Clarke County, VA Tornado Risk & Storm Shelter Cost
Clarke County, VA: what NOAA's tornado record says
Since 1975, NOAA has logged 10 tornado tracks crossing Clarke County - one about every 7.6 years, which lands it in our Low band. Nationally, Clarke County ranks at the 28th percentile for tornado frequency. Among 133 Virginia counties in this dataset, Clarke County ranks 41 for how often a tornado touches down.
Clarke County's EF4-5 history
Clarke County's record has no EF4-5 tornado - its 10 tracks split 9 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 Clarke County
For a Clarke County homeowner, budget $2,890-$13,280 for a shelter or safe room ($7,645 typical) - this pass found no Virginia-specific rebate on top of FEMA's underlying 75% national cost-share program.
The outage nobody plans for
The storm that misses Clarke County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Virginia 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. Clarke County covers about 176 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. Clarke County has about 15,598 residents.