Safe rooms have several advantages over outside shelters. If you'd rather build a safe room inside your house, read on to the next page for some ideas.Ī safe room is a windowless box inside your house where you and your family can escape the danger of wind-borne projectiles during hurricanes or tornadoes. For an idea of what you're up against, consider that a typical two-car garage measures 400 square feet (37.2 square meters). You'll need even more space than that if you have sick or shut-in relations, as each bedridden person needs 30 square feet (2.8 square meters). Now that we've convinced you to build some sort of hurricane shelter, how large should it be? It depends on the number of people in your household FEMA suggests that your home hurricane shelter building have at least 10 square feet (.93 square meters) of space per person, so a shelter made to house a family of five would need to be at least 50 square feet (4.65 square meters). These shelters are made for "extreme wind events" like tornadoes and hurricanes. Companies that sell storm shelters include Armor Vault of Oklahoma City, Okla., and Steel Storm Shelters, based in Jackson, Tenn. To be built properly, a storm shelter can be designed by an engineer and built on-site by a contractor, or you can have a pre-fabricated unit delivered to your chosen site and assembled there. You can expect to pay $5,000 and up for a shelter built to standards set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA).Ī stand-alone shelter strong enough to protect against a hurricane's fury could also be made of concrete fortified with reinforcing iron bars (known as rebar), fortified masonry blocks, or insulating concrete forms (foam molds into which concrete is poured, known as ICFs). Unless you have metalworking skills and tools, this is not a DIY project. Stand-alone hurricane shelters are typically made of steel panels welded together into a box-shaped structure with a steel door and bolted to a concrete pad.
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