Garfield County, MT: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
How likely is a tornado in Garfield County, MT?
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 12 tornado tracks touching Garfield County since 1975 - about one every 6.3 years on average. That puts it in our Low band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 33rd percentile for frequency. Montana has 56 counties in this dataset; Garfield County ranks 16 of them by frequency.
Has Garfield County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Garfield County's file: 12 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 0 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Garfield 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
The storm that misses Garfield County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Montana are common well beyond the tracked path. A battery-backup unit handles that without a generator's setup or fuel.
County-level, not address-level
Treat this as a county-wide figure, not a prediction for one address. Garfield County covers about 4,677 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. Garfield County has about 1,181 residents.