Major findings

  • While the number of declared major disasters rose quickly in the mid-2000’s, the number of declarations peaked in Fiscal Year 2011 and have fallen dramatically since then.

  • After some reforms in the declaration process in 1999, the proportion of disasters that include possible housing and “other needs” assistance to residents has plummeted. Even in 2017, the year of hurricanes Irma and Maria, only about 35 percent of declarations include individual assistance. (Before the Stafford Act in 1983, almost all disasters included the individual assistance.)

  • Although some of the people interviewed for the series feel that disasters are becoming more frequent, most counties experienced more frequent disasters in the decade beginning in 1999 than in the last decade.

Important data notes:

  • A “disaster” isn’t the same thing as an event or a storm or a fire. Instead, it’s determined by the president after a state or tribal government applies for the designation. A hurricane or flood that devastates areas in three states will have three declared disasters.

  • The records prior to 2003 are incomplete. That year, FEMA was moved to the Department of Homeland Security and the names of some of the programs changed. While we know which disasters included different types of assistance, the amounts are unavailable before then.

  • Geographic records are spotty or unavailable for several types of areas:

    • Independent cities that are not part of a county, such as Baltimore, Richmond and St. Louis.
    • Areas in Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam and other territories.
    • Tribal lands
    • Events that were declared for entire states without listing them. This is more common in emergencies than in declared major disasters. It’s only happened a few times in the last 20 years.

  • All data is shown in fiscal years, which begins Oct. 1. This means that storms occuring in October, like Superstorm Sandy, are counted in the following fiscal year - in that case, 2013 instead of 2012. The data was fixed as of June 30, 2019.

  • The data here is slightly different than the data shown in official records. I think this has to do with inferring the fiscal year of the declaration, and because of some missing data in state records.

Number of Major Disasters by Year

There were 1,734 major disasters declared between 1983 and 2018 2018:

(In 2011, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers had the worst floods since the 1930s.

Going further back, this is what the pattern looks like:

Less frequent disasters with individual assistance

Beginning in the 1990s, the disasters were less likely to offer any individual assistance.

Beginning around 2009, most declaration disasters do NOT include any individual assistance. (We have the amounts beginning in 2003, but none before then.)

A regulation went into effect in 1999 governing the process of declaring disasters, with an effort to de-politicize it (while also reducing costs) . THe history is pretty well laid out in this CRS Report: FEMA’s Disaster Declaration Process: A primer (Source: FAS archive of CRS reports)

County patterns

To see whether some counties are now having more disasters than in the past, we can compare two decades: 1999-2008 and 2009-2018.

There were 20771 declarations at the county level. We won’t be able to analyze tribal declarations or those outside the continental US, which removes about 200 disasters from the total.

NOTE: Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands are NOT included in this dataset, making the 2017 year look less disasterous than it really was. (They were included in the previous analysis.)

Are some counties getting disasters more frequently?

One of the sentiments heard on in reporting is that, in some areas, residents said that they used to experience a disaster once every 3 or 5 years, but they’re now coming back to back. To check that, we can calculate what percentage of years included a disaster. Instead of showing the number of declarations, we can compare two decades’ percentages.

Conditions used:

  • A major disaster declaration
  • A valid county code
  • Between years 1999 and 2018

Only 3 counties have 13 out of 20 years’ disasters, but 167 counties have at least a 50-50 chance of having a declared disaster in any given year.

Here is a list of disasters in counties with the maximum number of disaster yaers: Logan County, Ok; McHenry County, ND; and Independence County, AR. All of these come from severe storms and floods rather than hurricanes.

County estimates for the number of years with disasters declared

About 1/2 the counties we have had 5 or fewer years with disasters over the two decades, or about one out of four. (This doesn’t include the handful of counties in the US that never had a disaster over the two decades.)

Comparing two decades

How to read this: The number of disasters from 2009 to 2018 is called “decade 2”, from 1999 to 2008 is “decade 1” . In this case, the further to the right, the more disasters were declared in the later year. The closer to the top, it’s more in the earlier years. It only includes counties that experienced at least two disasters in each decade. You can click on any bubble to see what the underlying data is.

Individual assistance is even more rare in the more recent years. This chart shows that most disasters in the last decade have not had any years with disasters containing individual assistance.

List of counties with growing number of indiv. asst. disasters

Although many fewer have more disasters in recent years compared with previous years that had individual assistance, here is a list that did:

Mapping the disaster counties

Count full history by county

The historic data comes from a summary file from FEMA that goes through 2015. I couldn’t replicate this, since I don’t have historic fips codes or fips for reservations, etc. As a result, this data won’t exactly match the analysis above.

This data excludes territories, Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

The number of counties with more vs. fewer disasters in the most recent decade:

Where are the counties?

This map shows counties with at least eight total designations, and at least three in the more recent decade: