Few safe rooms in Mid-Missouri despite tornado prone region

So far, this spring has been a quiet severe weather season in Mid-Missouri.

And that is probably a good thing as the area has few storm shelters.

Since the 2011 Joplin tornado, the community has built more than 20 safe rooms built to FEMA standards in Joplin, Webb City and Jasper County. The Joplin school district has spent $30 million installing the rooms in all but two of its schools.

“As you’re coming in, you can see that you really wouldn’t know it was a safe room unless someone told you,” Kelli Price with Joplin Public Schools said. “So, most of them are gymnasiums and this is very typical of what they look like.”

But in Mid-Missouri, there are only seven FEMA-approved safe rooms across all 14 counties, plus one that is currently under construction.

This month, ABC 17 News went to the safe room in Holts Summit. It was build around 2007, years before the Joplin tornado.

“One of the reasons we explored this avenue was there have been tornadic events in this area within Callaway County over the years and since we do have several mobile home parks in the city, we felt that this was necessary,” Holts Summit Police Chief Kyle McIntyre said.

The safe rooms are built to withstand an EF5 tornado, the strongest on the scale.

“It’s constructed of reinforced concrete and steel,” McIntyre said. “It’s designed to hold up to 270 mile an hour winds. The ceiling has precast panels and then concrete on top of the precast panels.”

The Holts Summit safe room also has steel-reinforced doors, buffer areas near the entries, an emergency generator, two bathrooms and a kitchenette.

But in Boone and Cole counties, the two counties with more people than all of the other Mid-Missouri counties combined, there are no safe rooms or community storm shelters.

“They’re done through mitigation grants and they’re really very competitive and very hard to get,” Boone County Emergency Management Agency Director Terry Cassil said.

The FEMA grants, or federal funds, for safe rooms only become available once in a while. The grants are generally rewarded to places hit by recent disasters or those with a history of tornadoes.

“The last time there were federal funds available for safe rooms, most of those went to the Joplin area after, of course, after the tornado that happened there, that devastating storm,” Cassil said.

Since 2000, tornadoes have only touched down in Boone County four times and there have been no touch-downs in Cole County, according to the Midwestern Regional Climate Center.

The recipients must also be able to show financial need.

“It’s just harder for larger metropolitan, larger rural communities to get those grants,” Cassil said.

But the lack of safe rooms in Boone County isn’t due to a lack of trying. Columbia Public Schools officials said they have applied for the FEMA grants multiple times and have been turned down. Most recently with the gymnasium additions at Hickman and Rock Bridge high schools around the year 2012.

“And so we’ve gone a different route as far as continuing to evaluate our school buildings to make sure that we have the best emergency plans in place, working with our local emergency officials, talking with our architects and our engineers,” Michelle Baumstark with Columbia Public Schools said.

CPS reevaluates each school’s safety plan with evacuation routes and shelter in place locations every year. Every building has a different plan.

“We have different plans for each one of those to make sure that it addresses not only the layout and design of that particular building, but also the student capacity in that building, whether or not it has trailers, how many levels is it, what interior locations we have available,” Baumstark said.

CPS also works with emergency officials when building new schools to make sure there are a number of options for students to take shelter, although there is no official safe room.

But that may change.

At the Columbia City Council meeting on May 2nd, a bill was proposed to adopt the 2015 International Building Code. Atop the set of codes is a new storm shelter requirement. New schools and emergency operations centers would have to construct shelters that meet FEMA standards.

“This is often the case with the case with the codes, they’re often generated from catastrophes and as we all well know, we’ve had some recent catastrophes, even thinking about Joplin in 2011,” City of Columbia Building Regulations Supervisor John Simon said. “In the wind areas where the wind speed is up to 250 miles an hour during these events, the code is now mandating storm shelters.”

But the code change would be costly to the city and school district.

“You have to keep in mind that we are not a small district,” Baumstark said. “So when you say we’re adding a safe room, is that an underground safe room? Is that an interior reinforced safe room? How many students can it hold?”

“It sounds great in theory, but there’s certainly a lot of challenges that would need to be explored,” Baumstark said.

Columbia city council members told ABC 17 News they are in support of adopting the new set of codes. Both said keeping students safe is worth the extra cost.

The bill will be reviewed at the next city council meeting on June 6th. If it is passed, officials recommend that it start being enforced October 1st.