FEMA Disaster and Flood Claims Scraper

Get FEMA disaster declarations, the federal aid paid for each disaster, flood insurance claims, housing assistance by ZIP code and repair money paid to local governments, in clean rows you can export to CSV or Excel. The data comes from OpenFEMA, the public data program of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Actor reads the latest release on every run.

FEMA publishes dozens of separate tables. A declaration table has one row for every county of every disaster, the aid totals sit in another table, the flood insurance claims in a third. This Actor joins them and adds the figures that insurers, real estate teams, researchers and reporters normally calculate themselves: aid per county, days between the start of an incident and the declaration, declarations per county by type, the share of homes with flood insurance, how much of the damage an insurance claim paid, and claims grouped by county, ZIP code or year.

What can you do with this FEMA data scraper?

• List every major disaster declared in Texas since 2015 with the counties, the incident type and the total federal aid.
• Find out how many disasters have been declared in your county, split into floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and storms.
• See how long it has been since the last declaration and how many happened in the last 10 years.
• Check how many homes in a county have flood insurance compared with how many are in a flood zone.
• Download the flood insurance claims for a county or ZIP code with the payout, the damage, the water depth and the building age.
• Find claims where the payout covered less than half of the building damage.
• Group all flood claims by county, ZIP code, year, event or community with total paid and average payout.
• See how much housing assistance owners and renters received after a disaster, by ZIP code.
• List the repair money FEMA paid to cities, counties and agencies for a given disaster.
• Compare the aid per designated county across hurricanes.

Six ways to collect data

Mode	One row is	Best for
Disasters and aid totals	one disaster	disaster reports, aid comparison, news
County disaster history	one county	risk scoring, insurance, real estate
Flood insurance claims	one claim	loss analysis, underwriting, research
Flood claim summary	one county, ZIP, year, event, community or state	maps, trend charts, pricing
Housing assistance by ZIP code	one ZIP code, disaster and occupancy	recovery studies, relief planning
Public assistance	one applicant and disaster	government spending, contractors

What data do you get for a disaster?

• Disaster number, declaration number, declaration type and title, incident type and a simple incident group.
• States, number of designated counties and the first 25 county names.
• Declaration date, incident start and end, closeout date, FEMA region and fiscal year.
• Flags for individual assistance, public assistance and hazard mitigation.
• Days the incident lasted and days from the start of the incident to the declaration.
• Approved household aid, housing assistance, other needs assistance, public assistance for emergency and permanent work, and hazard mitigation.
• Total federal aid and aid per designated county.

What data do you get for a flood claim?

• Date and year of loss, event name, state, county code, ZIP code, census block group, latitude and longitude.
• Community name and number, community rating class, flood zone at the time of loss and today.
• Occupancy, primary residence, rental, non profit and small business flags, number of floors, foundation and basement type, elevation and post FIRM construction.
• Building and contents damage, the amounts paid for the building, the contents and increased cost of compliance.
• Building and contents coverage, property value, replacement cost and credit score.
• Derived fields: total paid, payout as a share of the damage, uncovered damage, building age at the time of loss and coverage as a share of property value.

Input example

Major flooding in Louisiana since 2010, largest aid first:

{
    "mode": "disasters",
    "states": ["LA"],
    "yearFrom": 2010,
    "incidentTypes": ["Flood", "Hurricane"],
    "sortBy": "largestAid"
}

Flood claims in Harris County, Texas for 2017:

{
    "mode": "floodClaims",
    "states": ["TX"],
    "counties": ["48201"],
    "yearFrom": 2017,
    "yearTo": 2017
}

Output example

A real disaster row, shortened:

{
    "disasterNumber": 4332,
    "declarationTitle": "HURRICANE HARVEY",
    "incidentType": "Hurricane",
    "designatedAreas": 53,
    "individualAndHouseholdApprovedUsd": 1656932722.84,
    "publicAssistanceObligatedUsd": 2999904067.62,
    "hazardMitigationObligatedUsd": 582046551.63,
    "totalFederalAidUsd": 5238883342.09
}

A real county history row, shortened:

{
    "countyFips": "22005",
    "county": "Ascension (Parish)",
    "state": "LA",
    "totalDeclarations": 58,
    "hurricaneDeclarations": 29,
    "floodDeclarations": 14,
    "declarationsLast10Years": 21,
    "floodInsuranceResidentialPenetrationPct": 28.88
}

How much does it cost?

You pay for each row returned, and the price per row drops with higher Apify subscription plans. Free accounts can test the Actor with up to 10 rows per run. Claim summaries read about 3,000 claims per second, so a large county takes about a minute.

Frequently asked questions

How often is the data updated? Declarations are updated daily by FEMA. Flood claims and policies are updated monthly.

Why is the aid empty for a recent disaster? FEMA adds the approved and obligated amounts after the work starts. New declarations show empty aid fields until then.

What do the declaration types mean? DR is a major disaster declaration, EM an emergency declaration, FM a fire management assistance declaration and FS a fire suppression declaration.

How do I find a county code? Use the five digit FIPS code, which is the state code followed by the county code. Harris County, Texas is 48201.

Can I get every flood claim in the country? Yes, but there are almost 2.7 million. Use the claim summary with a higher claim limit, or filter by state, county or year.

Does it show flood risk for an address? No. The Actor shows what happened and what was paid, not a forecast for a street address.

Limits

The Actor covers FEMA disaster declarations, aid, flood claims, housing assistance and public assistance. It does not include policy level premium data, which FEMA publishes in a very large separate file, and it gives no flood zone for a street address. The data is public and published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through OpenFEMA.