Church to double as storm shelter

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) - When a tornado threatened his construction site on April 3, Kevin Drake knew just where to seek sanctuary: inside the unfinished home of Trinity United Methodist Church.

Turns out, the 75,000-square-foot building on West Green Oaks Boulevard near Pioneer Parkway was spared a direct hit, although the site was showered with debris from the twister that hit a nearby nursing home and neighborhood.

With a framework of insulating concrete forms, the church will offer refuge against not only worldly temptations but also howling winds able to withstand the equivalent of a 15-foot two-by-four hitting it at 100 mph, according to testing done by the Wind Science and Engineering Center at Texas Tech University.

"This is one of the safest sites in Arlington," said Drake, construction manager for Fort Worth-based FPI Builders. "I would think it would fare very well" in a tornado.

Projects like Trinity's raise public awareness of tornado-resistant construction techniques and may lead to greater acceptance of them, said Ernst Kiesling, a professor of civil engineering at Texas Tech and executive director of the National Storm Shelter Association.

The 17 tornadoes that hit North Texas that afternoon caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage but took no lives. At the very least, Kiesling said, the outbreak should be a wake-up call for the need for more storm shelters, whether public buildings or reinforced rooms in a home, he said.

Government incentives, like mitigation grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, can also help, but funding is usually scarce.

Tarrant County, for example, received $400,000 in 2010 for homeowners to use on tornado safe rooms, and that money is long gone.

"My bottom line is that the (property owner) is the key person who decides what is going to go in," Kiesling said. "Waiting on the government to create incentives or adopt new standards is an unsure and complicated path that can take a long time.

"It's like wanting to win the lottery without buying a ticket."At Trinity, the new buildings are being constructed with insulating concrete forms, a technology that originated in Europe after World War II and has been slowly catching on in this part of the U.S., said Ann Crocker, the church building committee member who suggested the material.

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Church to double as storm shelter