Judith Basin County, MT: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Judith Basin County, MT: what NOAA's tornado record says
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 18 tornado tracks touching Judith Basin County since 1957 - about one every 4.2 years on average. That puts it in our Moderate band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 46th percentile for frequency. Montana has 56 counties in this dataset; Judith Basin County ranks 4 of them by frequency.
Has Judith Basin County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Judith Basin County's file: 18 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 3 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Judith Basin 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
2,111 people live in Judith Basin 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. Judith Basin County covers about 1,870 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. Judith Basin County has about 2,111 residents.