Safe Rooms for Tornadoes and Hurricanes

This online engineering PDH course provides guidance on best practices related to the design, construction, and operation of community and residential safe rooms.

 

Tornadoes and hurricanes are among the most destructive forces of nature. Unfortunately, these types of windstorms continue to cause injury and death to people who are unable to safely evacuate or find shelter from these events. FEMA has long supported the development of hazard-resistant codes and standards by assessing how structures respond in a disaster. Assessment conclusions and recommendations are applied through active participation in the process of creating and developing building codes and standards.

 

This course describes the criteria for any safe room, private or public, to be constructed so that it is capable of providing near-absolute protection for its occupants during tornadoes and hurricanes. The guidance in this publication builds on knowledge gained through field investigations and research, represented in FEMA’s technical reports and publications, as well as information from other national and State agencies and universities that have studied the performance of the built environment during tornadoes and hurricanes.

 

This 12 PDH online course is applicable to structural engineers who are interested in gaining knowledge on the planning and engineering issues for design and construction of stand-alone safe room buildings, constructing safe rooms within a new building, and adding a safe room to an existing building.