Studies identify the best places in your home to take shelter

That gap has a human face. A 2022 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society sent researchers to conduct in-person interviews with 23 survivors of two deadly EF3 tornadoes that struck southern Georgia in January 2017 — one overnight, one in the afternoon — killing 16 people combined, including 11 in manufactured home parks that had no storm shelters. To protect participants’ identities, the study used pseudonyms throughout.

The researchers found that nearly every person interviewed had been actively monitoring weather forecasts, tracking storms on phone apps, and attempting to respond. What many lacked was a safe destination. Several interviewees, when asked where they could go if a tornado threatened again, drew a blank.

One mobile home resident in Adel, Georgia, described her situation after noting the tornado had destroyed large and small homes alike in the area: “There’s nowhere to really go. We would have went to the same spot” — meaning the center of her mobile home. Another Adel resident said her husband would take her to a nearby ditch in a future storm, “because I don’t know where any shelter is around here.” In Albany, Georgia, when an interviewer asked one man where he would have gone if he had known the tornado was coming, he replied: “Wherever there was a shelter. There ain’t no shelter around here.”

Another Albany resident, a woman the study calls Donna, described how a television meteorologist’s unusually direct language finally moved her to leave her manufactured home. In her own words as recorded by the researchers, she recalled the broadcast this way: “Albany, Georgia, mobile homes, trailer park — he even said trailer park — mobile homes, trailer parks, get to your safe zone in one hour.” She told the interviewers: “He didn’t say ’might hit’, he said, ’it will hit.’ And I told my husband, I said, ’baby, it’s time to go.’” She and her family drove to a friend’s brick home in a neighboring county and survived. When researchers asked where she would have gone if that friend had not been home, she said: “Sweetheart, I don’t even know.”

The BAMS researchers argued that framing low shelter rates as a product of public complacency misses the point. Most people in their study were paying close attention and trying to protect themselves. The obstacle was structural: they simply had nowhere adequate to go.

Building stronger homes in the first place is one long-term answer. A Texas Tech University study published in 2025 in Advances in Wind Engineering modeled the financial effects of 12 enhanced building code requirements adopted by Moore, Oklahoma, after a violent tornado struck the city in May 2013. The upgrades included stronger roof sheathing nails, hurricane straps on roof-to-wall connections, and wind-rated garage doors, adding roughly $10.75 per square meter to construction costs.

Over a projected 50-year period without factoring in a discount rate, the researchers found that the code modifications produced a benefit-cost ratio of 0.88 when measuring construction losses alone. That means the codes came close to paying for themselves even before accounting for other savings. When the researchers expanded their model to include home contents, injuries, and deaths, that ratio rose to 1.8. The paper also noted that a 2015 tornado that struck Moore, the first to hit after the new codes took effect, caused only minor, quickly repaired damage to homes built under the revised standards.