Our Storm Shelter & Helping Heather

Before I get to the rest of this post, a twitter friend of mine named Heather and her husband and children lost everything to the tornado that hit Oklahoma. Thankfully, they are all physically okay and staying with her parents right now. If you feel led, some of the girls have put together a fund for Heather and her family. You can donate directly to them via the paypal link below.

Last night while all of the storms were rolling in, I tweeted a picture of our storm shelter. It's a bad iPhone pic and our power was out so all I had was the flash from my phone, but you can see it pretty well.

Anyway, so many of you tweeted me asking about it, so I thought I'd post more about it here.

This is the pic I'm referring to:

Before we built our new house, we decided to invest in a storm shelter. We saw these at a local home building show and loved that they are an above ground shelter. I'm not a rep for this company and they haven't asked me to write this post or anything, and hopefully I don't mess my facts up, but you can get all the accurate information by visiting THIS site.

From what I understand, our shelter is the only above ground FEMA certified storm shelter rated to withstand an F5 tornado. Most of the other ones are below ground shelters. We looked at those - you can have a portion of your garage dug up to hold one - but my concern was what if a car or something blew over top of it and locked you in? With our shelter, the door opens inward and overall, it feels safer and certainly less claustrophobic to me.

We actually unbolted it from the floor and moved it with us to our new home. By the way, this thing is heavy so it's not super easy to move, but it can be done. The shelter can support over 100,000 pounds stacked on top of it, and we feel really safe having it at our house.

They offer different sizes to accommodate what your family needs. Ours is a 4*6' unit. We keep water, flashlights, a first aid kit and other necessities in it. I had trouble getting a connection to my wifi and even to 4G while in it, but for whatever reason, I had just enough connection to be able to read twitter and know when it was safe to come out!

I realized that a lot of people didn't know about these shelters last night while we were tweeting during the storm, so I just wanted to mention them on here today. It's a great investment and it really offers our family peace of mind. Feel free to ask me any questions and I'll do my best to answer them!