Northeast Disaster Risk Reports

The Northeast United States experiences one of the most varied disaster profiles in the country. Hurricanes and tropical storms push flood surges up the Atlantic coast into New Jersey and New York. Nor'easters dump heavy snow and ice across Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Flash floods follow spring thaws in the Hudson Valley and Susquehanna River basin. Wildfires strike the Pine Barrens. Ice storms collapse roofs in Northeast Pennsylvania. Tornadoes, though rare, have caused major property damage as recently as 2021.

Every property owner in the region lives with some combination of these risks, and the specific profile varies significantly county by county. A homeowner in Ocean County, New Jersey faces fundamentally different disaster odds than one in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania — even though they are only a two-hour drive apart. Coastal flood zone coverage, hurricane landfall history, winter storm frequency, and aging infrastructure all differ by county. Understanding your specific county's risk profile is the first step toward informed decisions about insurance coverage, preparedness investments, and emergency planning.

These reports exist because we believe every homeowner, landlord, property manager, and real estate professional should have easy access to the data that insurance underwriters and FEMA already use. All of it is public. None of it should require hiring a consultant to understand. We have aggregated the most relevant datasets into a single interactive view per county, and we update it monthly.

Reports combine four primary public datasets. FEMA Disaster Declarations Database provides the list of federally declared disasters, their type, and their severity category. Data is pulled via the OpenFEMA API and filtered to the target county's FIPS code.

NOAA Storm Events Database records every storm event that meets reporting thresholds — severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, coastal flooding, winter weather, heat waves. We aggregate by event type and year, then display both the breakdown and the multi-year trend.

U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey supplies population and median year-built for each incorporated municipality in the county. Combined with FEMA flood zone data, this lets us identify neighborhoods where older housing stock sits in high flood-risk areas — the combination that historically drives the most restoration demand.

FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer provides the percentage of each municipality inside Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHA). County and municipality boundaries come from the Census TIGER/Line shapefile program.

Data is refreshed monthly. Each individual county report displays its own last-updated date. All sources are free to access and re-use under public domain or open licensing terms.