underground shelters. There needs to be a serious environmental study before deciding where to put what type of shelter. There are two major issues to consider carefully before you decide where to spend your hardly earned money.
The first problem to consider is the clay soil, the high water beds, and the propensity to flooding. You go in the shelter, let the tornado go by, and then you have to run out of the shelter because of a flood warning. Many people can live with that inconvenience.
The second problem is that Oklahoma is an oil state. Oil has been extracted here since the beginning of the twentieth century, when oil production practices were not regulated by serious environmental legislation. There were a lot, A LOT of spills in that time. Our water beds are filled with extreme toxic chemicals and heavy metals and such as arsenic, mercury, and lead, just to name a few of the scary things in Oklahoma underground waters. When there is a flood, the water rising in those basements is TOXIC, VERY.TOXIC. You don't want to stir that up. Underground shelter is not for everybody.
That's not Moore's case, where probably building costs have been a factor in the construction of shelters in that working class suburb of Oklahoma City. That's the case, though, for many small towns with a lot of oil activity in the past. Shelters are needed, and everybody should have one that fits the particular underground water conditions of their county or city.
