McCook County, SD: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
McCook County, SD: what NOAA's tornado record says
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 44 tornado tracks touching McCook County since 1953 - about one every 1.7 years on average. That puts it in our High band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 83rd percentile for frequency. South Dakota has 66 counties in this dataset; McCook County ranks 13 of them by frequency.
Has McCook County ever had a violent tornado?
Yes, 1 time: McCook County has an EF4-5 tornado on record. Wherever that history exists, FEMA's safe-room case applies regardless of how often the county gets touched overall.
Paying for it, if McCook 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 South Dakota 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
Tornado outbreaks routinely knock out power across South Dakota for days, separately from any single house getting hit. A portable battery bank keeps a fridge, phone chargers and a radio running through that gap - cheaper and faster to set up than a generator.
County-level, not address-level
Treat this as a county-wide figure, not a prediction for one address. McCook County covers about 574 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. McCook County has about 5,771 residents.