Franklin County, VT Tornado Risk & Storm Shelter Cost
Franklin County's tornado history, by the numbers
Since 1957, NOAA has logged 8 tornado tracks crossing Franklin County - one about every 9.5 years, which lands it in our Low band. Nationally, Franklin County ranks at the 25th percentile for tornado frequency. Among 14 Vermont counties in this dataset, Franklin County ranks 1 for how often a tornado touches down.
Franklin County's EF4-5 history
Franklin County's record has no EF4-5 tornado - its 8 tracks split 3 weak and 5 significant. That does not rule one out in the future, only that none has been recorded since 1950.
What a storm shelter costs near Franklin County
For a Franklin County homeowner, budget $2,890-$13,280 for a shelter or safe room ($7,645 typical) - this pass found no Vermont-specific rebate on top of FEMA's underlying 75% national cost-share program.
The outage nobody plans for
The storm that misses Franklin County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Vermont 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. Franklin County covers about 631 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. Franklin County has about 51,066 residents.