PlainHazard

Original research, PlainHazard editorial

Top 10 US States by Total FEMA Disaster Declarations

PlainHazard ranks US states by the total number of FEMA disaster declarations recorded in the OpenFEMA disaster declaration registry, using the per-state aggregate. Rendered server-side from a live SELECT against the states table.

Research period:

Reviewed by PlainHazard Editorial on 2026-05-17

Research question

Across the 50 US states and territories, which jurisdictions have accumulated the highest number of FEMA disaster declarations, and how does declaration frequency correlate with state geography, climate exposure, and population density?

Methodology

We queried the PlainHazard states table at server render time and pulled the columns state_name, total_disasters, major_disasters, emergencies, top_incident_type. The query ranks records by total_disasters DESC and returns the top 10. Every numeric value rendered on this page derives from a live SELECT against the production states table — no figure is hardcoded, and the table refreshes whenever the underlying FEMA dataset is reingested.

A "declaration" counts a single federal action, not a single storm. FEMA issues three kinds: a Major Disaster (DR) when an event overwhelms state and local capacity and unlocks the widest aid; an Emergency (EM), narrower and often issued ahead of an event; and Fire Management Assistance (FM) for wildfire suppression. One hurricane can generate separate DR and EM declarations, and a state with many small but distinct events can out-rank a state hit by one catastrophic storm. The count therefore reflects federal recognition of need as much as raw hazard frequency.

High-ranking states tend to share three traits: large land area exposed to multiple hazard types, recurring severe weather seasons (wildfire in the West, flooding and tornadoes across the South and Midwest), and active state emergency-management offices that routinely request federal assistance. Because the count is federal-action-driven, it should be read alongside the FEMA National Risk Index — which estimates expected annual loss in dollars — rather than as a standalone measure of how dangerous a state is to live in.

See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.

Top 10 US States by Total FEMA Disaster Declarations

Live data — rendered from a SELECT against the portal database at request time

records
Source Federal Emergency Management Agency

The ranked top 10

Every row below is rendered from a live SELECT against the 10-row result returned by the query in the frontmatter above. Refresh the page after an ETL run to see the latest values.

# State Total declarations Major disasters Emergencies Top incident type
1 California 130 19 3 Fire
2 Washington 94 12 1 Fire
3 Oregon 68 5 0 Fire
4 Oklahoma 57 12 1 Fire
5 Arizona 36 7 0 Fire
6 Texas 34 8 1 Fire
7 Montana 32 9 1 Fire
8 Nevada 31 1 0 Fire
9 New Mexico 29 5 1 Fire
10 Florida 29 10 12 Hurricane

Source: Federal Emergency Management Agency — OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries V2. Values are queried live from the PlainHazard SQLite snapshot at request time; the snapshot is refreshed by the portal ETL pipeline. Federal Emergency Management Agency — OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries V2. Values are queried live from the PlainHazard SQLite snapshot at request time; the snapshot is refreshed by the portal ETL pipeline.

Findings

Top entity in the ranking

The top-ranked record in this dataset is California, with a value of 130 on the Total declarations column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value derives from the underlying states table; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency publishes a revision and our ETL pipeline reingests, the ranking and the prose around it update on the next page load.

Distribution shape

The gap between the top-ranked record (130) and the 10th-ranked record (29) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated — a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.

Aggregate context

Across the full states population, the aggregate query returns the following summary statistics. These anchors situate the top-10 ranking against the underlying population: how many records exist in total, what the sum of the ranking column is across all qualifying rows, and what the mean per-record value looks like. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied by the aggregate query (records with null or zero values on the ranking column are excluded). The aggregate row is computed by the same database engine that renders the ranking above, against the same snapshot.

Source provenance

The records in this ranking originate from Federal Emergency Management Agency, specifically the OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries V2. PlainHazard ingests the source vintage published by the agency, transforms it into a normalized SQLite schema, and serves it from a read-only snapshot. Every render of this page is a fresh SELECT against that snapshot — there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and the edge cache lifetime is bounded by the portal middleware so that a reingested dataset propagates within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the transformation steps applied during ETL.

Why this ranking matters

Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.

What this analysis cannot tell us

FEMA disaster declarations require a state or tribal government to formally request federal assistance for an incident, and the President of the United States to issue a declaration. The presence or absence of declarations therefore reflects both the underlying hazard exposure of a state and that state's administrative decisions about when to request federal assistance. Smaller-scale damaging events may be handled entirely at the state or local level without a federal declaration, and would not appear in this ranking even though they impose real losses on residents. Declaration counts also weight all declarations equally — a fire-management assistance declaration for a single wildfire and a major-disaster declaration for a multi-county hurricane both count as one declaration in the totals.

Secondary cut from the same source

Top 10 states by NOAA Storm Events Database count (separate dataset from FEMA declarations)

records
Source Federal Emergency Management Agency

Related data

Sources