Posted on 05/07/2015 10:39:28 AM PDT by dware
OKLAHOMA CITY – Authorities say an Oklahoma City woman apparently drowned after taking cover in an underground storm shelter that later flooded.
Oklahoma City police Sergeant Gary Knight says the 42-year-old woman's body was discovered Thursday morning in an underground shelter. She is the only person known to have died in the strong storms that raked the Plains Wednesday and early Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Keep your powder dry, and your bunker even more so.
How tragic - hard to tell from the story, but assuming it was a flash flood? 6-9 inches doesn’t sound like much, but in a flat area & with runoff, it could be catastophic.
Just a reminder to have multiple options, if you can, for your own shelter & preps.
+1
Something must have blocked the shelter door. The new garage shelters have sliding doors parallel to the garage floor and something could have been dislodged during the flooding.
Did you see the pic of the storm shelter pulled out of the ground? Looked like a prefab, possibly steel or fiberglass. Don’t know the details.
That was 6-9 inches on top of the 3-4 inches we have had over the last week or so. The ground is saturated and the drains are full. Remember this is an area that was in moderate to extreme drought conditions just 2 months ago. In one month we have gone back to slight to no drought. I am not complaining though. Don’t know why she didn’t or couldn’t get out.
I was in Dubai once when 1” of rain shut down half the city and caused massive flooding. They don’t have a lot of drainage because it never rains. It was crazy. Didn’t mix with marble streets very well.
I didn't. The article posted by OK Sun indicates the shelter was an old "Well House", separate from the main home.
That makes more sense. It was a cellar and not a shelter. Shelters are the pre-fab units with sliding doors. Looking at that house, it was probably an old storm/root cellar. Probably was up over the door before it started coming in and the weight on the door trapped her in there.
I never liked those old style cellars.
Those are common in Oklahoma City. Houses rarely have basements so prefab shelters that bolt into the garage floor or a concrete slab are the preferred solution.
The water table is really high in much of Oklahoma.
That is why you see little freestanding storm shelters instead of basements.
That’s really interesting to know. I always thought Oklahoma was pretty dry, in general.
Only having visited OKC once, I wondered why my SIL’s house was on a slab (I’d just assumed everyone had a basement, considering the tornado alley thing)
Went through a tornado in Iowa in a slab house and it was one of the worst experiences of my life (kids & me huddled in the hall closet while hubby & the dogs barricaded the door).
To this day, when I’m checking out new houses online, the kids immediately want to know about the underground facilities.
Maybe that’s Ray Nagins’ Momma he thought drownt in her attic?
Here in Norman, OK we have to drill down 300 ft to hit the water table. Basements are scarce in Oklahoma because of the soil.
It’s that way in Pawnee county too.
Tulsa, Broken Arrow, lots of the northeast though, have higher water tables.
The soil just makes digging require heavy equipment. Or guys with jackhammers.
I have an underground fallout bunker under my back yard, circa about 1964.
It is exceedingly difficult to keep dry, even with it being fully intact.
It is thick plate steel, so I dunno.
Maybe I need one of those little moisture absorber packets that come with my wife’s shoes and ammo.
For those that live elsewhere, a "storm shelter" is just another name for "storm cellar" except that it may also be built above ground.
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