Wicomico County, MD: Tornado Risk and Shelter Cost
Wicomico County, MD: what NOAA's tornado record says
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has recorded 11 tornado tracks touching Wicomico County since 1962 - about one every 6.9 years on average. That puts it in our Low band nationally. Against the rest of the country, that is the 32nd percentile for frequency. Within Maryland alone, Wicomico County ranks 16 of 24 counties for tornado frequency.
Has Wicomico County ever had a violent tornado?
Nothing violent in Wicomico County's file: 11 tracks total, topping out at significant (EF2-3) strength on 1 of them, zero at EF4-5.
Paying for it, if Wicomico 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 Maryland 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 Wicomico County outright can still take its power out - outbreak-scale outages across Maryland 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. Wicomico County covers about 374 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. Wicomico County has about 106,329 residents.