Graphic:   IOWA RECOVERY CENTER ??? SAFE ROOM    BANNER
The Waverly Shell Rock Community School was destroyed by the 2008 floods. To better prepare for future disasters, the school board was granted FEMA Hazard Mitigation funding to design their new auditorium as a certified safe room.

Jere Vyverberg, Superintendent Waverly-Shell Rock Community Schools:
Well Homeland Security began talking to me early on and said you know when you build a building do you want to consider putting a safe room in and I said well yes. 
Actually I lived in a town that went through the last EF5 tornado before the one that hit Parkersburg.  And I was there when that happened it was in 1968. And so knowing that we had just had this devastating tornado in Parkersburg everybody was anxious to say yes we should have a safe room.  You know I have been in business in this business for 40 years and during that time it has always just really bothered me that we have tornado drills and we put them in the hallway because it is the best we have.  Thank goodness that I have never had to go through a tornado during a school day otherwise.  So the board was anxious and in fact said seek the funding and thank goodness we got it because we were able to get our auditorium to be approved as the safe room. Now the auditorium is going to be able to hold around 700 people, but the safe room part of it will hold 1350 because we don???t need to use the seats we can just stand people there.  So the entire auditorium will be a safe room and not only will it be a safe room it???s gonna be an auditorium and it is also going to be a classroom every day.  So we are getting a lot of bang for those bucks and uh again we wouldn???t have been able to do that without the funding.  It is equipped with all the safe room needs and it is going to have its own backup generator in case of loss of power.  I think it is just a superb addition to our building. 

Graphic:   IOWA RECOVERY CENTER ??? SAFE ROOM     BANNER
The rebuilding of the school and the safe room was funded, in part, by a grant of 9.375 million dollars from FEMA

www.FEMA.gov