08 Mar How thick are safe room walls?
Long answer short – it depends. The thickness of the walls of any safe room will always depend on several factors, including the place in which they’re fitted, the type of safe room a client opts for (what they need protection from), as well as how big the safe room needs to be.
Standard concrete safe rooms that are designed to protect against strong weather or natural disasters usually have 6-inch-thick walls, while safe rooms meant to protect against home invasions can have walls of as little as 3-inches in thickness.
In this blog, we’re going to take a look at what safe rooms are and how they can help protect you from extreme weather and home invaders.
What is a safe room?
First thing’s first, we need to take a look at what is and isn’t considered to be a safe room. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: a room/compartment (with or without windows) that can only be locked from the inside but has a standard door and only one entrance IS NOT a safe room, no matter what argument you may conjure.
In essence, a room like that is merely a room that can only be locked from the inside. A safe room on the other hand earns its name from the fact that it should be virtually impenetrable by home invaders, as well as virtually indestructible against extreme weather.
Safe rooms consist of layers upon layers of safety measures all located in an easily accessible (yet hidden) area of your residence or place of work to ensure your security during a break-in or an extreme show of mother nature’s destructive capabilities. Let’s take a look at a couple of things that make safe rooms safe.
Safe room safety: The Build
Even the most basic of safe rooms allow you to have an in-case-of-emergency fortress within your home or workplace. They are usually simple closets that have hollow cores and come standard with reinforced security doors that do well against battering and sawing. In many cases, people also opt to reinforce the walls and ceilings of their safe rooms to provide that extra bit of security in dangerous situations.
Many safe rooms also come handy with steel reinforcements on all sides, while many people also opt to use Kevlar or bullet-resistant fibreglass – both useful in a man-made or natural emergency.
Some people also choose to include secured escape shafts in case invaders somehow manage to get through all that metal and Kevlar, or in cases where the building around the safe room has been completely demolished by a freak act of nature.
Safe room safety: Features
If you’re smart, you’ll rig up your safe room with reliable communications equipment that can’t be easily compromised (for example, by a compromised phone line). That means telephones shouldn’t be an option if you’ve made dangerous enemies or live in an area filled with mother nature’s fury.
You could opt for regular cellular telecommunications equipment, but thieving these days is a Ph.D. profession; the bad guys could easily cut off your communications by taking down a few cell-phone towers.
Finally, your safe room should also come stocked with emergency and survival items like non-perishable foods, flashlights, gas masks, blankets and first aid kits (among many other things you can stockpile). This would be the smart move in case you find yourself trapped in that safe room after using it to get cover from a harsh storm.
If you’d like to learn more about how safe rooms can keep you and your loved ones safe in the case of an emergency, don’t be too shy to get in touch with us!