Preparing the disaster record…
Play the record year by year.
© OpenStreetMap contributors · © CARTO
Reading seventy years of federal declarations…
Current map filters · largest footprint first
This map is not about weather. It is about response. A column rises over a county when the federal government formally declared a disaster there, which is the moment federal money and help become available. A quiet county may still have had storms; it did not have declarations.
The number of separate declarations that covered this place.
Colour and height carry one measure, so the pattern reads at a glance.
Play the timeline to watch the record build from 1953.
Three Kinds
A single event produces many declarations. A FEMA disaster number belongs to one state, so Hurricane Katrina appears as 52 separate declarations, not one. Counting declarations counts state-level responses, which is the honest unit.
Reading The Record
Declarations also reflect policy and politics, not only damage. A rising count over seventy years partly reflects a widening federal role in disaster response.
Source: FEMA OpenFEMA DisasterDeclarationsSummaries. County boundaries and population from the Red Cross county spine.