5 families buy peace of mind with grant

Published 12:00 am Monday, November 15, 2004

Lester and Novella Bradshaw look down from the doorway of their new storm shelter built in May of this year.(Brian Loden The Vicksburg Post)

[11/15/2004] Lester and Novella Bradshaw said they installed a storm shelter to gain a bit more peace of mind when their three grandsons come to visit during summer, thunderstorm season in Mississippi.

They were among five families in Warren County to take advantage of a little known federal program announced last year. Although it had limited funding, the program helped those who qualified pay for bunkers at their homes.

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L.W. Callaway III, Warren County Emergency Management Office director, told the Warren County Board of Supervisors of the program in October 2003.

At that time, he said the money for the program came from funds allocated to help people in a 40-county area of Mississippi hit by severe weather in April 2003 and left over after those who applied for help had received it.

Rather than return the money to the treasury, the balance was offered to people who applied for reimbursement grants.

An actual bunker wasn’t needed. Options included a safe room in an existing house or adding one to plans for a home under construction. The owner could be paid maximums of 75 percent of the cost up to $2,675 for a single family shelter or $3,750 for a community shelter.

“We saw the advertisement in the paper,” Bradshaw said.

“We applied. We thought we wouldn’t get it,” said Novella Bradshaw.

But they did, and had the shelter installed in May of this year.

Novella Bradshaw said she grew up in Northeast Arkansas, where shelters are much more common.

“When Lester and I married and I came to Mississippi, nobody had one,” she added.

Once they had been approved for the grant, the Bradshaws got a list of licensed and qualified storm shelter contractors from the local emergency management office. They selected Tornado Alley Storm Shelters Inc. of Como, Texas.

Bradshaw said the company trucked in the shelter in two parts, and even brought a backhoe with them to dig the hole.

The whole process took part of one afternoon, he said.

After digging the hole, Bradshaw said the contractor lifted the base session into place and then the top. The two sections were then bolted together.

The walls of the shelter are 8 inches thick and the interior is 6 feet by 8 feet with a 6-foot-2-inch height. There is enough room inside for six to eight people to take cover.

The shelter does not come furnished, but the Bradshaws have theirs stocked with a battery lantern, weather radio, water, folding chairs and a pry bar in case the door becomes jammed in a storm.

“We thought we needed some protection from under these trees,” Bradshaw said, pointing to the huge oak trees that surround the home on Woodhaven Drive in Lake Park Estates.

Since installing the shelter, the Bradshaws have not had to use it.

In some ways, their storm shelter is somewhat similar to the fallout shelters that many people built in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At that time, the Cold War was just getting cranked up with its attendant fears that the Soviet Union would start lobbing nuclear weapons at the United States.

That fear came to Vicksburg, and Robert E. Ehrhardt built one in the back yard of the home in which they lived at the time.

“It was built of concrete and steel below ground level,” Ehrhardt recalled, and it had double steel doors.

Like the Bradshaw’s storm shelter, the fallout shelter had an air vent, but it also had a hand-cranked fan to bring in fresh air.

“We had bunk beds and a portable toilet,” he said.

The entire structure was a little larger than the Bradshaw’s storm shelter and was probably 10 feet long by about 7 or 8 feet wide.

“We used if for a storm shelter a couple of times,” Ehrhardt said.

Other storm shelters were built by David and Ellen Daily on Fisher Ferry Road, Linda Larry on Watkins Road, Michael Hollingsworth off Mississippi 27 and David and Nena Longmire on Fort Hill Drive.