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Keep Your
Family Safe: Build a Tornado 'Safe Room' in Your Home
Washington, May 12, 1999 -- James Lee Witt,
director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), is
urging residents of tornado-prone areas to build a "safe
room" in their homes that can provide protection against
deadly tornadoes. Safe rooms also can provide protection against
hurricanes and other extreme wind hazards.
"The deaths and devastation caused
by the tornadoes that hit Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas just last
week are heartbreaking. While we can't stop tornadoes, we can
build secure, easily accessible rooms in homes that can keep
families safe from harm." -- James Lee Witt
Witt noted that a safe room built in a
home in Del City, Okla., last week saved the lives of homeowner
Norma Bartlett, her daughter and four pets. Their neighborhood
was completely destroyed and a nearby neighbor was killed during
the storm. Construction costs can vary from one geographic area
to another. Safe rooms can be built above ground or below, within
a home or attached to one. Some are built of reinforced concrete
and some are build with wood-and-steel walls anchored to concrete
slab foundations or floors.
The Bartlett's safe room was built to design
standards developed and published in a 25-page, illustrated FEMA
publication, Taking Shelter from the Storm: Building a Safe Room
Inside Your House, which outlines the basics of in-house safe
room shelter design, including construction plans, materials
and construction cost estimates. Safe rooms built to these specifications
are designed to provide protect-ion from the forces of extreme
winds as high as 250 miles-per-hour and the impact of flying
debris. FEMA developed Taking Shelter from the Storm in collaboration
with the Wind Engineering Research Center of Texas Tech University
in Lubbock, Texas. The safe room designs draw on 25 years of
field research, including studies of the performance of buildings
following dozens of tornadoes throughout the United States and
laboratory testing on the performance of building materials and
systems when impacted by airborne debris.
The safe room project is part of an ongoing
FEMA initiative called Project Impact: Building Disaster Resistant
Communities designed to encourage people and communities to take
measures to protect themselves and their property before disasters
occur.
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