Menominee County, WI: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Menominee County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 5 tornado tracks touching Menominee County since 1984 - about one every 15.2 years on average. That puts it in our Minimal band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 15th percentile for frequency. Among 72 Wisconsin counties in this dataset, Menominee County ranks 71 for how often a tornado touches down.
Has Menominee County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Menominee County's file: 5 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 2 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Menominee 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 Wisconsin 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
4,286 people live in Menominee County, and a tornado outbreak's power loss usually reaches far more of Wisconsin 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. Menominee County covers about 358 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. Menominee County has about 4,286 residents.