Perry County, IN: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Perry County, IN: what NOAA's tornado record says
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 13 tornado tracks touching Perry County since 1970 - about one every 5.8 years on average. That puts it in our Low band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 36th percentile for frequency. Among 92 Indiana counties in this dataset, Perry County ranks 75 for how often a tornado touches down.
Has Perry County ever had a violent tornado?
Yes, 1 time: Perry County has an EF4-5 tornado on record. Wherever that history exists, FEMA's safe-room case applies regardless of how often the county gets touched overall.
Paying for it, if Perry County's history says you should
Nationally, storm shelters and safe rooms run $2,890-$13,280. Because Perry County is in Indiana, the Indiana Department of Homeland Security's Residential Safe Room Program can cut that by 75% (capped at $5,000), to about $722.5-$8,280 net - check current funding status before counting on it.
The gap a shelter does not cover
19,320 people live in Perry County, and a tornado outbreak's power loss usually reaches far more of Indiana 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. Perry County covers about 382 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. Perry County has about 19,320 residents.