Clearwater County, MN: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Clearwater County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 23 tornado tracks touching Clearwater County since 1959 - about one every 3.3 years on average. That puts it in our Moderate band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 56th percentile for frequency. Minnesota has 87 counties in this dataset; Clearwater County ranks 56 of them by frequency.
Has Clearwater County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Clearwater County's file: 23 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 4 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Clearwater 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
8,630 people live in Clearwater County, and a tornado outbreak's power loss usually reaches far more of Minnesota 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. Clearwater County covers about 999 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. Clearwater County has about 8,630 residents.