Does your Tennessee town have a public tornado shelter?

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — We are entering the most active time of the year for tornadoes in Middle Tennessee. This means you should already have a plan to get to a safe place if a Tornado Warning is issued over your house. But what if you live in a mobile home?

A tornado shelter is the best place to go to stay safe from a tornado. If you don’t have one of those, the next best place to go is the lowest level of your house farthest away from exterior walls and windows. Mobile homes or cars are not safe places to shelter, so many cities and counties have community shelters.

Dr. Craig Ceecee, a meteorologist in Mississippi, created a website that shows where community storm shelters are located. Find Your Tornado Shelter, and it plots all the known community storm shelters in the United States.

Dr. Ceecee created the website a few years ago and in recent years it has gained popularity.

“I created it a few years ago because I felt there was a big gap in knowledge about tornado shelters especially since everything was sparse and usually county by county it at most, a single viewing area,” Ceecee told News 2.

According to the map on Find Your Tornado Shelter, there are hundreds of tornado shelters in Mississippi and Alabama, and much fewer in Tennessee and Kentucky. Ceecee said this is likely caused by funding from FEMA.

“One factor I believe is that a lot of these in Alabama and Mississippi were built after the outbreaks in 2011, which affected these areas in Alabama and Mississippi to an extraordinary degree, and they got a lot of FEMA funding,” said Ceecee.

He said there could be shelters he has yet to register in Middle Tennessee and Southern Kentucky, but he needs help from local emergency agencies to add them.

“I would be very happy to work with the emergency managers who may want to work on developing plans for a tornado shelter in their communities and try to suit it for their own city, or town, or county,” said Ceecee.