The federal disaster record, state by state

• Since 1953, the federal government has declared about 4,443 distinct disasters across the 50 states and DC. The single most common kind is fire.
• What a state faces varies sharply by region. fire leads in California (79% of its declarations), severe storm leads in New York (28% of its declarations), hurricane leads in Louisiana (34% of its declarations), flood leads in West Virginia (37% of its declarations).
• The raw number of declarations partly reflects a state’s size and county count, so a bigger state naturally accumulates more over 70-plus years. Read the mix of disaster types a state faces, not its rank, as the comparable signal. For where risk is modeled to be highest going forward, see our natural-hazard risk study.

All 50 states and DC, most federally declared disasters first. Each disaster is counted once for the state even when it touched many counties. “Leading types” are the incident types behind the most of a state’s declarations. Pick your state to see its associations.

A count of declarations is not a measure of how severe or how recent the damage was. It counts distinct federal declarations on record, which vary in scale, and the same disaster can be declared across many counties.

The figures come from the FEMA OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries (federal declarations since 1953), a public federal record. FEMA logs one row per disaster per designated county, so for each state we count the distinct disaster numbers, which collapses a multi-county disaster into a single event, and we tally the share of those declarations by incident type. This is our own count of FEMA’s record. It is not an official FEMA state ranking, and FEMA did not produce or endorse these state figures.

A few honest limits. The count of declarations partly tracks a state’s size and number of counties and the fact that the record runs back to 1953, so a larger, longer-covered state accumulates more. That is why we treat the mix of disaster types, which is comparable across states, as the real signal. A declaration also says a federal disaster was declared, not how severe or how recent it was. This is the historical record; for modeled future risk, see our natural-hazard risk study.

More from the data desk

• Natural-disaster risk to communities by state FEMA’s modeled forward-looking risk, the companion to this record
• Flood insurance and CRS discounts by state where federal flood insurance is offered, and where it is discounted
• HOA and condo fees by state what a typical household pays, from Census microdata
• All data studies