By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
Principal Anita Scheve pointed to a plastic skylight in one of the halls at Wilson Elementary School.
Just underneath these skylights is where her students have to shelter in the case of a tornado.
She said she worries about this space. Could something get sucked up through the skylights if a tornado hit? Could debris come through the openings?
Although the children here and all other district facilities drill for tornadoes at least three times a year, Scheve said the facilities at Wilson are not adequate to protect her students.
“I want us to be prepared and be able to stay safe in a F3 or F4 tornado, and we don’t have the facilities to do that,” she said.
In a paper offered by NOAA, Roger Edwards of the Storm Prediction Center, Norman, Okla., notes hallways can be unsafe if exposed to windows.
“For example, the idea of a relatively safe hallway becomes invalid if the hall is lined with plate glass, or if it has windows to the outdoors. Hallways can turn into wind tunnels filled with flying glass and other dangerous objects,” he wrote.
The Vision Team that is working to build a new bond issue for the district has placed a priority on creating storm shelters for all the district’s schools. Options considered by the team at its last meeting included a new multi-use storm shelter for Wilson.
Although a major tornado has never hit the city of Hays, Ellis County had 60 tornadoes between 1950 and 2015.
Four schools in the district do not have storm shelters, and in case of a tornado, would have to shelter in hallways. These include Wilson, O’Loughlin, Westside and the Learning Center.
Vicki Gile, principal at O’Loughlin Elementary School, also expressed concern about her students. O’Loughlin students and staff would also have to shelter in hallways in the case of a tornado.
“If a tornado happened, I just don’t know what the outcome would be,” she said. “Quite frankly, with the kids in the hallway, I am not sure what we might see.”
The district has considered closing O’Loughlin as an elementary school, renovating it and using it as a space for the Westside program, Early Childhood Connections and the Learning Center. If that occurs, the district plans to add a storm shelter to that building.
Hays High and Hays Middle schools are the only schools in district that have rated storm shelters. Hays High’s library has a reinforced concrete ceiling and walls, which is rated to withstand winds of about 160 mph.
Classrooms at the middle school double as high wind shelters. Those were added about six years ago, according Superintendent John Thissen.
Federal Emergency Management Agency designates a high wind shelter as a space that can withstand between 150 and 250 mph.
On new community and residential construction, FEMA suggests specifications that withstand 250 mph winds and a 15-pound, 2-by-4-inch board missile traveling horizontally at 100 mph — the equivalent of an EF5 tornado.
Students and staff at Lincoln, Roosevelt and Early Childhood Connections can go into basements.
Although this may theoretically provide better protection, these locations can cause complications. All of the basements have to be accessed by stairs.
FEMA standards require that community shelters be handicap accessible and meet all standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which the district’s basement shelters do not.
Students who have mobility issues or are in wheelchairs are not placed at Lincoln because the building is not handicap accessible, Lincoln Principal Elaine Rohleder said.
Rohleder said if a child was on crutches, he or she would probably have to be carried down the stairs in the case of an emergency.
There is only one entrance from the interior of the school to the school’s cafeteria in the basement. That means all 260 students plus staff have to go through that one choke point to get to safety.
The students drill regularly to increase the speed of descent down the stairs. The children move in three lines, and the older children are taught to assist the younger children as they move to the basement, Rohleder said.
Schools are constantly working to improve their drill times. Lincoln can be evacuated to the basement within three to four and a half minutes.
However, Edwards, in his recommendations to school administrators, suggested four minutes could be too long.
Tornadoes can develop quickly. Despite advanced technology, warning of an imminent tornado may be short.
“If it takes more than 2 or 3 minutes to move all upper-floor people down, things get really risky!” he wrote.
The Vision Team and the district is still working to decide which rooms in each building will be built to storm shelter standards. However, Thissen said all storm shelters that are being built at schools at this time are multi-use.
They can be classrooms, gyms, auditoriums or cafeterias. These are facilities that would be used on a daily basis even when there are no storms.
Thissen also noted shelters at schools could be opened to the community in off-school hours if a tornado emergency arose.
During his tenure at the Herrington school district, that district built storm shelters at its schools. The district ordered key lock boxes that allowed school officials, law enforcement or fire personnel to open shelters at the schools when tornado warnings were issued.
During his time there, the schools were used several times as shelters after hours, and Thissen personally responded in some of these events.
He said the number of people who used the shelter were not large, but these were people who might have not had another place to go.
“I think that it is key to have the shelters open whenever there is a threat for the public,” he said.
Hays residents don’t have to look too far from Hays to see what kind of destruction a tornado can do to a school, including communities such as Chapman, Greensburg, Hoisington and Moore, Okla., Thissen said.
“Our community is sold on having insurance for cars and insurance for health and life insurance,” Thissen said. “I strongly believe that we need to have insurance for the safety of our children during the school day and the safety of our community in the off hours.”