Moody County, SD: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Moody County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 11 tornado tracks touching Moody County since 1956 - about one every 6.9 years on average. That puts it in our Low band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 30th percentile for frequency. Within South Dakota alone, Moody County ranks 63 of 66 counties for tornado frequency.
Has Moody County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Moody County's file: 11 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 1 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Moody 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 South Dakota 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
6,529 people live in Moody County, and a tornado outbreak's power loss usually reaches far more of South Dakota 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. Moody County covers about 519 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. Moody County has about 6,529 residents.