Monroe County, AR: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Monroe County, AR: what NOAA's tornado record says
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 21 tornado tracks touching Monroe County since 1965 - about one every 3.6 years on average. That puts it in our Moderate band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 52nd percentile for frequency. Arkansas has 75 counties in this dataset; Monroe County ranks 60 of them by frequency.
Has Monroe County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Monroe County's file: 21 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 5 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Monroe 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 Arkansas 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
6,415 people live in Monroe County, and a tornado outbreak's power loss usually reaches far more of Arkansas 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. Monroe County covers about 607 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. Monroe County has about 6,415 residents.