Guide
Shelter types, compared without a sales pitch
The directory filters use four groups: in-ground or garage floor, above-ground safe room, community, and basement.
A business can be in more than one. The grouping is a reading of the words in the shelter_types cell.
The listing page always shows those words unchanged.
In-ground / garage floor
These are units set into a garage slab, under the floor, or buried in the yard. The file uses a lot of names for them: in-ground garage, garage floor, underground, below-ground, backyard, under-bed, and fiberglass. Outdoor concrete shelters with a sloped front are grouped here when the source did not call them above-ground.
Questions that matter more than the adjective: where you enter it, what happens to the garage slab, how water is kept out, and whether the door you will actually have was part of the tested design. This site does not have soil or water-table data for your lot.
Above-ground safe room
These sit on a slab, usually in a garage or as a small anchored room. Steel and concrete both show up. “Safe room” in a source line is filed here. A bolted room is not automatically easier or harder than a buried one. It is a different install, with its own anchors and floor.
Community
Community or commercial shelters are the larger rooms: workplaces, schools, manufactured-housing communities, and similar buildings. FEMA’s highlights of ICC 500-2023 describe a residential storm shelter as one that serves a dwelling and is limited to 16 occupants. A community storm shelter is one that is not residential. That sentence is a summary of the standard, not a design. If you are seating a crew or a neighborhood, say that when you call an installer. Online quote requests on this site are not open.
Basement
Only a handful of rows mention a basement model. A house with a basement is not, by that fact, a storm shelter. If a company sells a basement unit, the listing says so because the company said so.
What the filter will not do
- It will not hide a business that left the shelter type blank. Choose “All recorded types” to see those rows.
- It will not rank one type as safer. The standard and the installed assembly matter more than the marketing category.
- It will not add a type the source did not use. Vaults, when a company mentioned them, stay in the original sentence and do not get their own filter.
The standards guide is the next page if a company is using FEMA, ICC, or NSSA as a selling point. Read it.
On this page
Does a basement count as a storm shelter?
Not by itself. A basement is below grade, and that can help with debris, but a storm shelter is a specific structure with a door, anchors, and a design standard. Only a few listings in this file mention a basement model.
Why do some listings say the shelter type was not recorded?
Many association-list rows did not say what the company builds. The directory leaves that blank instead of guessing from the company name.