Maries County, MO: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Maries County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 10 tornado tracks touching Maries County since 1957 - about one every 7.6 years on average. That puts it in our Low band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 28th percentile for frequency. Within Missouri alone, Maries County ranks 109 of 115 counties for tornado frequency.
Has Maries County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Maries County's file: 10 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 4 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Maries 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 Maries 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. Maries County covers about 527 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. Maries County has about 8,506 residents.