Protecting More than His Family

Richard McCalley's wife and daughter were visiting his wife's mother in Saledo, Texas when a tornado struck the town of Jarrell five miles away. "They had more than adequate warning, but they didn't really have anyplace to go," McCalley recalls. This struck a nerve and prompted him to start designing a shelter for protecting people from tornadoes.

He started out to build one for his mother-in-law, but after tinkering with the idea for awhile, he shelved it. Then a tornado swept through Virginia, 15 miles from where the McCalleys live in Fredericksburg and killed a woman and her daughter. "I said, 'Maybe the good Lord's telling me something,'" he says. He decided to focus a little closer to home and build a shelter for his family's use also. Now, after perfecting a design, he's on his way to mass-producing and marketing his line of KeepSafe tornado and hurricane shelters.

Designing structures is only one of many pies the opportunistic McCalley has had his finger in since high school. Born and raised in Fredericksburg, the 55-year-old went to Texas Tech University, where he stayed for eight years, accumulating a college education he describes with a chuckle as "extremely broad and diversified." He took courses in business, psychology, and science -- "whatever seemed interesting. I enjoyed learning." He ended up with a degree in animal science and set off to be a veterinarian, but that plan soon fell by the wayside.

After returning to Virginia, McCalley went to work as a manager at a glass company in Fredericksburg. One day, a man came in looking for a truck rack saying he couldn't buy it in the area and there were no fabrication shops around. So McCalley seized the moment and quoted a price on making it himself, and the fellow took him up on it. "I took the $100 bill and went and bought a used buzz box, torch, grinder, and drill press." He crafted the rack, and the man came back later for more.

Then a contractor found out about McCalley's handiwork and asked him to do some jobs for him. One job was too large for McCalley to afford, so the contractor agreed to buy the materials and give him some space he had available. McCalley negotiated a year's worth of rent, and "that got me a shop," he recalls. His company, Rappahannock Forge, was born. "I'm a need filler," he says in explaining his business approach.

The company specialized in fabricating metal components for larger, more difficult projects such as office buildings, state prisons, and shopping malls because they offered less competition -- one job at the Pentagon brought in over $3.5 million. Although each job is different, they often involve batch manufacturing large quantities of particular parts, resulting in economy of scale.

McCalley has always done the engineering for Rappahannock Forge. At one point, he had a staff of drafters, but he started using CAD equipment in the late 1980s and cut way back. He does conceptual drawings himself and has a detailer to add the finishing touches.

When it came to designing a tornado shelter, the first thing he did was determine the forces involved, using a code book, 250-mph wind as the worst case, and maximum modifiers. Then he looked at what it would take to resist projectiles. In searching the Web for information on shelters, he found only the underground variety but discovered that Texas Tech was involved in wind engineering research. So he contacted them and got information on projectile tests. A graduate student there referred him to a book on stress analysis, in which he found a formula that approximates what happens, and he extrapolated and interpolated from that. The theoretical part was hard enough, but McCalley says, "The difficult part of this thing was creating something inexpensive to build."

For further inspiration, he turned to another arena. McCalley had gotten involved with racing cars through his youngest son, a freshman mechanical engineering major. As he tells it, "I got to looking at it, and said, 'How do these race cars hit the wall at 200 miles an hour, and folks walk away from them.' Well, it's energy dissipation -- structural members bend before they break to absorb energy. I followed those same principles and developed a system." He submitted his design to Texas Tech, and they put it through a missile test to prove that it could withstand a direct hit by a 15-pound 2x4 at 100 mph. Then he got a patent on it and ordered tooling.

Actually, the idea of a storm shelter is nothing new, but McCalley's mass-produced kit concept makes it unique. The kit includes heavy-guage galvanized steel panels, which bolt to framing made of bent steel plates. The most popular model measures 4'x8'x7' tall. Retail prices range from $2750 to $6000 for the five models offered, with occupancy ratings ranging from two to eight people. Each can be installed in a basement, on a concrete slab, or in a garage by the typical homeowner with no special tools. "It's easier than putting a bicycle together," he claims.

KeepSafe has marketed the shelter kits through Home Depot. McCalley didn't expect to do business with the giant retailer for a couple years, but a devastating storm in Oklahoma City suddenly raised awareness of safe rooms. "It was a blessing and a curse," he says. "We were going to go through a crawl phase, then a walk phase. One thing led to another, and my oldest son made a cold call on Home Depot, and we got a vendor agreement within 24 hours. That's kind of like the dog chasing the bus -- now that you've got it, what are you going to do with it. This presented a whole new set of problems. But they're good problems."

Hustling to meet production for Home Depot, McCalley's company has gotten out of its other business. "I think there's more potential in storm shelters," he explains. After two years of research and development, "I think we're to the point where it's going to pay off."