Every federal declaration since 2000, mapped and ranked.
Since 2000, the federal government has issued thousands of disaster and emergency declarations: the formal decisions that unlock federal help after a hurricane, flood, wildfire, ice storm, or public-health crisis. The full record is public, but it lives in spreadsheets and APIs built for analysts.
Disaster Data puts that record on a map and a scoreboard. Drag the year range to watch a decade reshape the rankings, filter by hazard, and drill into any state to see its individual declarations and how often requests were denied. No account, no cost, nothing to install.
Every county, parish, borough, and tribal nation also has its own page with a full declaration history and a ready-to-use previous-occurrences table for local hazard mitigation plans. Over 3,600 jurisdictions, all searchable from the homepage.
Straight from OpenFEMA, refreshed automatically.
Every figure here is drawn from FEMA's Disaster Declarations Summaries (v2), published through the OpenFEMA program and refreshed on a schedule so the dashboard stays current.
Disaster Data uses OpenFEMA data but is not endorsed by or affiliated with FEMA. It's an independent project. Any errors or interpretations are ours, not the agency's. Where a number here disagrees with an official FEMA source, treat the official source as authoritative.
Source, definitions, and how counts are made.
Source. Every figure is drawn from FEMA's OpenFEMA datasets: Disaster Declarations Summaries (v2) for declarations and Declaration Denials (v1) for turndowns. It is rebuilt automatically each week. Uses OpenFEMA data but is not endorsed by or affiliated with FEMA.
What counts as a “declaration.” FEMA's file lists one row per county per declaration. We collapse those to one row per declaration: a unique combination of declaration type (DR / EM / FM), disaster number, and state. A single disaster affecting five states therefore counts as five declarations. Counts reflect declaration records, not dollars, damage, or loss.
Years are federal fiscal years (Oct 1 to Sep 30), matching FEMA's own fyDeclared field. FY2000 begins October 1, 1999. The headline view shows complete fiscal years only; the current, in-progress year stays one slider-drag away.
Denial rate. The share of requests turned down = turndowns ÷ (declarations + turndowns). Denials are tracked in a separate FEMA dataset from approved declarations, so this figure cannot be reproduced from the summaries file alone.
Fire-management (FM) declarations fund wildfire suppression under a faster, lower-threshold program. They're counted as their own type. Toggle FM off anywhere on the site to see the disaster picture underneath.
Declarations, not dollars.
Every count on this site is a count of declaration records, how many times a federal declaration was issued, not a measure of damage, cost, or lives affected. A small county flood and a multi-state hurricane each register as one declaration; the dollars behind them can differ by orders of magnitude.
A few things worth knowing before you cite a figure. Fire is the largest category by far, but that's inflated by Fire Management Assistance declarations, which a single fast-moving wildfire can generate quickly. It doesn't mean fire is the most damaging hazard. The four biggest categories (Fire, Severe Storm, Hurricane, and Flood) make up roughly five of every six declarations. And a denial reflects an assistance request that was turned down, which is a measure of process and eligibility, not of how severe an event was.
Three kinds of declaration.
FEMA issues declarations under three programs. Disaster Data color-codes them the same way everywhere they appear.
The broadest and most common. Issued for events that overwhelm state and local resources, unlocking the widest range of federal assistance.
A narrower, faster declaration to protect lives and property, often issued ahead of, or alongside, a major disaster.
Fire Management Assistance, for wildfires threatening to become major disasters. Busy fire seasons can generate many of these in a short window.
The 25 hazard types.
FEMA tags every declaration with an incident type. Disaster Data tracks all 25 that appear in the record, grouped here into families. On the dashboard the hazard count ticks down as you narrow the years: the rarest types drop out of short windows.
A few terms.
Lead Time, a training game.
Lead Time is a free, browser-based game about the decisions an emergency manager actually makes. You work an unfolding disaster one call at a time, weighing incomplete information against limited time and resources, and your choices decide how the event turns out. It runs entirely in your browser and keeps a service record and commendations that carry across sessions, with no account or install.
Part of CompliAid.
Disaster Data is built and maintained as part of CompliAid, and shares its principles: privacy-first, no ads, nothing tracked for sale, and tools designed for the real constraints of rural and local government.
The aim is simple: make public disaster data genuinely usable by the people who live with disasters, not just the people who study them.
If something looks off, report a data issue and we will investigate.