FEMA Disaster Declaration Search
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Pay per event
FEMA Disaster Declaration Search
Searches US federal disaster declarations from OpenFEMA. FEMA returns one row per designated county, not per disaster, so a row count is not a disaster count. This Actor gives you either grain and always reports both numbers. No key and no login.
Pricing
Pay per event
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Developer
Gregory Bolshakov
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2 days ago
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Searches US federal disaster declarations from OpenFEMA. Fires, hurricanes, floods, severe storms, biological events, back to 1953. You get the declaration, the incident type, the dates and which counties were designated, as JSON, CSV or Excel.
No API key and no login. The data is public and this Actor reads it directly.
A row is not a disaster
FEMA declares a disaster once, then designates counties under it one at a time. Every designation is its own row, carrying the same disaster number, the same title and the same dates.
So the row count is a county count. I checked Texas from 2020: 1,390 rows and 36 disasters. That is 38.6 rows per disaster. COVID-19 alone is 257 rows, because it was declared in 257 Texas counties.
If you ask how many federal disasters hit Texas since 2020 and count rows, you get 1,390 instead of 36. FEMA's own total agrees with the wrong number, because it counts rows too.
This Actor gives you either shape. disaster is the default and gives one row per
declaration, with the counties listed and counted. area gives FEMA's own shape. Every row
says which one it is, and carries both totals so you can see the difference.
Rolled up honestly
The four assistance programmes are declared county by county, not for the whole disaster. So
at disaster level you get counts, not flags: areasWithPublicAssistance says 257 of 257, or
3 of 40. A single true or false there would claim the whole disaster qualified when one county
did.
An incident end date stays empty while any one county is still open, because a disaster is not over while one of its counties is not.
Two things about the source worth knowing
If you call OpenFEMA yourself and leave off $top, you get 1,000 rows. Not all of them, and
not an error. There are 70,272.
And if you leave off $inlinecount, the response says count: 0 while handing you a full
page of data. Read as a total, that turns a complete answer into an empty one. This Actor
always sends both.
Filters
State, incident type, declaration type, disaster number, and a fiscal year range.
Declaration types are DR for a major disaster, EM for an emergency, and FM for a fire
management assistance grant. One event can produce more than one under different numbers, and
those are separate declarations rather than duplicates.
Cost
Pay per event, priced on the Actor page. A search matching nothing is free, because nothing is charged until rows are written to your dataset.
