Saline County, IL: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Saline County's tornado history, by the numbers
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 19 tornado tracks touching Saline County since 1957 - about one every 4 years on average. That puts it in our Moderate band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 49th percentile for frequency. Illinois has 102 counties in this dataset; Saline County ranks 77 of them by frequency.
Has Saline County ever had a violent tornado?
Yes, 1 time: Saline 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 Saline 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 Illinois 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
A direct hit is not required for Saline County to lose power - outbreak-wide outages across Illinois regularly reach homes and businesses well outside the actual tracks. A battery bank covers that gap without a generator's fuel and venting needs.
County-level, not address-level
Treat this as a county-wide figure, not a prediction for one address. Saline County covers about 380 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. Saline County has about 22,826 residents.