What Are Storm Shelters and What are The Requirements for a Storm Shelter?

About The Everything Building Envelope Podcast: Everything Building Envelope℠ is a dedicated podcast and video forum for understanding the building envelope. Our podcast series discusses current trends and issues that contractors, developers and building owners have to deal with related to pre and post construction. Our series touches on various topics related to water infiltration, litigation and construction methods related to the building envelope.
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Dan: Welcome everyone to our “Everything Building Envelope” podcast. I am Dan Johnson, the senior consultant for GCI Consultants, and I will be your host today. I'm excited to have as a guest, Jim Bell, the director of operations for the National Storm Shelter Association. Today, our topic is What Are Storm Shelters and What are The Requirements for a Storm Shelter? Let's start off by having you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and then we'll jump into our podcast.
Jim: Good morning, Dan, and nice to be here. I started out with wind codes after riding out Hurricane Andrew in South Florida. I was on the fringe of it, the county north of Dade County, and it affected us a lot. And going down and looking at the damage that following weekend, it was…it amazed me, and it lit a fire in me. And I got involved with the codes there and it kind of expanded and went on to the tornado codes, and I joined the National Storm Shelter Association, which at the time was outta Texas Tech with Dr. Kiesling. And I've since gotten very involved with the national codes and all about shelters.
Dan: Okay. Jim, I know…you and I go back aways back to my storm shelter testing days. And so I know that you've just briefly been with NSSA. So, what is the NSSA and what does it serve the industry?
Jim: Yes. Thanks. The NSSA is an organization started in 2000. It was really started after a series of severe tornadoes in the Lubbock area, near Texas Tech. And there was a professor of wind sciences at Texas Tech, Dr. Ernst Kiesling, who started up this organization to talk about how we can prevent loss of life in tornado events. And he is considered the grandfather of the aboveground tornado shelter, and they did a lot of studies. The NSSA was the group that put together the ICC 500, which is the building code in the International Building Code, which covers the United States for shelters, and then partnered with ICC who then took the code as an ICC standard. And the ICC 500 is NSSA/ICC 500 in the code, which covers how you build a safe room.
Dan: I was just gonna say [inaudible 00:02:49] the NSSA is basically, it's like a trade association comprised of many different building officials and also shelter manufacturers, correct?
Jim: Correct. We have a membership of industry professionals, architects, engineers. We also have producer members who produce, you know, pre-manufactured shelters for the home, site build shelters, and then the officials who actually build the community-type large shelters in schools and other types of buildings. We also work with building officials and emergency managers. And then the associations like FEMA and NOAA, and NIST are some of the other people that are members of NSSA.
Dan: Okay. Yeah. I know that NSSA and ICC 500 goes from large structures down to residences. But for just kind single-family residents,

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