Grant Gives Cedar Rapids School District Storm Room

Wayne Wurzer with Knutson Construction is working on the new administrative building for the Cedar Rapids Community School District.

The building, scheduled for completion later this year, comes equipped with a 500,000 dollar storm shelter.

"It's an up and coming thing,” Wurzer said.  “It's fairly unique to this area to go this great lengths to make a safe room."

The district received grant money from Federal Emergency Management to add the storm shelter to the new administrative building on Ellis And Edgewood Drive Northwest.

Linn County Emergency Management Director Mike Golberg says this is the future of storm protection in larger cities.

"Sheltering is pretty much up to the individual home owner or property owner,” Goldberg said.

Goldberg says gone are the days of large public shelters with businesses, companies and homeowners building personal safe rooms.

These most recent deadly storm cells may have larger cities taking another look at providing citywide protection.

"I definitely think it's a teachable moment when you have a death or loss of life in a community due to a storm,” he said.

EMA says they don't know of any plans for a Cedar Rapids shelter, but tells us they are always looking to provide more protection to the county.