Preview: automated baseline. Built automatically from federal data. 32 packets were hand-checked against FEMA and NOAA sources on 2026-09-28 and say so on their pages; all other packets are automated and not yet checked by hand. Check every figure against your own records before you use it in a plan.
Hazard Plain

About Hazard Plain

Why it exists

A county needs a FEMA-approved hazard mitigation plan to stay eligible for FEMA mitigation project grants, and plans must be updated every five years. Many counties, especially small and rural ones, update their plans with little staff time. The federal data a plan's risk assessment starts from is public, but it is spread across several agencies and formats.

Hazard Plain gathers that data for every U.S. county area and Vermont town, organizes it to FEMA's Local Mitigation Plan Review Tool, and is planned to refresh it monthly (the refresh job is not built yet), so an emergency manager or planner can start from a dated, cited baseline instead of a blank page.

Who builds it

Hazard Plain is built and maintained by an independent software engineer as a public-interest project. It is free to use, with no account or advertising.

Hazard Plain is an independent product built from public federal data. It is not a FEMA document and is not reviewed or endorsed by FEMA or any state agency. It is not affiliated with FEMA, NOAA, the Census Bureau or any state agency, and it does not speak for them.

Reuse and citation: Hazard Plain text and tables are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/); credit Hazard Plain and the release. The underlying federal data are public domain; OpenFEMA data are also subject to the OpenFEMA terms and conditions.

How it is made

An automated pipeline downloads the federal source files, applies the rules on the Methods page, runs quality checks that block a release when they fail, and renders every packet as PDF, Word, Excel and JSON. Packet text comes from fixed templates, and every number comes from the source files; none is typed by hand.

Contact

Contact: to be added.

If you find a figure that does not match your records, please say which page and which table, and what your source shows. Corrections to the source data itself go to the publishing agency; this site will note known source problems on the Methods page.