Your local risks
Twenty-two hazards across five categories. Browse them all, or enter your ZIP to find the ones that actually apply where you live.
Browse by hazard
Each links to a dedicated guide: what the hazard looks like in your region, specific preparation, during-event protocol, recovery, and local resources.
Atlantic and Gulf coasts, June through November. Storm surge kills more people than the wind.
The West and increasingly the Plains, Southeast, and Northeast. Season now runs year-round.
Plains, Midwest, and Southeast. More than 1,000 per year, peak season March through June.
Every state floods. Riverine, coastal, and urban flash flooding. The costliest natural disaster in the U.S.
Slow-onset, no dramatic moment. Strains water supply, amplifies wildfire, and drives food prices higher over months.
The deadliest weather hazard in the U.S. most years. Urban heat islands make cities especially dangerous.
The most destructive winter event for power grids. A half-inch of ice collapses lines across entire regions.
“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”
— John F. Kennedy, 1962
West Coast, Alaska, and the New Madrid seismic zone. No warning. Drop, cover, hold.
Pacific Coast, Hawaii, and Alaska. Minutes to move after a local earthquake. The ground shaking is the warning.
161 active U.S. volcanoes. Ashfall travels hundreds of miles. Lahars follow river valleys at highway speed.
Heavy rain, earthquakes, and post-wildfire burn scars. Warning signs are visible if you know where to look.
The most common emergency in the country. Caused by storms, grid failures, and demand overloads.
A Carrington-class geomagnetic storm could disable transformers across entire regions. Power outage prep at extended scale.
Rail corridors, highways, and pipelines. Shelter-in-place or evacuate. Knowing which and knowing fast matters.
Over 90,000 dams in the U.S., thousands rated high-hazard. Know if you're in a downstream inundation zone.
Grocery stores hold three days of inventory. A rotating two-week buffer is the simplest, most universal preparation.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
— Benjamin Franklin
“The chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”
— Proverb
“Forewarned is forearmed.”
— Latin proverb
Sustained disruption over months. Supply chain stress, healthcare rationing, and the medication buffer that matters most.
48 million cases a year. Power outage food safety, recall tracking, and the kitchen practices that prevent most cases.
Boil orders, chemical spills, and infrastructure failures. The type of contamination determines whether you boil, filter, or switch to stored supply.
Rare but requiring specific responses. Get inside, stay inside, stay tuned. Three steps that cover most scenarios.
Situational awareness, the Run-Hide-Fight framework, and community resilience that reduces vulnerability.
When daily routines break down for days. Household readiness, reliable information, and knowing your neighbors.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
— African proverb
“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
— Sir Edmund Hillary
Make it yours
Enter your ZIP to see what’s active in your area right now — weather alerts, drought status, FEMA declarations, and your specific hazard profile.
Or browse by household situation below.
Browse by household
The standard checklist assumes a healthy adult household. Most aren't. These are the situations that change the plan — not by adding more, but by changing what gets prioritized.
Diapers, formula, comfort items, and the household plan rewritten for someone who can't walk to the meeting point.
Independent enough to be elsewhere when something happens. The plan needs roles and check-ins designed for that.
Mobility, medications, and the medical equipment that quietly drives the rest of the plan.
The "checking on Mom" plan. Who calls, who drives, who stays — when the household and the parent are separate.
Pets aren't allowed in most public shelters. The evacuation plan has to account for them ahead of time.
Stairs, distances, and the equipment that has to come along. Evacuation logistics done right.
CPAP, oxygen concentrators, dialysis, infusion pumps. Power-out priority status, backup power, and the registered list nobody tells you about.
Less storage, no yard, shared utilities, building-wide systems. The apartment plan is different in real ways.
Longer response times, well water, propane heat, and the assumption that help is hours away by default.
Common mistakes
01
A Texas household doesn't need avalanche gear. A Colorado household doesn't need hurricane shutters. Local risk matters more than generic preparedness. Three real hazards covered beats ten imagined ones partially addressed.
02
Most preparation advice assumes a healthy adult household. Most households aren't that. The plan for a household with an infant is different from the plan for a household with a parent on oxygen — not more, different.
03
The state emergency management number, the nearest cooling center, the local Red Cross chapter, the CERT program — all worth knowing now, when it's a five-minute search. Mid-disaster is the wrong time to start.
Local resources
Save these to a folder. The five-minute task that pays off the day you need it.
The federal coordinating agency for declared disasters. Ten regions covering the US, each with its own contact and resource list.
fema.gov/locations
Every state has one. They coordinate state-level response, run hazard maps, and operate the alert systems your phone uses.
fema.gov state directory
Shelter operations during evacuations, blood drives, and the first-aid and CPR certification classes worth taking before you need them.
redcross.org chapter finder
FEMA-coordinated, volunteer-led training programs run by many local fire departments. Twenty hours of class, free, useful even if you never deploy.
community.fema.gov CERT finder
122 local forecast offices, each with regional expertise. The source for the warnings that actually apply to your county, not the generic alerts that don't.
weather.gov
The official flood zone designations that determine insurance requirements — and the gap between the maps and current risk that's worth understanding.
msc.fema.gov
If you're starting from zero
This page is most useful for households that already have a 72-hour kit and a household plan in place. If you don't yet, start with Tier 01 — it's where most of the work pays off, and it's a single weekend.
Start with the first 72 hours