Flood Center · live river gauges + FEMA history

Flood Center

Start with what the nearest rivers are reading right now, then the FEMA flood-claim history for the area below.

The optional live checks send the ZIP's map center to the government sources: the National Weather Service for river gauges and active alerts, and FEMA for the flood zone.

The wider record for this area: flood claims are one thread of an area's history. The Address Risk History page assembles the full documented record for a ZIP in one place: every federal disaster declaration on file for the county, thirty years of weather extremes, and FEMA's county risk index, each with its date and source.

How to use this, and how not to

This is the most useful, and most misread, data in storm prep. The number that matters most is usually the share of paid claims from outside the high-risk zone. Flooding does not follow the lines on a map, and in many areas a large minority of paid claims are on homes where flood insurance was never required. That is the case for buying coverage you are not forced to buy. It is not a reason to panic: past claims describe what has happened in an area, not what will happen to your home.

Where these numbers come from

Three federal datasets, pre-loaded into this page and refreshed monthly:

Flood claims come from FEMA's OpenFEMA API (the FIMA NFIP Redacted Claims dataset). FEMA anonymizes every record to the ZIP code and census tract under the Privacy Act, so no one, including us, can look up the flood-claim history of a specific property.
County risk comes from FEMA's National Risk Index, which rates a whole county's natural-hazard risk against every other U.S. county.
Federal disaster history comes from FEMA's Disaster Declarations Summaries, each one linked to its official FEMA record.

Educational context only, never a property-specific flood-risk score, insurance advice, or a safety directive. FEMA specifically recommends the NFIP claims data not be used in commercial catastrophe models because the coordinates are truncated; we present it as area history for planning. This product uses the FEMA OpenFEMA API but is not endorsed by FEMA. The Federal Government or FEMA cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from the API. County risk is from the FEMA National Risk Index; flood-zone lookups are from FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. Data-verified at build; every factual claim here is logged in our internal verification file. Coverage and "current as of" date appear with each result.

Flood Center

Current river levels near this area

The live flood zone for this area

How to use this, and how not to

Where these numbers come from