In Greene County, Alabama, the overlap of manufactured housing and other forms of vulnerability makes tornado safety a pressing concern. Roughly a third of homes are manufactured housing, and tornado events rose 171% between 2010 and 2025, according to Census Bureau data cited in the seed reporting. Nearly 40% of the county's population is considered vulnerable, with a 33% poverty rate and an 18% disability rate layered on top of the housing risk.
Greene County is part of a wider regional concern. The U.S. Census Bureau's analysis found higher tornado counts in January through April and notable increases in October and December in 2010–2025 compared with 1950–2009. A recent tornado season exceeded the 30-year average by 27%, and Census Bureau data can help identify communities with high concentrations of mobile homes and other vulnerabilities; Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi are among the states named in the analysis. The broader findings were also reported by KTUL.
What the Census data measures
The Census Bureau's Community Resilience Estimates measure vulnerability using 10 components, including poverty and disability; people with three or more components are considered vulnerable to natural-disaster impacts. Its analysis compares tornado counts across periods, but the cited summary does not identify the county-level series behind Greene County's reported 171% increase or specify whether that figure counts tornadoes, reports or tornado days. The Census Bureau's analysis also reports higher counts in January through April and notable increases in October and December in 2010–2025 compared with 1950–2009.
A Subtle but Real Shift East
Stephen Strader, a hazards geographer who teaches at Villanova University, describes the eastward shift in Tornado Alley as very subtle. A separate study he points to, which examined tornado activity over decades rather than individual years, found a 25% decrease in tornado frequency to the west and a 12% increase to the east. That eastward shift adds roughly two to four additional tornado days per decade across the South, according to the account relayed by KTUL.
Strader is careful to note that overall U.S. tornado frequency has shown no long-term increase, and he says climate change has no established effect on the number or strength of U.S. tornadoes. What concerns him instead is overlap: the slow increase in Mid-South tornado activity lines up with a higher concentration of people living in vulnerable manufactured homes.
Why Manufactured Homes Fare So Badly
Mobile home residents are 15 to 20 times more likely to be killed in a tornado than people in site-built housing, citing National Weather Service figures reported through the seed coverage. That disparity tracks with broader federal data showing home-related fatalities account for 72% of all U.S. tornado deaths, and that 54% of people killed inside a residence were in mobile or manufactured homes, according to the National Weather Service. Research compiled by NOAA meteorologist Harold Brooks shows the share of at-home tornado deaths occurring in mobile homes climbed from 43.6% between 1975 and 1984 to 63.2% in the decade ending in mid-2023, as reported by AP News.
Manufactured homes were called mobile homes before 1974, when building codes changed and the structures began meeting certain construction standards. Standards have improved over the years, but many manufactured homes remain insufficiently anchored to the ground, and when a tornado strikes, these homes can be picked up, tossed and thrown. Stronger manufactured-home wind standards are concentrated along the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast, leaving inland residents with weaker protections than those along the coast — a gap explained by the fact that HUD's 1994 update to its building code, adopted after Hurricane Andrew, established tougher Wind Zones II and III primarily for coastal hurricane exposure rather than inland tornado corridors, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute of South Carolina. Most inland Southern states remain in the less stringent Wind Zone I.
Alabama's Deadly History With Twisters
Alabama's vulnerability isn't new. National Weather Service fatality records from 1950 to 2016 show Alabama recorded 633 tornado deaths compared to 552 in Texas, making it the nation's deadliest tornado state despite experiencing nearly three times fewer tornadoes per year than Texas, reported by AP News. A 2019 EF4 tornado in Beauregard, Alabama, which killed 23 people, offered a grim local case study: manufactured housing accounted for 33% of all damaged homes in that tornado's path, according to a study published in Natural Hazards Review.
Nighttime timing compounds the danger further. Research published by the American Meteorological Society found that nocturnal tornadoes, striking between midnight and sunrise, are roughly 2.5 times more likely to result in fatalities than daytime tornadoes, with more than half of tornado deaths in Mid-South states like Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas happening at night. Sleeping residents frequently miss early warnings, a risk Hoodline has previously detailed in coverage of a Dane County tornado warning tied to the broader eastward storm shift.
When Alabama tornadoes occur
The Alabama Office of the State Climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville says tornadoes most often occur in the afternoon and evening, peaking around 5 p.m. CST, though a notable number happen overnight, when people may be asleep and tornadoes are harder to see.
Weather-Aware but Short on Options
Studies cited by Strader suggest manufactured-home residents are generally weather aware, but many lack the self-efficacy to take protective action when a warning arrives. A resident living 20 minutes from a community shelter may simply not have enough time to respond to an average tornado warning. Complicating matters, manufactured-home residents in the South are often scattered across rural land rather than concentrated in mobile-home parks, which makes community shelter placement far more difficult for policymakers — echoing concerns Hoodline raised about storm shelter funding obstacles in tornado-prone schools.
Strader says people sheltering in a decent shelter during a violent tornado have extremely good odds of survival, and for many, that shelter is a neighbor's basement. Residents can survive by driving to a neighbor's house with a basement after receiving a warning, he notes, since tornado watches are typically issued hours before a potential threat arrives, giving time to monitor forecasts, receive alerts and plan shelter actions in advance. A shelter plan, Strader says, can be the difference between life and death.
A Costly Fix, Slowly Taking Shape
More than 22 million Americans live in manufactured housing, drawn by affordability: these homes cost an average of $87 per square foot compared to $166 per square foot for traditional site-built construction, according to housing research from Construction Coverage. Manufactured homes make up 9.3% of all housing units in the East South Central region covering Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, the highest share of any U.S. region, with 53% of those residents living in rural areas where centralized shelters are hardest to reach.
Alabama has moved to help offset the cost of building safer shelter. Under state Code § 40-18-111, homeowners and manufactured-home residents can claim an annual income tax credit of up to $3,000 or 50% of installation costs for an EF5-rated, FEMA-compliant storm shelter, per the Alabama Department of Revenue. The statewide credit pool is capped at $2 million a year — a modest sum against the scale of need in places like Greene County, where poverty and manufactured housing overlap most heavily.
