[graciegirl]

Originally Posted by pgc4340

When we built our house in The Villages in 1994, we knew that hurricane's came to Florida, but had no idea that tornadoes were a risk until after we moved in. We have a 3 bdr 2 bth house, but the only places which do not contact an exterior wall are 3 closets, 2 of which are linen closets which not be big enough for us, and would take time to get into even if they were because we'd have to removed shelves and contents. One other closet has sliding doors, so I doubt they would be secure in a tornado. If we had known about the tornado issue, we would have made changes to make at least one closet a safe room.

Ignore the recommendation of getting into a bathtub and covering your self. When the tornado hit The Villages in 2007, one thing we saw was that most bathtubs had debris in them, including heavy items like toilets. I heard one lady in another area of Florida say she started to get into her bathtub, but decided on a closet instead. She saved her life, because she would have been killed in the bathtub, but was safe in the closet.

As far as I know, there is no public storm shelter in The Villages, but there are some storm shelters available to be installed, in a garage. The problem with that, is one would have to have time to open the garage door, back the car out of the way, then get in the shelter and close it. Since there are no warning sirens here, and weather alert radios usually announce the storm about the time it is happening or has already gone through, I doubt people would have enough time to utilize the aforementioned garage shelter.

After the 2007 tornado, there was a brief attempt to start an emergency 911 reverse call system. It did not work, and we have heard nothing about it sense then.

Good luck!

We got warning calls all last year about severe thunderstorms and a warning that the police were chasing a bad guy. We didn't get any storm warning calls this year. Maybe there wasn't any bad storms to warn about. We signed up at the Fire Station for these calls. Anybody called this last year?