City plans made over a decade ago to incorporate a storm shelter for vulnerable mobile home park residents at Shadow Wood in Champaign have been abandoned, according to city officials and residents.

Storm safety at the park remains one of the neighborhood’s unresolved issues — especially as Illinois has recently experienced historically high tornado activity. In 2024, the state recorded 142 confirmed tornadoes, the second-highest annual total on record, as well as a record number of storm-related injuries.

Despite those risks, Shadow Wood has no dedicated tornado shelter and no nearby public facility that residents can reliably reach during a warning that isn’t around one mile away. A shelter was part of the Bristol Park Neighborhood Plan, but Champaign Neighborhood Services Director Rob Kowalski said there’s no plan for it anymore.

The lack of shelter received public attention more than a decade ago when CU-CitizenAccess reported residents would flee to a nearby interstate underpass – which is an unsafe practice – when they received storm warnings.

“Building a storm shelter was kind of an aspirational goal of the 2011 plan that didn’t happen,” Kowalski said. “And there’s no plan for it to happen right now. There’s no funding being pursued or anything like that.”

As of now, there is no emergency plan for residents, and as a result, many residents remain in their homes during severe weather, longtime Shadow Wood manager Roxanna Almaraz said. 

Additionally, mobile home parks in Champaign still lack emergency weather alerts in Spanish.

“Most of them don’t speak English,” Almaraz said. “If I explain something, they just nod. They come back later if they really need to know.”

The 2011 plan targeted major issues — housing conditions, safety concerns, infrastructure and chronic poverty — and laid out long-term goals for redevelopment.

The plan referenced a need for a storm shelter, but it was later envisioned that one of the fire stations the city hoped to move to Market Street would also serve as a space for people to shelter during severe weather. 

“The fire station isn’t really reflected in the neighborhood plan but later we did a master plan for the Bristol Park neighborhood that is out there now, and the fire station was envisioned in that plan,” Kowalski said.

Although that was the vision, no fire station was built on Market Street.

The Martens Center, a Champaign Park District facility that opened in October 2022, was built across the street from Shadow Wood.

“I don’t think it has a storm shelter per se, like underground, but I think it serves — at least when it’s open, not 3 in the morning — it actually serves as a bit of a shelter for residents in that area that need more solid structure than a mobile home,” Kowalski said.

He also said that the planning and development department has a renewed effort to do an East Side Plan, which would include Shadow Wood and other areas in Bristol.

”Maybe the storm shelter comes back up again as a strategy, I don’t know,” Kowalski said. “There is a planning effort that is just getting underway.”

According to the National Weather Service, people are 15 to 20 times more likely to die in a tornado if they live in a mobile home. More than half of all tornado fatalities occur in manufactured housing.

The National Weather Service provides a three-step plan for mobile and manufactured homes during a tornado. 

The first step is to monitor weather service forecasts every day and make or review a tornado sheltering plan. The day before a severe weather event, the second step is to coordinate with family and friends to find a safe place to shelter. 

The third step is to be ready to evacuate during a tornado watch and evacuate to the designated safe shelter quickly during a tornado warning.

On average, a total of 72% of all tornado-related fatalities are in homes. Of those fatalities, just over half took place in mobile homes.

The National Weather Service recommends people living in mobile homes should evacuate to a sturdier building — but that option still isn’t realistic for many in Shadow Wood during an emergency.