Emergency chief wants to see safe rooms in schools
A safe room in every school? In the aftermath of the May 20 tornado, many state officials were saying it couldn’t be done. Albert Ashwood wasn’t among them.
Ashwood is director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management, a small state agency with a big responsibility: Since he took over in 1997, the agency has coordinated the state and federal response to 37 tornadoes, floods, wildfires, ice storms and other calamities deemed worthy of a presidential disaster declaration.
Now Ashwood is helping to pick up the pieces from the deadly May 19, May 20 and May 31 tornadoes, which killed at least 46 people in Oklahoma. Seven were children at Moore’s Plaza Towers Elementary School, which had no safe room. It is one of hundreds of Oklahoma schools lacking adequate storm shelters.
In an interview, Ashwood describes how Oklahoma could take the lead in developing a model program to put safe rooms in every school. He also explains why Oklahoma homeowners should take responsibility for their own tornado precautions. The interview has been edited and condensed.
A native of Muskogee and current resident of Chandler, Ashwood ended a newspaper career to become the agency’s public information officer in 1988. He was appointed director by a Republican governor, reappointed by a Democrat, and appointed again by Republican Gov. Mary Fallin in 2011. He is the
longest-serving state emergency management chief in the country.
government funds it.
Q: Do you have a dollar figure in mind? No, I don’t. Right now, we don’t have a baseline of what we’re missing.
We have between 1,700 and 1,800 school buildings in the state of Oklahoma. The school safe rooms that we have funded through the traditional FEMA grant program usually cost between $500,000 and $1 million. If you apply that figure to the number of school buildings, it would take a very long time to try to fund it just that way. And who would you fund first? How would you set priorities of putting a safe room in this school as opposed to that school? It’s impossible to do.
We have to have something broader and different and new and innovative that really gets all of the partners together and says this is a priority. It might be something that goes along with building codes. Many communities have an ordinance that requires a safe room in new school construction, but not every community does. Is that something we need to look at the state level? We ought to discuss it. I don’t think anyone wants to tell local jurisdictions what they have to do. I’m talking about something that would be an incentive for districts to set this as a priority or a fundable item. It would never be 100 percent federal or state government saying, “We’re going to put a safe room in your school.” It would be, “Here’s an opportunity for you, should you decide to take it. You could match your bond money against what we’ve already got in place.” First and foremost, everybody in the state of Oklahoma should have a safety plan. ... We would love to see everyone have a safe room or a shelter, but that’s not practical. We understand that. There are many people who live in apartments. There are many people who live in mobile home parks and places that don’t have a safe room because they don’t own the land that they’re living on. We need to address all facets of that.
We’re not proponents of community shelters. We don’t want people to leave their home to go to a community shelter. But we also realize that there are certain situations like commercial buildings, mobile home parks, where there needs to be a plan on where individual residents go. This is what I tell folks: It doesn’t hurt to apply. But that shouldn’t be the basis of your decision. We don’t want you to shoot for the rebate. To wait for the rebate is a bad idea. Because we don’t want to get into case management. We would have to hire people to do that means test. If you have to verify and validate, you’re going to end up spending more money in administration than you actually do in providing safe room rebates. I had a talk on Sunday when we drove from El Reno with the governor. I suggested that we get a group together made up of meteorologists from Oklahoma City and Tulsa as well as the National Weather Service, and that we all sit down and come up with consistent messaging.