The National Risk Index is a new, online mapping application from FEMA that identifies communities most at risk from 18 natural hazards. The application visualizes natural hazard risk metrics and includes data about expected annual losses, social vulnerabilities and community resilience.
The data is at the county and census tract level and made available via geographic information system (GIS) services for custom analyses.
The system combines the risk from 18 factors to come up with one rating for each county or census tract.
- Avalanche
- Coastal flooding
- Cold Wave
- Drought
- Earthquake
- Hail
- Heat wave
- Hurricane
- Ice storm
- Landslide
- Lightning
- Riverine flooding
- Strong wind
- Tornado
- Tsunami
- Volcanic Activity
- Wildfire
- Winter weather
If you go to the site it may take some time to load. It worked, slowly, on my desktop computer with a fast internet connection, but not at all on my cell phone. At one time I got a “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable.”
You can zoom in and click on a county or census tract to see more details about each of the 18 risk factors that appear in the left sidebar. If you go to the site and the map loads, click on County or Census Tracts, then Info.
It would be helpful if you could toggle each of the 18 hazards on or off. For example, if you simply want to see where the risk is highest for wildfires, you can’t display that risk individually on the map. You have to click on each county then scroll down the left sidebar to see the data just for that location.
well, I had time to make a nice cheese sandwich while the front page loaded … thanks for the warning!
Once it did, though, I got “Discover the landscape of natural hazard risk” and I was hoping the whole site wasn’t written like that. Despite the glossy page layout and weird navigation, it DOES look like a site with some serious value and potential. THANKS Bill, for the heads-up!
Hi Bill
Had a look and found you can drill down to get the info at Census Tract level, it just takes a little while to load as you pointed out. Have taken a snip of this but cant seem to post it for all to see.
would be nice to having something similar down under
Regards
Andrew