Howard County, MO: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Howard County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 8 tornado tracks touching Howard County since 1958 - about one every 9.5 years on average. That puts it in our Low band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 23rd percentile for frequency. Missouri has 115 counties in this dataset; Howard County ranks 113 of them by frequency.
Has Howard County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Howard County's file: 8 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 2 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Howard 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 Missouri 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 Howard County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Missouri 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. Howard County covers about 464 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. Howard County has about 10,150 residents.