Even in hurricane-prone areas, storm shelters are not required in warehousesExBulletin

In the United States, tornadoes cause more deaths annually than tornadoes and earthquakes combined. However, there is no national standard that mandates that large warehouses include storm shelters for workers.

Ari Shapiro, host:

Hurricanes are more deadly than other extreme weather, and kill most people when inside. After deadly tornadoes last December in the Midwest and South, people are becoming concerned about the safety of workers in large warehouses the next time someone strikes. From St. Louis Public Radio, Eric Schmidt reports.

Eric Schmidt, Beilin: Arentra Rhodes is trying not to think of last December when six people died in an Amazon warehouse just about 20 miles from the store she works at in Hazlewood, Mo. Rhodes says she can’t act if she’s focused so hard on what happened in Edwardsville, Illinois.

Arentra Rhodes: Everyone’s mental health is different. I just have to push certain things into the past because money is money. And at the end of the day, you have to get the money so we can survive.

Schmidt: Rhodes is one of many workers on industrial buildings across the increasingly hurricane-prone regions of the Midwest and South. Many of these facilities are similar to those in Edwardsville, which had no hurricane shelter, just a shelter area away from the windows. Jim Bell directs the operations of the National Storm Shelter Association and says the difference is important.

Jim Bell: They weren’t built to save lives. It’s just the safest place you can be inside a building that isn’t built as a shelter.

Schmidt: Bill says the official storm shelter isn’t hard to include in the designs. It can be as simple as strengthening a room or corridor within a warehouse.

Bill: And that 1% of the time you really need to have a shelter built to withstand 250 mph winds and 100 mph impacts — we’re testing that stuff as well.

Schmidt: He says it’s not that expensive either. Building a storm shelter can cost anywhere from 20,000 to a few hundred thousand dollars. To put that in perspective, a new warehouse could cost upwards of $20 million. Arentra Rhodes says she and others sometimes feel insecure in their warehouses now.

Rhodes: Just like they make the restroom look good, they can at least make the sanctuary room look good, and that’s supportive enough for everyone. And they can do that. They just won’t.

Schmidt: Amazon officials say their facilities meet local building codes. Randy Corgan is the National Director of Brotherhood International at Amazon. The union also represents many in the logistics industry, such as delivery drivers and workers in distribution facilities. Corgan says hurricane shelters are just the latest example in a long list of safety issues in warehouses. He adds that the following building codes are just the bare minimum.

Randy Corgan: Employers don’t tend to do it alone. They don’t really take into account the health and safety of the workforce at the proper level until they have to.

Schmidt: Most local building codes do not require storm shelters in new or existing warehouses, and there is no national standard. It is mostly fragmented from town to town. This makes it difficult, says structural engineer Ron Hamburger.

Ron Hamburger: If every city within a state has different rules, that’s baffling to me.

Schmidt: Hamburger supports the possibility of statewide bases, which Illinois lawmakers are considering in light of the Edwardsville warehouse collapse. But he worries that the national standard may not be that useful.

Hamburger: You don’t have hurricanes coming from St. Louis, so why design for hurricanes, right? In the same way, Florida has no snowstorms, so why design for snowstorms?

Schmidt: If conditions within one region are relatively consistent, increasing safety protocols there may help accommodate the changing climate, which is causing more hurricanes in the Midwest and South than ever before, says Ron Hamburger.

For NPR News, I’m Eric Schmidt from St. Louis.

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