Need for safer shelters at schools

USA Today reports that deadly tornados at school have shown the need for safer shelters. The report is illustrated by the above image from March 1, 2007 of a helicopter evacuating an injured person from Enterprise High School in Alabama. USA writers track the events and lessons learned in when the tornado killed eight students “even though the National Weather Service said Enterprise school officials and students followed appropriate safety measures before and during the tornado . . . .” The conclusion: “the storm demonstrated the need for a safe-room shelter.”

From Alabama’s Press-Register comes this opinion piece titled Alabama’s deadly lesson:

TWO IMPORTANT messages came out of a National Weather Service study of the fatal tornado that hit southeast Alabama nine months ago.

Eight students were killed at Enterprise High School when winds of up to 200 mph collapsed the school’s roof. The tornado that hit Enterprise was the worst of 31 twisters that struck 45 counties in Georgia and south Alabama in a sweep of storms that fatal day in March.

The first message from the report that’s important for the Enterprise community is this: Stop blaming school officials for the tragedy. Their decision to keep the children in the building was, the National Weather Service says, the right thing to do even if it didn’t turn out well.

“Dismissing the students could have been just as dangerous,” NWS meteorologist Glenn Lussky of La Crosse, Wis., told The Associated Press. Mr. Lussky led the study. “This is just one of those cases where everyone did everything they could,” he added.

The second message: Build reinforced, hardened safe rooms in every school. These are concrete-reinforced rooms with strong shutters or no windows, where students can quickly go when storm alarms sound.

Enterprise school officials learned the lesson in the worst way possible when the high school building couldn’t withstand high winds, and children died. The new schools being constructed in Enterprise will have “tornado shelter” rooms.

School officials throughout Alabama should include safe areas in all new schools and can look at reinforcing designated safe areas in existing school buildings.

Hurricanes are the worst storms for the Gulf Coast, and preparing for them gets lots of attention from officials and residents. The Enterprise tragedy showed that isolated tornadoes can be dangerous on a smaller, but equally deadly, scale.

They, too, deserve to be taken seriously, especially by school officials who have responsibility for the safety of children.