Big Stone County, MN: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Big Stone County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 13 tornado tracks touching Big Stone County since 1956 - about one every 5.8 years on average. That puts it in our Low band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 35th percentile for frequency. Among 87 Minnesota counties in this dataset, Big Stone County ranks 78 for how often a tornado touches down.
Has Big Stone County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Big Stone County's file: 13 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 1 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Big Stone County's history says you should
A storm shelter or in-residence safe room typically runs $2,890-$13,280 nationally, around $7,645 for a common single-family installation. No state-administered rebate program specific to Minnesota was confirmed for this site - FEMA's own Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants fund 75% of an approved safe room nationwide, but only some states currently run a homeowner-facing application on top of that.
The gap a shelter does not cover
The storm that misses Big Stone County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Minnesota are common well beyond the tracked path. A battery-backup unit handles that without a generator's setup or fuel.
County-level, not address-level
Treat this as a county-wide figure, not a prediction for one address. Big Stone County covers about 499 square miles, so a single touch here counts the same as a single touch in a county a fraction of that size. And records from before the 1990s, NOAA notes, undercount weaker tornadoes in areas with less storm-spotting coverage at the time. Big Stone County has about 5,067 residents.