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 and organizes it to FEMA's Local Mitigation Plan Review Tool, so an emergency manager or planner can start from a dated, cited baseline instead of a blank page. Each release is dated; this is release 2026-10.

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.

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.

Privacy and analytics

This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views. It is cookieless: it sets no cookies, uses no local storage, does not fingerprint or track individual visitors, and no personal data is collected for analytics. It reports totals only, such as page views, referring sites, countries and browser types. There are no accounts, advertising or other trackers, and search runs in your browser.

Contact

Corrections, questions and requests: [email protected].

Corrections to the source data itself go to the publishing agency; known source problems are listed on the Methods page.