It is with great sadness that we must announce that the North Central Texas Safe Room Rebate Program has retired as of December 2020. It has been a pleasure to serve the region with this program, but our agency is no longer able to feasibly administer the program. As an alternative, many reputable safe room installers offer loans and financing options to homeowners. We encourage you to contact an installer for more details.
In the meantime, for your safety, you need to find a location in your home that is...
Remembering the basics of tornado safety, you should look around your home to determine the best place. Here are some ideas:
Bathrooms MAY be a good shelter, provided they are not along an outside wall and have no windows. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing magically safe about getting in a bathtub with a mattress. In some cases, this might be a great shelter. However, it depends on where your bathroom is. If your bathroom has windows and is along an outside wall, it's probably not the best shelter.
Bathrooms have proven to be adequate tornado shelters in many cases for a couple of reasons. First, bathrooms are typically small rooms with no windows in the middle of a building. Secondly, it is thought that the plumbing within the walls of a bathroom helps to add some structural strength to the room.
However, with tornadoes there are no absolutes, and you should look closely at your home when determining your shelter area.
A small interior closet might be a shelter. Again, the closet should be as deep inside the building as possible, with no outside walls, doors or windows. Be sure to close the door and cover up.
If a hallway is your shelter area, be sure to shut all doors. Again, the goal is to create as many barriers as possible between you and the flying debris in and near a tornado. To be an effective shelter, a hallway should be as far inside the building as possible and should not have any openings to the outside (windows and doors).
The space underneath a stairwell could be used as a shelter.
For more tips on how to prepare for severe weather, please visit KnoWhat2Do website at https://knowhat2do.com/severe-weather/storms/.