McHenry County, IL Tornado Risk & Storm Shelter Cost
McHenry County's tornado history, by the numbers
Since 1958, NOAA has logged 29 tornado tracks crossing McHenry County - one about every 2.6 years, which lands it in our Elevated band. Nationally, McHenry County ranks at the 68th percentile for tornado frequency. Among 102 Illinois counties in this dataset, McHenry County ranks 51 for how often a tornado touches down.
McHenry County's EF4-5 history
McHenry County has 3 violent (EF4-5) tornados on record. FEMA centers its safe-room case on exactly this strength, not on how often a county gets touched - a hardened room is the difference between a code-built house surviving an EF4-5 or not.
What a storm shelter costs near McHenry County
For a McHenry County homeowner, budget $2,890-$13,280 for a shelter or safe room ($7,645 typical) - this pass found no Illinois-specific rebate on top of FEMA's underlying 75% national cost-share program.
The outage nobody plans for
The storm that misses McHenry County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Illinois are common well beyond the tracked path. A battery-backup unit handles that without a generator's setup or fuel.
Read this before you rely on it
This is a county-level figure, not a per-address probability. McHenry County covers about 603 square miles, so a single touch here counts the same as a single touch in a county a fraction of that size. Pre-radar-era records (before the 1990s) are also documented by NOAA as undercounting weaker tornadoes in sparsely-instrumented areas. McHenry County has about 315,959 residents.