Crowley County, CO: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Crowley County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 17 tornado tracks touching Crowley County since 1951 - about one every 4.5 years on average. That puts it in our Moderate band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 44th percentile for frequency. Among 64 Colorado counties in this dataset, Crowley County ranks 25 for how often a tornado touches down.
Has Crowley County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Crowley County's file: 17 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 3 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Crowley 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 Colorado 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
5,600 people live in Crowley County, and a tornado outbreak's power loss usually reaches far more of Colorado 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. Crowley County covers about 787 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. Crowley County has about 5,600 residents.