TANNER: Well, we did not fail - did not find any failed shelters at all. TANNER: Well, we usually do lots of various types of forensic investigations of building failures, but this particular investigation is dedicated solely to shelters, shelter performance, shelter types that we find, numbers of shelters, visiting with people that have experienced the tornado and were in shelters and some that weren't in shelters, and you know, to quantify, you know, how, you know, people are doing nowadays with the advent of a whole lot of shelter opportunities from various manufacturers.ĭONVAN: Are you - Larry, are you finding in this preliminary sense, are you finding any patterns? In other words most of the shelters, did they hold, did they work and serve their function? What brings you there in the aftermath? What are you looking for? So you are in Moore now physically, and you study shelters professionally. He is the manager of the Debris Impact Test Facility for the Wind Science and Engineering Research Center at Texas Tech University. Joining me now by phone from Moore is Larry Tanner. Later in the program, how Ta-Nehisi Coates reignited his imagination.

Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Our email address is And you can join our conversation at our website. What is involved in deciding if you want to get a shelter of your own? And has one ever saved your life? Our number is 80. If you are in or even near a tornado alley out there, we want to learn from you. The reasons for that? Well, we're going to ask.īut meanwhile, we are hearing from storm shelter companies in Oklahoma that their phones have been ringing off the hook. And yet most people in high-risk areas don't have them. It's still unclear how many people were saved by storm shelters in last week's tornado, but there is little doubt that people who sought cover in previously installed underground shelters and safe rooms were protected. The caption explains that actually this hole in the ground is a tornado shelter and that nine people's lives were saved because they were down inside it when the funnel blew past and that the shelter had only been installed two weeks earlier. A small hole in the ground, that's all it looked like the other day in the photo of the Christian Science Monitor, published in its coverage of a tornado that ripped through Moore, Oklahoma, a small hole in the ground surrounded on all sides by the wreckage of totally flattened homes, right up to the very edge of that hole in the ground, which oddly is rectangular in shape in the photo and has a door attached to it, flung open.

Underground storm shelters dfw