Augusta school ready for storms

AUGUSTA — Walk through a newly built 20-foot entryway at Ewalt Elementary School and you reach a set of steel double doors. The doors, which open to the school's new storm shelter, can stand up to the force of an EF-5 tornado containing winds of more than 200 mph.

The shelter is part of the new construction in Augusta public schools coming from the $48 million bond issue district taxpayers approved in 2008. Five more safe rooms, as they are labeled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, are planned in the district. Two are under construction.

Overall, the bond provides for construction projects lasting until 2013, which includes new schools at the current Garfield and Lincoln elementary sites, as well as additions at Robinson Elementary, Augusta Middle School and Augusta High School. The Ewalt addition was completed last spring.

"Hopefully we'll never have to use (the shelter)," Augusta Superintendent Jim Lentz said, "but you could blow away the whole edge of town and those buildings would still be there."

Ewalt Principal Greg Clark has seen what happens when tornadoes meet school buildings. He began teaching in 1992, the year after tornadoes raked an area from Haysville to Andover, killing 19 people.

Many of the textbooks and desks in Clark's then third-grade classroom at Wineteer Elementary still had damage, he said.

"You'd open a book and between the pages there'd be grass, or even glass sometimes, from that tornado," Clark recalled of his days at the school near Webb Road and 31st Street South.

In case of a tornado, students at Ewalt will walk into the roughly 5,000-square-foot space, a block of four classrooms that acts as a separate structure.

The 20-foot entryway marks where the school connects to the safe addition, where the walls change from 8-inch brick to 1-foot-thick, concrete-filled walls reinforced with rebar.

The steel doors would be closed and bolted shut with spans of more steel. Small bolts inside the door frame, akin to those in a high-end vault, are locked from inside the room. The windows would be blocked with 3-inch-thick steel shutters. The ceiling and floor are also packed with concrete and steel, to give the building weight and to reinforce the roof.

Kansas' first FEMA-approved safe room was built in 1999, and there are now 144 such rooms statewide, according to FEMA. Kansas has more than 1,330 public schools.

The Wichita school district completed its first safe room in 2001 at Jefferson Elementary School, two years after a tornado destroyed three portable classrooms at that school. The district has completed 41 safe rooms, with plans to build 57 more, spokesperson Susan Arensman said.

Previously, conventional thought was to have children cover up in a school hallway, Lentz said. That has changed since administrators saw what happened when a tornado destroyed Greensburg's high school in 2007.

"That was a real-world example of you don't want (the children) out there," Lentz said.

This story was originally published September 7, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Augusta school ready for storms."