FEMA disaster type · OpenFEMA declarations
Mud/Landslide disasters in the United States
FEMA disaster declarations classified as "Mud/Landslide" from 1973 to 2025 - which states are hit most often and how the count has changed over time.
- 13
- FEMA declarations
- 7
- States affected
- 1973
- Earliest year
- 2025
- Latest year
The verdict
According to FEMA's disaster declaration history, mud/landslide ranks #17 of the 27 distinct disaster types the agency has declared, accounting for 0.2% of all 5,218 declarations on record. It is rarer than 62% of the other declaration types FEMA tracks, based on total historical volume.
- #17 of 27
- FEMA disaster types, by declaration volume
- 0.2%
- share of all 5,218 FEMA declarations
- 13
- mud/landslide declarations, 1973–2025
Ranking reflects the count of Presidentially declared federal disasters per OpenFEMA, not event severity or economic loss; a rare declaration type can still be individually catastrophic.
How does Mud/Landslide compare?
Mud/Landslide vs. every FEMA declaration type
Declaration volume across all tracked incident types
13 37th percentile higher than 37% of 27 disaster types
Each bar is a band; taller bars hold more disaster types. The dashed line + filled bar mark this entry. Hover or tap any bar for its full count, share, and where it sits relative to this entry.
Source FEMA OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries v2 · 2026-08-03
What shapes the mud/landslide record?
States with the most mud/landslide declarations
Wider bars = more FEMA declarations of this type
- Alaska
Alaska
5 declarations
- Washington
Washington
3 declarations
- Hawaii 1
Hawaii
1 declarations
- North Carolina 1
North Carolina
1 declarations
- Ohio 1
Ohio
1 declarations
- Oregon 1
Oregon
1 declarations
- West Virginia 1
West Virginia
1 declarations
What this shows Alaska leads with 5 mud/landslide declarations among the states shown.
Mud/Landslide declarations by year
Federal declaration cadence for this incident type across the OpenFEMA record.
Peak year in this series: 2014 (2 declarations). A declaration is a federal assistance trigger, not a raw event count.
How common are Mud/Landslide disasters in the U.S.?
FEMA has issued 13 federal disaster declarations classified as mud/landslide between 1973 and 2025, affecting 7 states and territories. Each declaration represents a formal federal recognition that an event exceeded state and local response capacity, unlocking Public Assistance, Individual Assistance, or Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funding depending on the declaration class (DR, EM, or FM). Raw declaration counts therefore measure the federal response footprint, which is a lagging and thresholded indicator: smaller events handled entirely at the state level never appear, and declaration thresholds have been recalibrated over the dataset's multi-decade history.
With so few declarations on record, the year-by-year pattern is necessarily sparse. The peak year on record was 2014, with 2 mud/landslide declarations issued that single year, a clustering driven by major multi-state events and the federal government's declaration cadence. The most recent year on record is 2025, with 1 declarations. Trends over the 52+ year history reflect how infrequently this disaster type crosses the federal declaration threshold at all.
This disaster type's footprint is thin and scattered across the map. The three states with the most mud/landslide declarations on record are AK (5 declarations), WA (3 declarations), HI (1 declarations), consistent with how narrowly this hazard type is geographically concentrated. States with the fewest declarations, including OH (1), OR (1), WV (1), unsurprising given how rare a federal declaration of this type is anywhere in the country.
Which federal declaration does mud/landslide actually get?
This is a conventional Major Disaster type: 92% of its 13 declarations are DRs, with 8% filed as Emergencies. A DR is the instrument that opens the widest set of programs -- Public Assistance for damaged infrastructure, Individual Assistance for households, and Hazard Mitigation funding intended to reduce the next event's cost. The concentration means these events are typically declared after damage has been assessed, not while they are still developing.
Declarations by State
| # | State | Declarations |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alaska AK | 5 |
| 2 | Washington WA | 3 |
| 3 | Hawaii HI | 1 |
| 4 | North Carolina NC | 1 |
| 5 | Ohio OH | 1 |
| 6 | Oregon OR | 1 |
| 7 | West Virginia WV | 1 |
Declarations by Year
| Year | Declarations |
|---|---|
| 2025 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2 |
| 2023 | 1 |
| 2022 | 1 |
| 2021 | 1 |
| 2018 | 1 |
| 2017 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2 |
| 2013 | 1 |
| 1999 | 1 |
| 1973 | 1 |
Recent Mud/Landslide Declarations
Download all 13 declarations as CSV . Source data is public domain; our derived presentation is CC0. The table below lists the 13 most recent; the file carries every one.
| DR# | Title | State | Type | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4846 | LANDSLIDES | AK | DR | 2024-11-13 |
| 4767 | SEVERE STORM, FLOODING, AND LANDSLIDES | AK | DR | 2024-04-06 |
| 4763 | SEVERE STORM, LANDSLIDES, AND MUDSLIDES | AK | DR | 2024-03-15 |
| 4733 | SEVERE STORM, FLOODING, LANDSLIDES, AND MUDSLIDES | OR | DR | 2023-08-28 |
| 4661 | LANDSLIDE | AK | DR | 2022-07-26 |
| 4585 | SEVERE STORM, FLOODING, LANDSLIDES, AND MUDSLIDES | AK | DR | 2021-02-17 |
| 4359 | SEVERE STORMS, FLOODING, LANDSLIDES, AND MUDSLIDES | WV | DR | 2018-04-17 |
| 4282 | SEVERE STORMS, FLOODING, LANDSLIDES, AND MUDSLIDES | HI | DR | 2016-10-06 |
| 4168 | FLOODING AND MUDSLIDES | WA | DR | 2014-04-02 |
| 3370 | FLOODING AND MUDSLIDES | WA | EM | 2014-03-24 |
| 4103 | SEVERE STORMS, FLOODING, LANDSLIDES, AND MUDSLIDES | NC | DR | 2013-03-01 |
| 1255 | WA LANDSLIDE 3/6/98 | WA | DR | 1998-10-16 |
| 390 | MUDSLIDES | OH | DR | 1973-06-04 |
What this means for Mud/Landslide declarations
Mud/Landslide is rarer than 62% of the other declaration types FEMA tracks, with 13 FEMA declaration records; Alaska leads with 5.
- Alaska accounts for the largest share of mud/landslide declarations in this corpus. Alaska profile
- See how states compare on raw FEMA declaration volume across all incident types. Most disasters ranking
- Learn what a FEMA declaration does and does not measure relative to NOAA storm events. Disaster-data guide
A federal declaration is a legal assistance trigger, not a count of every storm event or a forecast. For current threats follow the National Weather Service and local officials; in an emergency call 911.
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Source: FEMA OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries v2 For informational purposes only
Read our methodology - how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.
Related
Verify declarations with FEMA → Verify storm-event context with NOAA →
Every figure on PlainHazard is rendered directly from FEMA federal disaster data, no number is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or national statistics report, the data & editorial changelog, or report a data error.