Gnu, I don't think your idea would actually be simple, esp. in a old, built-up city like Wichita.

A friend of mine has just moved into a new home outside Kansas City. It has a special room, extra-strong, for a storm shelter. Seems like a good idea.

About that 88-year-old woman who couldn't walk to the storm shelter at the mobile-home park: it occurs to me that she, her family, and her landlord had 48 hours to do something about that, and they didn't do it. Shameful!

I have another acquaintance, a structural engineer, who went to Joplin, Missouri (site of an EF 5 tornado last May) to examine buildings and say whether they were a write-off or not. He reported, to my surprise, that even in that tornado, the quality of the construction made a difference. But nobody wants to hear that cheap construction, slapped together by lazy workmen, is the first to go in a tornado.

When the tornado hit Moore, OK in 1995, there was a ruin subdivision which had been marketed to senior citizens. Afterwards, an inspector found that the nails which "anchored" the walls to the sill had only gone in 1/2 inch. Nobody wanted to know.