Stutsman County, ND: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
How likely is a tornado in Stutsman County, ND?
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 58 tornado tracks touching Stutsman County since 1952 - about one every 1.3 years on average. That puts it in our High band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 91st percentile for frequency. Among 53 North Dakota counties in this dataset, Stutsman County ranks 6 for how often a tornado touches down.
Has Stutsman County ever had a violent tornado?
Yes, 1 time: Stutsman 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 Stutsman 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 North 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
21,546 people live in Stutsman County, and a tornado outbreak's power loss usually reaches far more of North 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. Stutsman County covers about 2,222 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. Stutsman County has about 21,546 residents.