Lanham, C. (2009). 75 (6)
The tiny town of Niangua, Missouri, made national headlines in 2008 when a rare cluster of winter tornadoes tore across the state on an unseasonably warm January night. The twisters killed a Niangua woman in her trailer home and destroyed numerous other structures. News photos of the trailer debris were a sobering reminder of the vulnerability of the town's youngest residents: preschoolers who regularly attended class in a double-wide trailer only one mile away. Just a little over a year later, the town is making national headlines again, but this time the news is good. This article discusses the revolutionary steel-reinforced concrete dome that the Niangua R-V School District is building. It will serve as the district's new preschool classroom and double as the town's disaster shelter. The building's unique shape and ability to offer near-absolute protection from tornadoes is noteworthy. But what gives this project national prominence is that the dome building is being constructed with a $300,000 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The project's federal funding is sparking hope among superintendents in other disaster-prone school districts that more government money may soon be in the pipeline to fund what is known as predisaster mitigation efforts. Those are funds earmarked to help a community "before" disaster strikes, and could become more of a priority in the Obama administration.
