MURRAY – The Calloway County Office of Emergency Management has announced that the new severe weather storm shelter on Murray State University’s campus is now ready to open when needed.
Emergency Management Director Jeff Steen said his office has worked out an arrangement with Murray State to host the shelter at the Cutchin Field House and Racer Arena on 14th Street. The public will use the southeast doors to enter, and they will be marked during operation by a “Storm Shelter” sign. This is a short-term shelter that will be opened whenever severe weather is forecast, and in many cases, the shelter will be open for only a few hours. Steen said there are adequate restrooms and water fountains located in the arena, and the building also has an emergency generator if it were to become necessary.
Announcements about the shelter being put into operation will be made by radio stations and mass public notification systems, and Steen said he would soon be releasing more information about signing up for notifications over landlines, cell phones, text and virtual assistant devices like Amazon’s Alexa. The county is currently in the process of transitioning from the CodeRED public notification system to Hyper-Reach.
“We have what we need to have in place for the shelter, and we have great cooperation with the folks at Murray State,” Steen said “We also have the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members who have been through orientation and training for the facility. They’ve walked through the facility, and they will (staff the shelter) when we have a severe weather forecast. They’ll be able to get there maybe an hour or so ahead of time and make sure the place is open. They’ll put a sign up so people can find it.”
After the terrible destruction and loss of life resulting from the tornado in Mayfield last December, Steen said the need for a storm shelter to provide enhanced protection to Murray and Calloway County residents became all the more apparent. He said the Cutchin Field House is two-thirds underground, with two layers of exterior masonry walls and has withstood straight line winds measuring more than 100 mph in the past. When the shelter is open, the CERT shelter monitors, who are amateur radio operators, will monitor weather conditions by communicating with weather spotters and the Murray State Public Safety Dispatch Center, Steen said.
“It’s a very solid structure, and it will be a good structure to be in, there’s no doubt,” Steen said. “You don’t want to be traveling to it as the storm is hitting, so we want to open it before the storm gets here. If we identify a large category tornado, we have the potential to move into certain areas in the building that are even more secure.”
Steen said the shelter will be especially beneficial to people who live in mobile homes or other buildings that are more vulnerable to being damaged by straight line winds or even more severe conditions. He noted that during the Mayfield tornado, the impact of vehicles and other large, heavy objects caused about as much damage as the direct hit from the tornado itself.
“It wasn’t just the wind loads they had to deal with,” Steen said. “Those structures have to hold up to those projectiles. Touring the Mayfield damage, (I saw) the lighter buildings were definitely scattered, and you could see pieces of them in the trees for miles. But even a substantially nice masonry home would suffer damage, and sometimes you could see projectiles that weren’t part of the structure that were thrown into it and caused it to be destroyed.”
The shelter will enforce the following rules while in operation:
• Pets need to be leashed, crated or muzzled.
• No weapons are allowed on Murray State property.
• Murray State is a smoke-free campus.
• Loud music is not allowed.
• No alcohol or illegal drugs are allowed.
