Bingham County, ID: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Bingham County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 20 tornado tracks touching Bingham County since 1954 - about one every 3.8 years on average. That puts it in our Moderate band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 51st percentile for frequency. Among 44 Idaho counties in this dataset, Bingham County ranks 1 for how often a tornado touches down.
Has Bingham County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Bingham County's file: 20 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 0 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Bingham 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 Idaho 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
50,889 people live in Bingham County, and a tornado outbreak's power loss usually reaches far more of Idaho than the tracks themselves touch. A portable battery unit is the faster, no-fuel way to bridge that outage.
County-level, not address-level
Treat this as a county-wide figure, not a prediction for one address. Bingham County covers about 2,094 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. Bingham County has about 50,889 residents.