The Dallas Morning News ran an op-ed I wrote about where to spend tornado safety funds. The most tragic element of last week’s tornado in Moore was that an EF-5 tornado, an extremely rare event, hit two elementary schools with full force. Few structures are designed for that type of stress but engineered buildings would be about the best choice you could have. Most residential structures would be leveled. ...
If you consider that Oklahoma has 1,780 campuses and estimates to provide a safe room run from $500,000 to $1,000,000 per campus, the outlay to protect all schools would be immense, $1 to $2 billion dollars. ...
In general, my research suggests that using public money to save lives from tornado fatalities fails the benchmark that spending is considered reasonable if the cost per avoided fatality is less than $10 million. In our book Economic and Societal Impacts of Tornadoes and the follow up to that book DeadlySeason: An Analysis of the 2011 TornadoOutbreak, Dan Sutter and I show that these programs are well outside that benchmark for most uses of the program. Using the funds to reduce fatalities in mobile homes is the one exception for some states.
Should that be "greater than $10 million"? And, $10 million is much higher than the value of a statistical life used in other areas of public policy (e.g., traffic, air quality) making safe rooms in schools even more difficult to justify with benefit-cost analysis.
