Fergus County, MT: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Fergus County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 28 tornado tracks touching Fergus County since 1964 - about one every 2.7 years on average. That puts it in our Elevated band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 65th percentile for frequency. Among 56 Montana counties in this dataset, Fergus County ranks 2 for how often a tornado touches down.
Has Fergus County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Fergus County's file: 28 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 6 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Fergus 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 Montana 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
11,862 people live in Fergus County, and a tornado outbreak's power loss usually reaches far more of Montana 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. Fergus County covers about 4,339 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. Fergus County has about 11,862 residents.