My kingdom for a
place to hide
Blanchard company builds stout saferooms
to endure fury of fiercest tornado
By Randall Turk
Transcript Business
Editor
Someday the back yards of whole neighborhoods will
be studded with these monoliths.
There will be formations
of them in schools, daycare centers and other public places - throughout the country.
This is the dream of Andrew Zagorski, a construction company owner who invented
and patented the "Oz," an above ground saferoom certified to be the
safest by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The
dream is shared by Don Staley, a Moore resident who lived through the Moore tornadoes
of 1974, 1998, 1999 and 2003. On May 9 of last year Staley became the only person
to ride out a tornado in an Oz saferoom, which later was surrounded by the ruins
of his home.
Nearby, the tornado leveled a church,
leaving behind a pile of bent and twisted steel I-beams. "I went to the cellar
during the 1974 tornado, but I'm claustrophobic," Staley said.
A
former home repair contractor, Staley suffered injuries from the '99 tornado in
Moore. He had been searching for a less strenuous line of work when he met Zagorski
and asked to sell the product.
For 30 years Zagorski
built seamless, monolithic underground concrete structures for nuclear power plants
and earthquake-proof tunnels under Niagara Falls. He moved his company to Blanchard
after the F-5 tornado of May 3, 1999 devastated huge swaths of Bridge Creek, Moore,
Midwest City and south Oklahoma City. He incorporated and trademarked the product
name.
"At first we tried building underground
saferooms in Florida, but the state's water table is too shallow," Zagorski
said. "We tried Texas, but there's too much rock. Texas has more tornadoes
than Oklahoma, but Oklahoma has worse ones.
"If
the government hadn't recommended above-ground saferooms we'd still be in New
York building tunnels."
Oz saferooms are one
piece, slab sided affairs of 5,000 psi poured concrete. They have walls two feet
thick and 18-inch thick ceilings with chamfered edges and reinforced 21-inch thick
roof corners. The weakest part of any saferoom is the door, Zagorski said. The
Oz doors are of steel sandwiched between 3/4-inch plywood. The door slides in
a covered, recessed steel channel because hinges will not withstand a tornado's
wrenching winds. Holes below knee level in the massive walls and a concealed slot
above the door provide ventilation.
The standard 25-square-foot
shelter weighs 21 tons. A 40-square-foot model, wheelchair accessible, weighs
30 tons. Each has benches that fold out from the wall. Other interior features
are optional.
This "permanent home improvement"
can be had for between $7,500 and $9,500, or "about the price of a good used
car," Staley said. FEMA has approved a $2,000 rebate for Oz saferooms.
Zagorski
regards most tornado shelter testing as "a joke." Texas Tech subjects
the structures to the force of a two-by-four piece of lumber shot through the
air at high speed, he said. "Tornadoes shoot trucks."
He
claims the Oz will endure anti-tank artillery fire nearly unscathed.
The
company has retained the Kate Gleason College of Engineering at Rochester Institute
of Technology to assist in developing and testing Oz products.
Zagorski
recites a litany of deficiencies in other tornado shelters: "Some below ground
can get buoyant," he said. "A tornado can suck one of these out of the
ground and you go for a ride."
Some shelters
have roofs only two inches thick that can collapse during a storm Zagorski said.
Some are just made of lattice and sprayed gunite, easily destroyed. Others of
thicker concrete are poured in sections. Those products are left with seams and
joints that buckle under a tornado's fury.
Zagorski
also has reservations about safe rooms built inside houses or under garage floors.
If buried under the rubble of a flattened house, occupants could be imprisoned
for days or weeks before they are found, he said. "Every hazardous chemical
stored in a garage" could seep into garage floor saferooms, he said.
"You're
better off inside an interior closet of your house, surrounded by soft clothes
and bedding," Zagorski advises.
The company is
moving about 200 saferooms a year, all that 11 employees can produce and market.
Partners in the business are engineers Gregory Hauser and Joseph Grzywna.
Oz
Saferooms has plans to build "the first tornado proof home in Moore,"
and add 200 workers over the next year to step up production. The City of Newcastle
uses an Oz saferoom for an emergency communications center and wants others for
the police and fire departments, Zagorski said.
Now
it takes about three days to build one of the structures. The company also is
working on models for industry and government, such as a saferoom for pharmaceutical
company testing and a specially equipped model for anti-terrorist operations that
could accommodate inhabitants for a month at a time. But for now, Oz is concentrating
on the residential market.
"In 10 years we should
have these in every state," Zagorski said. "Our product is just like
insurance. If you need it, you have to have it. If you don't need it, great."
© 2004 The Norman Transcript.
A subsidiary of Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc.
Terms of use for this service.
Read our privacy guidelines. Contact us.