Morrow County, OR: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
How likely is a tornado in Morrow County, OR?
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 3 tornado tracks touching Morrow County since 1957 - about one every 25.6 years on average. That puts it in our Minimal band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 10th percentile for frequency. Among 36 Oregon counties in this dataset, Morrow County ranks 22 for how often a tornado touches down.
Has Morrow County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Morrow County's file: 3 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 0 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Morrow 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 Oregon 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 Morrow County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Oregon 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. Morrow County covers about 2,031 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. Morrow County has about 12,360 residents.