OpenFEMA Frequently Asked Questions

NEMIS utilizes census data from the United States Census Bureau in which Tribal Nations are listed as localities within a State. As such, disaster declarations for Tribal Nations are currently included in State data. Initially, the State is declared in order to designate the Tribal Nation (Place Name).  Then fema.gov is manually updated to reflect a tribal declaration.

As far as reporting, tribal declarations only have a Tribal Nation as the designated place or area. Tribal Nations that are subrecipients are not included in this data.

You should be able to join Public Assistance Funded Projects Details - v1 | FEMA.gov with the Public Assistance Applicants - v1 | FEMA.gov using the applicantId field to get the level of detail you want.

Disaster declarations are declared at State, Tribal Nation, Territory, and county levels. Other types of geographic areas may include boroughs, parishes, Regional Educational Attendance Areas, or independent cities in certain states. In addition, disaster declarations are expressed at a county-level fidelity. If only part of a county was impacted by a disaster, the entire county remains in an open declaration until the disaster has been closed.

If the declaration has an incident period of “continuing,” FEMA has the delegated authority to close it. The Federal Coordinating Officer is responsible for monitoring and evaluating weather conditions to determine when to recommend closing the incident period. It may be necessary to obtain official meteorological information from the National Weather Service, United States Geological Survey, or other validating agencies. When FEMA closes the incident period after the declaration, FEMA indicates the change through a Federal Register Notice.

Information on the disaster declaration process is located here: https://www.fema.gov/disaster/how-declared.

DR = Major Disaster Declaration, EM = Emergency Declaration, FM = Fire Management Assistance Grant, FS = Fire Suppression (replaced by FM). More information regarding declaration types are located here: https://www.fema.gov/disaster-declaration-process and https://www.fema.gov/fire-management-assistance-grant-program. 

Disaster declaration date - the date when a disaster was declared

Disaster closeout date - the date when all financial transactions for all programs are completed and the disaster is closed

Incident begin date - the date the actual incident or disaster began

Incident end date - the date the incident or disaster ended

The incident period is the time interval during which the disaster-causing incident occurs. The Governor or Tribal Chief Executive usually requests the incident period “incident begin date” and “incident end date” in the request for a declaration. However, if the declaration has an incident period of “continuing,” FEMA has the delegated authority to close it. When FEMA closes the incident period after the declaration the dataset is updated to reflect the “incident end date.”

The best method is to determine the county in which the address is located. The Disaster Declarations Summaries or FEMA Web Declaration Areas API endpoints can be used to look up a location by county. The placeName (or declaredCountyArea depending on the endpoint used) field contains a textual description of the county/area, while the last 3 digits of the placeCode field represents the FIPS county code. Zip codes are not useable because they can span county boundaries.

The dataset page indicates the update frequency. The frequency of update depends on the specific dataset. Most of the disaster related datasets are updated every 20 minutes. When accessing the datasets through the OpenFEMA API, the OpenFemaDataSets endpoint can be used to determine the last refresh time.

For example, the following URL displays metadata for the DisasterDeclarations Summaries dataset, indicating the last update in the “lastRefresh” field: https://www.fema.gov/api/open/v1/OpenFemaDataSets?$filter=name eq %27DisasterDeclarationsSummaries%27

The “Program Deliveries” dataset includes all applicants except those removed by FEMA. Within that population of applicants, we only provide statistics for active damages and active projects. Generally, the first Public Assistance reporting can occur months after the declaration date and projects continue to be added several years afterwards.