Why can't they build a hill and then put a shelter below it?
I'm not an engineer, but if you can't dig down, seems you could build up and then underneath.
Anyone, know?
I live in massachusetts where almost every home has a basement.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Period. This is just common sense. Instead we're constantly defending education and wasting money on wars for profit. 
however, the monster that hit today....
you are talking about people who don't like to pay a lot of taxes...
And that isn't taking a shot at them. I live in this area and bond issues die on the ballot.
Stay safe!
Not far from there you have Enchanted Rock which is all granite. There is topsoil, of course, but it's shallow compared to the coasts. And full of rocks 
It's historical. They were used either for food storage or as additional rooms. They were never designed as shelters from inclement weather. If people used them that way in the past, it was spur of the moment and not a design concern.
And so, modern homes there get built the same way because people expect it. And then they use them as additional rooms or for storage
root cellar
And historically, people down here had cisterns, but they would never have been large enough to use as a shelter. Other than for the storage of rainwater, they were used mostly for keeping things cold or cool, like dairy products.
said "sellahs", spelled "cellars" 
Now they are used for storage or extra living space or both.
I remember the basement well (it was the main TV room.) I also remember how damp it was most of the time
I'll bet those would survive without too much trouble. The tornado might even just stroll right over it.
http://www.tornadoproofhouses.com/
The technology for designing and building tornado-resistant houses has been around since 1963 — almost half a century. It was first developed in America, not in continental North America, but instead in the American protectorate territory of the Marianas islands, primarily on the island of Guam. It utilizes the principle of "box-rigid-frame," a type of reinforced concrete shell design. This approach is described in an article titled "Disaster-Resistant Shell Houses" [PDF] in the American Concrete Institute's Concrete International magazine, published in May 2008. The article discusses in detail the sterling performance of reinforced concrete houses over the past half century impacted with numerous strong typhoons and powerful earthquakes on the islands in the region.
In 1962, Typhoon Karen roared across the island of Guam with recorded wind gusts up to 207 mph, cleaning the island of most of the conventionally constructed houses. Following an appeal to the U. S. government by the Guam governor, President John F. Kennedy directed the development of typhoon-resistant houses. In this effort, the president enlisted the help of Henry J. Kaiser of Kaiser Hospital fame. At the time he also was CEO of Kaiser Permanente Cement Company as well as a homebuilder in Hawaii. Mr. Kaiser asked Dr. Alfred A. Yee, a world-respected structural engineer and author of a number of articles for various technical magazines, to develop the structural design for the first typhoon-resistant house. It was quickly done and thousands of these houses have been subsequently built around the island including on the military reservations. And they are still being built.
The original houses used precast concrete walls which were fabricated at the building sites and tilted into position. The roofs utilized cast-in-place reinforced concrete. All of the elements of a house, floors, walls and roofs, were intimately connected with steel reinforcing bars in order to create a box, or shell. Instead of building storm shelters inside a house as is usually done in North America, the entire house becomes a storm shelter, a practice that was not used until the Guam typhoon-resistant reinforced concrete shell house concept was developed.
The concrete shells on Guam have performed without damage for fifty years. The only vulnerable features of such structures are the wall openings. Steel doors and window storm shutters are usually available from local building supply stores such as the Home Depot or Lowes. Special structural attention must be paid to the door mountings. As of the time of this writing [June 2012], foolproof protection of these openings, especially windows, does not yet appear to have completely matured. It is assumed that conventional metal garage doors will not survive a big tornado.
In 1993, Guam, also a frequent target of earthquakes caused by movement of ocean floor plates in the Pacific Ocean (often referred to as the "Ring of Fire"
, was visited by a Richter 8.1 earthquake. There was no reported structural damage to a single reinforced concrete shell house.
The above site touts a different design, but it has the "concrete" concept in common. The whole 'sticks of wood and drywall' concept needs to die out in that area--it's a recipe for disaster.
As we've seen.
Now, double that...
