Potter County, PA Tornado Risk & Storm Shelter Cost
Potter County, PA: what NOAA's tornado record says
Since 1954, NOAA has logged 12 tornado tracks crossing Potter County - one about every 6.3 years, which lands it in our Low band. Nationally, Potter County ranks at the 34th percentile for tornado frequency. Pennsylvania has 67 counties in this dataset; Potter County ranks 43 of them by frequency.
Potter County's EF4-5 history
Potter County's record has no EF4-5 tornado - its 12 tracks split 9 weak and 3 significant. That does not rule one out in the future, only that none has been recorded since 1950.
What a storm shelter costs near Potter County
For a Potter County homeowner, budget $2,890-$13,280 for a shelter or safe room ($7,645 typical) - this pass found no Pennsylvania-specific rebate on top of FEMA's underlying 75% national cost-share program.
The outage nobody plans for
The storm that misses Potter County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Pennsylvania 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. Potter County covers about 1,081 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. Potter County has about 15,993 residents.