[JRandomFreeper]

In some areas of Texas and Oklahoma, underground shelters are not a viable engineering option. I live over the edge of an underground stream. There is no way, without spending hundreds of thousands, that I could have an underground shelter.

/johnny

[Drill Thrawl]

As we saw with the schools, cinder block can't stop didly, but what about a concrete and steel structure or a heavily rebarred concrete box.

There are also personal shelters that bolt to the slab, $3 to $5k.

[Paul R.]

The water table is within a few feet of the surface?

When I was a kid, our family lived over some sort of underground waterway, but it was significantly deeper, so it apparently did not present a problem. When a tornado took our house apart, we were in the back of the basement, with 2 ft. thick reinforced concrete walls around us. (My Dad “overbuilt”.) Some bricks from the exterior structure punched partially through the floor, but none actually came all the way through into our basement.

The positive of that particular location was that we had markedly better well water than the neighbors on either side of us (~ a couple hundred feet away either way, as I recall.)