FamilySAFE

FamilySAFE provides EF5-tested above-ground and underground tornado shelters and safe rooms.

Question: Why Don’t you put steel floors in your tornado shelters?

We sometimes get great questions from customers about our storm shelters, and are more than happy to share the answers.

Wendy asks “Why do you not put floors in your shelters?”

We used to put floors in our storm shelters, over 15 years ago. Now there are several good reasons not to:

  • If the room is properly anchored to the slab the steel shelter floor will do zero good and provides no extra strength.
  • Over time the floor will and can warp from the repeated heating/cooling of being in contact with the concrete floor.
  • If a builder is doing floor ducting or plumbing inside the room the steel floor gets in the way.
  • Not having a floor allows the occupants/owner to cover the concrete floor with whatever they choose w/o getting in the way.
  • If the unit is moved you could have a huge rust stain left over.
  • The room is harder to move into place with a floor.

As I mentioned before there is no need for it at all if the unit is going to stay in place. Since FamilySAFE makes sure that all of our techs are trained by HILTI for the proper bolts in the proper conditions it WILL stay in place, and it has in the 9 rooms we have had confirmed direct hits from the EF4 & EF5 tornadoes.

You may hear that a floor is better, but this is probably from a new or newer company trying/struggling to find an advantage. Thanks for your question!