The American Gothic House still stands on the edge of the tiny town of Eldon, Iowa, just where it was in 1930 when the artist Grant Wood made it the backdrop to his famous painting, American Gothic. When the Dibble family built the little house in 1881, they put a proper cellar beneath it. That’s what you did in those days, to store preserves and to have a place to hide when a tornado hit.
I thought of the American Gothic house while reading the news from Moore, Oklahoma, where a mile-wide tornado not only flattened the town but killed 20 people there. Ten of the victims were children, including seven students at a grade school named Plaza Towers. According to news reports, only 10 percent of the homes in Moore have a cellar or even an above-ground safe room. Plaza Towers Elementary had neither.
It's not that the tornado was a surprise. Moore is a blue-collar town of about 50,000 people that, in its 120-year history, has experienced no less than 22 tornados, about one every nine years, that killed more than 120 people altogether. This one this year, bad as it was, wasn't even the worst.
One story blamed the absence of storm cellars partly on rocky soil and partly on the local attitude, as common there as twisters, that nobody wants the government telling them what to do, whether it’s building basements or wearing helmets, even if it might save their lives.
But there’s another, more important factor. Many people who want to buy a house in the Midwest and Great Plains these days simply can’t afford a cellar. We can talk about economic disparity, or the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, but these are abstract terms. The reality is that a great swatch of this country is inhabited by people so poor, so abandoned by the 21st-century economy, that they can barely afford a roof over their heads but can’t put a cellar beneath their feet.
This isn’t just Oklahoma. All across the Midwest, especially in the small towns where tornados most often hit, the most common form of housing these days are mobile homes or double-wides. More accurately called manufactured homes, these are pre-fabs trucked in from the factory and dropped onto a concrete slab. Sometimes they’re secured to the slab with bolted plates, which make them harder to blow away: more often, they’re just secured with flimsy pins that are little help in a tornado.
Other new frame houses are available in poorer areas but these, too, are small and basic. Almost none come with anything resembling a basement.
Mobile home parks huddle on the outskirts of almost all Midwestern towns, big and small. These house trailers are tornado traps: every year, twisters rip through towns across Tornado Alley, and it always seems that these parks get hit the hardest. Some have put in communal storm cellars to protect their residents when a tornado hits.
But these flimsy mobile homes aren’t restricted to trailer parks. Increasingly, they’re the home of choice for Midwesterners who can’t afford anything better. The American Gothic House is kept in good trim, but most of the newer houses nearby are mobile homes.
The reason is economic. Mobile homes sell for as little as $20,000 or so up to around $75,000 for a two-bedroom place, generally much cheaper than a house. Would it be possible to mandate cellars beneath new frame houses, or even mobile homes? Not likely. A small pre-fab sunken shelter runs about $4,000, which is a lot of money for someone who can barely afford to buy these cheaper homes. So they take their chances.
Remember, we’re not talking fancy basements here, not paneled rec rooms with a wet bar and pool table. What’s needed is simply something basic, not much more than the root cellars of old, something that could keep a family from getting killed in a tornado. And most families these days can’t afford it.
If 90 percent of the homes in a town like Moore don’t have cellars, the answer doesn’t lie in hoisting these homes in the air and inserting basements beneath them. Nor would laws insisting that all new houses have cellars, because it seems clear that many purchasers can’t afford them.
Short of that, it seems reasonable to insist on – and subsidize – communal shelters, close enough to neighborhoods to enable people to get there between the time the sirens blow and the tornado hits. Certainly, such shelters should be mandated for every mobile home court and, especially, for every school: it’s intolerable that children were killed at Plaza Towers while cringing in closets, because their school didn’t have a safe place for them to go.
Recent Comments