Monroe County, IL Tornado Risk & Storm Shelter Cost
Monroe County's tornado history, by the numbers
Since 1957, NOAA has logged 39 tornado tracks crossing Monroe County - one about every 1.9 years, which lands it in our Elevated band. Nationally, Monroe County ranks at the 80th percentile for tornado frequency. Among 102 Illinois counties in this dataset, Monroe County ranks 33 for how often a tornado touches down.
Monroe County's EF4-5 history
Monroe County's record has no EF4-5 tornado - its 39 tracks split 30 weak and 8 significant. That does not rule one out in the future, only that none has been recorded since 1950.
What a storm shelter costs near Monroe County
For a Monroe 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 Monroe 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. Monroe County covers about 385 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. Monroe County has about 34,969 residents.