FEMA Disaster Declarations Scraper

What this Actor scrapes

OpenFEMA publishes every US federal disaster declaration — hurricanes, floods, fires, severe storms — back to 1953, but reaching a specific slice (one state, one county, one incident type, one date range) means hand-paging FEMA.gov or writing your own OData client against a filter syntax that rejects a malformed clause with a bare 400. This Actor builds that $filter expression from up to five inputs, pages it deterministically with $top/$skip, and hands back clean, typed rows — disaster number, declaration type, incident dates, program flags, county — ready for a spreadsheet or a risk model.

What we handle for you

• 🧱 Multi-filter OData query building — combine state, county, incident type, declaration type and date range in one request instead of hand-writing $filter syntax.
• 📄 Deterministic paging — $top/$skip walked against OpenFEMA's own result count, capped by your maxResults, never over- or under-fetching.
• ✅ Honest zero-row handling — a narrow filter that matches nothing finishes as a successful run with a clear status message, not a failed one.
• 🔁 Retries transient 429/5xx responses with exponential backoff instead of failing the whole run.
• 🧊 Per-record fault isolation — one malformed record is skipped and logged; it never takes down the rest of the run.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

Use cases

• Back a county-level insurance or restoration-contractor lead list with real declaration history.
• Feed a real-estate risk model with disaster frequency by state or county.
• Build an emergency-management consulting briefing on a state's declaration record.
• Track new declarations for a state or incident type on a schedule.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "state": "FL",
  "incidentType": "Hurricane",
  "maxResults": 5,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

fema_declaration_stringdisaster_numberstatedeclaration_typedeclaration_dateincident_typedeclaration_titleincident_begin_dateincident_end_datedesignated_areaia_program_declaredpa_program_declaredregion

{
  "fema_declaration_string": "DR-4734-FL",
  "disaster_number": 4734,
  "state": "FL",
  "declaration_type": "DR",
  "declaration_date": "2025-09-28T00:00:00.000Z",
  "fy_declared": 2025,
  "incident_type": "Hurricane",
  "declaration_title": "HURRICANE HELENE",
  "incident_begin_date": "2025-09-26T00:00:00.000Z",
  "incident_end_date": "2025-10-01T00:00:00.000Z",
  "disaster_closeout_date": null,
  "designated_area": "Pinellas (County)",
  "place_code": "12103",
  "ih_program_declared": true,
  "ia_program_declared": true,
  "pa_program_declared": true,
  "hm_program_declared": true,
  "region": 4,
  "last_refresh": "2026-01-05T10:12:00.000Z",
  "source_hash": "a1b2c3d4e5f6",
  "source_id": "5f8a1c2e-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
  "fips_state_code": "12",
  "fips_county_code": "103",
  "incident_id": "5f9a1c2e-0000-0000-0000-000000000001"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.

Limitations

• Returns the declaration-summary fields OpenFEMA publishes — not the full disaster narrative or FEMA's individual-assistance case data.
• county matches OpenFEMA's raw designatedArea text, which mixes formats (e.g. "Pinellas (County)"), so it is a substring match rather than a normalized county lookup.