Moffat County, CO: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Moffat County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 7 tornado tracks touching Moffat County since 1986 - about one every 10.9 years on average. That puts it in our Low band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 21st percentile for frequency. Within Colorado alone, Moffat County ranks 35 of 64 counties for tornado frequency.
Has Moffat County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Moffat County's file: 7 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 0 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Moffat 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 Colorado 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 Moffat County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Colorado 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. Moffat County covers about 4,743 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. Moffat County has about 13,142 residents.