About the site
County-level disaster risk data, written in plain language.
RiskByCounty is independently published data journalism. We present the natural disaster risk statistics that the federal government already collects — flood, wildfire, tornado, earthquake, and hurricane risk scores — for every one of America's 3,144 counties.
What RiskByCounty Is
RiskByCounty is a data-journalism site, not an insurance or emergency-management resource. Our purpose is to take county-level disaster risk statistics published by FEMA and NOAA and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and act on. If you are deciding where to buy a home, evaluating hazard exposure in a region you're considering, or just want to know how your county stacks up nationally, this site is built for you.
Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: the FEMA National Risk Index and NOAA climate and severe-weather records. Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology is published on the methodology page.
Who Runs RiskByCounty
RiskByCounty is published and edited by Evan Brooks, Data Editor of the ByCounty Network. The site uses automated pipelines to ingest public datasets from FEMA, NOAA, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other federal agencies, then transforms them into plain-language reporting that anyone can use.
The data editor documents the methodology for composite scores and rankings across all 13 sites in the network, spot-checks AI-generated narratives for accuracy, and signs off on every published page. The data editor is the named editorial owner of this site: published statistics either match the source data or they are corrected.
The data editor is not a certified emergency manager, insurance underwriter, or licensed geologist, and RiskByCounty does not present itself as a professional risk-assessment resource. We do not underwrite policies, issue evacuation orders, or provide emergency-preparedness advice. Our role is the data-editor role — verify the numbers, respect the underlying uncertainty ranges, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.
Long-form features and reported pieces, when published, carry a visible byline and — for topics that benefit from subject-matter expertise — a named reviewer credit at the top of the article.
Why I Built RiskByCounty
I started RiskByCounty after trying to understand natural disaster and climate risks across counties while evaluating where to buy a home. FEMA publishes extraordinary data through the National Risk Index, but it is buried in GIS files and technical reports. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, how their county compares on flood, wildfire, tornado, earthquake, and hurricane risk — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.
That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, schools, health, water quality, weather. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:
- Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
- Methodology — the exact data sources, composite-score formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.
Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.
Our Relationship to the Data
RiskByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with FEMA, NOAA, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or any government agency. We use their public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.
When we link out — for example, to FEMA's National Risk Index portal or to NFIP flood-insurance resources — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.
AI in Our Workflow
Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, insurance recommendations, and unsourced inference. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.
We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a YMYL site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.
Part of the ByCounty Network
RiskByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, schools, health, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.
Contact
For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@riskbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.
This page was last reviewed on by Evan Brooks, Data Editor.
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