ENID — With a new tornado season upon us and the scars of last year’s EF-5 tornadoes still visible in parts of the country, local emergency managers and civic leaders are teaming up to identify buildings that could be pressed into service as public storm shelters.

United Way of Enid and Northwest Oklahoma hosted an organizational meeting Monday to bring together emergency managers and local churches, some of which already operate public shelters.

Representatives from University Place Christian Church, Central Christian Church and First United Methodist Church were in attendance at the planning meeting.

United Way Executive Director Sean Byrne said the Volunteer Storm Shelter Initiative will serve both to identify possible public storm shelters and to raise public awareness of storm safety issues.

“There really are no public storm shelters in this community,” Byrne said, “but there are a lot of groups that have shelters that might be able to make those shelters available to the public.

“We want to be sure a plan is in place before a disaster happens, and we want people to be thinking about where they’ll go in the event of a tornado. Public complacency is a big deal, and we need to do whatever we can to keep this issue in front of people.”

Enid and Garfield County Emergency Management Director Mike Honigsberg expressed concerns over how a public shelter program would be implemented.

“My personal feeling on public shelters is, I don’t feel they’re a really good idea,” Honigsberg said. “That being said, my mind can be changed if we go about this the right way.”

His major reservation about public shelters is people tend to “wait way too long” to seek shelter, putting them in harm’s way once they do decide to leave home for a shelter.

“The big problem in this country today is everybody likes to wait until the last minute before they react,” Honigsberg said. “People don’t want to listen to the warnings ... they don’t want to believe it could happen to them. They want to see the tornado for themselves, and once they see it they go into the mode of, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do now?’ Then, it’s too late to do anything about it.”

Honigsberg said a public shelter system would have to have shelters dispersed enough to prevent people from driving long distances in the face of an approaching tornado.

“I don’t want people who live way over here to try to drive way over there in the middle of a tornado situation to try to get to a shelter,” he said. “I would rather, if we’re going to have a public shelter system, we have the shelters strategically placed throughout the city, and that people know where they are and know they need to go there long before the tornado arrives.”

Bill Presley, coordinator for Northwest Oklahoma Medical Emergency Response Center, shared Honigsberg’s reservations about public shelters.

“In many cases, you may be safer staying at home than going out directly in the storm and driving whatever distance, then trying to find a place to park and walk to the shelter,” Presley said.

He said anyone offering their facility for public shelter needs to be prepared to accept a large responsibility, including being available “24/7, 365” to open the facility in the event of a storm.

“You don’t know when that storm is going to hit, and when it does, people need to be able to go there and get in,” Presley said.

He pointed out other areas of concern for a public shelter, including availability of parking, capacity, access for handicapped persons, availability of restroom facilities, evacuation procedures and security.

“I think having public shelters is a great idea,” Presley said. “I just want everybody to be aware of the downsides.”

Honigsberg said not all large buildings provide adequate protection from a tornado, especially from the EF-5 level tornadoes seen last year.

“If you don’t have a basement, it shouldn’t be a public shelter facility unless it’s a new facility and it’s a hardened structure,” Honigsberg said.

“In a major tornado, if you take a direct hit, your survivability in the center of your home is pretty much zero. For the big, major tornadoes, you pretty much have to be underground in order to survive a direct hit.”

Honigsberg said the possibility of building new public storm shelters is limited by a “sad truth” in public safety funding: often, the funding for life-saving measures only comes after lives have been lost.

“Nothing’s going to be done, unfortunately, until we get people killed,” Honigsberg said. “That’s the sad part, but that’s when money comes rolling in to where you can actually do something about it.”

Honigsberg said the best solution for public shelters currently may be to identify former bomb or fallout shelters, or other hardened structures that could withstand a tornado.

“There are a lot of buildings in this city with basements, and we used to have Civil Defense fallout shelters all over the place,” Honigsberg said. “It’s really just a matter of finding those buildings, and whether the owners are willing to open their doors to the public.”

Honigsberg requested owners of buildings with large basements or former Civil Defense shelters contact him at (580) 249-5969 or mike .honigsberg@onenet.net to assess whether the building could serve as a public storm shelter.

Regardless of how many public shelters are identified or put in service, Honigsberg said the best protection lies in individuals’ awareness and preparation.

“The responsibility for preparedness is not the government’s responsibility, it’s not the churches’ responsibility, it’s not on anybody but you,” he said. “Stay on top of things, know what’s going on, know what you’re going to do and where you’re going to go, and have a plan. The people who wait, unfortunately, are the ones who are going to get hurt, because they waited too long to prepare.”