About DisasterRiskIndex.com
DisasterRiskIndex.com turns FEMA's public-domain National Risk Index into a free, searchable, per-county view of natural disaster risk across the United States.
Data source & attribution
All risk figures come from the FEMA National Risk Index (NRI), v1.20, released December 2025 under OpenFEMA's public-domain terms. FEMA requests attribution but does not endorse or sponsor this site. Definitions follow FEMA's data dictionary. Per-county disaster histories come from FEMA's Disaster Declarations Summaries (OpenFEMA). City-to-county mappings and city populations are from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). County boundaries on the risk map are from the US Census Bureau via the us-atlas project.
Who runs this site
I'm Dvir, and DisasterRiskIndex.com is an independent project I built and maintain. I made it because FEMA's National Risk Index is a genuinely useful public dataset that most people have never heard of — and the official tool, while excellent, isn't built for quickly answering "what's the disaster risk where I live, and what should I do about it?"
Every risk figure on this site is FEMA's number, published verbatim — no re-weighting, no editorial adjustment. What I add is navigation, context, and the written guides: those are drafted and edited by me, reviewed against the cited sources before publishing, and updated when the underlying data changes. If you find an error anywhere on the site, email me and I'll fix it.
Why this data is trustworthy
The National Risk Index is not a private scoring product — it is a federal dataset built by FEMA with academic partners and published with full technical documentation. Its two human-factor layers come from peer-reviewed academic work at the University of South Carolina's Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute: SoVI® (the Social Vulnerability Index) and BRIC (Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities). The hazard layers draw on the authoritative source for each peril — NOAA's Storm Events Database and Billion-Dollar Disasters record, the USGS National Seismic Hazard Model, the US Forest Service's wildfire hazard potential, and FEMA's own flood and loss data.
FEMA publishes the full methodology, every input variable, and the known limitations in its technical documentation. Anyone can download the same county file this site is built from and reproduce every number on it. That reproducibility is the point: nothing here is a proprietary score you have to take on faith.
Editorial process
There are two kinds of content on this site, and they are handled differently.
- Risk figures — scores, ratings, expected annual losses, hazard frequencies, disaster declaration counts — are imported programmatically from FEMA's published files and rendered verbatim. There is no re-weighting, rounding-to-flatter, or editorial adjustment. The build scripts that do the import are the only thing between FEMA's release and what you see. Where a figure is derived rather than copied (a state average, a within-state rank), the page says so.
- Written guides — the hazard guides and the methodology explainer — are drafted and edited by me. Factual claims are checked against the primary source before publishing: FEMA and NOAA for event and loss figures, USGS for seismic and landslide material, IBHS and FEMA building-science publications for mitigation advice, and the NFIP and state insurance departments for coverage questions. Each guide carries its own last-updated date and a sources list; where the evidence is genuinely uncertain, the guide says that instead of picking a number.
Corrections. If something here is wrong, email me and I will fix it and bump the page's update date. Corrections that change a factual claim are made in place rather than quietly deleted. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and no one pays to appear in a ranking — the rankings are pure sorts of FEMA's numbers.
What the scores mean
Each county's Composite Risk Index (0–100) combines three inputs across 18 hazard types: Expected Annual Loss (the average yearly dollar loss from natural hazards), Social Vulnerability (how sensitive the population is to harm), and Community Resilience (capacity to recover). Ratings run from Very Low to Very High. For the full explanation — formulas, data sources, and limitations — see How the National Risk Index works.
Update cadence
FEMA updates the NRI roughly once a year. This site currently reflects v1.20 (released December 2025) and is republished in full whenever a new version lands. Disaster declaration histories come from OpenFEMA and cover 1953 to present.
Limitations
- Risk is county-level, not address-specific. Your individual property may differ substantially.
- Expected Annual Loss is a statistical average, not a forecast for any given year.
- The NRI is updated roughly annually; figures reflect v1.20.
Contact
Questions or corrections? Email hello@disasterriskindex.com, or see the contact page for what's most useful to include.