The Prep NestWhat Disasters Actually Happen In Your County
Every federal disaster declaration your county has been named in since 1953, from FEMA’s own record — and which of our guides that makes worth your time. No email, no sign-up.
Where do you live?
Counties only. Nothing finer than that, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Pick a state and county and the figures appear here, along with which of our guides actually apply to you. Your choice is remembered in this browser so it is already set next time.
Why declarations and not a risk score
There are plenty of maps that will give your address a hazard rating out of five. They are models, built by people making defensible assumptions, and if we published one here we would be passing off somebody else's judgement as our own finding.
A federal disaster declaration is different. It is an event with a number, a date and a legal footing: a governor asked, a president agreed, and money moved. Counting them per county does not predict anything, and it is not supposed to. It answers a narrower and more useful question, which is what has actually gone wrong where you live often enough to overwhelm the state.
The figures come from OpenFEMA's declaration summaries, the same record FEMA publishes for anyone to query, covering 3,266 counties and county equivalents from 1953 onward.
What to do with the answer
Generic preparedness lists are generic because they have to be. The same checklist is read by someone in Florida and someone in Montana, and it ends up advising both to prepare for everything, which in practice means neither prepares especially well for anything.
Your county's record collapses that. If flooding is the recurring event, a filter rated for pathogens matters more than another case of bottled water, because the mains supply is the thing that fails. If it is ice storms, the question is heat without electricity, and a gas furnace does not solve it. If it is wildfire, the kit has to be able to leave in ten minutes, which is a different kind of preparation from a well-stocked cupboard.
Each hazard on your result links to the guide that deals with it. That is the point of the tool: not to tell you that disasters exist, but to tell you which three of our twenty-eight guides you should actually read.
The COVID-19 problem, and how it is handled here
Nearly every county in the United States carries two declarations under FEMA's “Biological” incident type, both from 2020. A nationwide declaration tells you nothing about any particular county, and leaving it in the totals would quietly inflate every result by the same amount.
So it is counted, named, and separated out rather than hidden, with the reason stated on the page. The same goes for the handful of economic and industrial categories that a household checklist genuinely cannot help with. A tool that silently drops the rows that do not suit its story is not a tool we would trust either.
What this assumes
One row per county per declaration, de-duplicated on the declaration number, so a disaster that named your county twice is counted once. Statewide and tribal designations without a county attached are set aside, which is about 1,600 of the 70,000 records. Declaration type is not separated: major disaster declarations, emergency declarations and fire management assistance declarations are all counted together, because all three mean the event exceeded local capacity.
A county is a coarse unit. A declaration covers the whole of it, not your street, and for the question of whether your own address floods the FEMA flood map is the right source and may well disagree with this page. Treat the result as a way to prioritise reading, not as a statement about your property.