Carbon County, WY Tornado Risk & Storm Shelter Cost
How likely is a tornado in Carbon County, WY?
Since 1958, NOAA has logged 18 tornado tracks crossing Carbon County - one about every 4.2 years, which lands it in our Moderate band. Nationally, Carbon County ranks at the 47th percentile for tornado frequency. Wyoming has 23 counties in this dataset; Carbon County ranks 15 of them by frequency.
Carbon County's EF4-5 history
Carbon County's record has no EF4-5 tornado - its 18 tracks split 16 weak and 1 significant. That does not rule one out in the future, only that none has been recorded since 1950.
What a storm shelter costs near Carbon County
For a Carbon County homeowner, budget $2,890-$13,280 for a shelter or safe room ($7,645 typical) - this pass found no Wyoming-specific rebate on top of FEMA's underlying 75% national cost-share program.
The outage nobody plans for
The storm that misses Carbon County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Wyoming are common well beyond the tracked path. A battery-backup unit handles that without a generator's setup or fuel.
Read this before you rely on it
This is a county-level figure, not a per-address probability. Carbon County covers about 7,898 square miles, so a single touch here counts the same as a single touch in a county a fraction of that size. Pre-radar-era records (before the 1990s) are also documented by NOAA as undercounting weaker tornadoes in sparsely-instrumented areas. Carbon County has about 14,250 residents.