By State

The manual, addenda, and skill guides on this site are written for Northern Utah's Wasatch Front, and most of that content, the physical skills, the federal agencies, the underlying science, applies anywhere. But laws, local agencies, and specific hazards vary by state. This section covers what's actually different where you live: state-specific legal rules, the local agencies and programs worth knowing about, and the risk profile that shapes what matters most in your state.

This section covers all 52 entries: all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, Utah included. Utah's own page here is short on purpose: it routes you to the main manual, addenda, and skill guides, since that content already covers Utah directly rather than needing a separate delta the way every other entry does. Every claim here is independently verified against a primary source before it's written, and existing pages get revisited as laws change or new data becomes available.

See the cross-state patterns that only become visible once every state is covered: how water law splits on geography, how carry law spans the full national spectrum, and where disasters trace to institutional failure rather than weather.

Icons show each state's 1-2 defining hazard types, drawn directly from that state's own overview page. Presence only, not a severity ranking: the underlying figures (a probability, a recurrence interval, a death toll) aren't on a common scale, so a 1-3 score would be a claim this site can't actually back up.

• AL Alabama No state suffered more from the largest tornado outbreak in U.S. history than Alabama, which lost more than 230 people on a single day in April 2011, and the Gulf Coast carries real hurricane risk of its own, demonstrated directly by Hurricane Ivan's 2004 landfall near Gulf Shores.
• AK Alaska The 1964 Good Friday earthquake, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America, and the October 2025 remnants of Typhoon Halong, a still-recent disaster that triggered one of the largest airlift evacuations in Alaska history.
• AZ Arizona A state carrying two of the most acute climate-driven risks in the country at once: Maricopa County recorded more than 600 heat deaths in each of the last two years, and Arizona is absorbing the largest mandatory water cuts of any state on the shrinking Colorado River.
• AR Arkansas The 2014 Mayflower-Vilonia tornado, one of the deadliest in modern Arkansas history, and the Guy-Greenbrier earthquake swarm, a genuinely different kind of hazard: thousands of quakes triggered by human wastewater-disposal wells, not natural faulting.
• CA California The nation's most populous state carries two dominant, independently documented risks at once: a major earthquake system beneath its two largest metro areas, and a wildfire threat that turned catastrophic in early 2025.
• CO Colorado The most destructive wildfire in Colorado history struck suburban neighborhoods in the dead of winter, not deep forest in summer, and Colorado has led the nation in avalanche deaths for decades, nearly double the toll of the next closest state.
• CT Connecticut A hurricane that struck with almost no warning in 1938 killed hundreds across southern New England, and more than 80 years later, Tropical Storm Isaias demonstrated that Connecticut's power grid remains one of the state's most vulnerable pieces of infrastructure during any major windstorm.
• DE Delaware The Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962, a slow-moving nor'easter that flooded Delaware's coast across five separate high tides over three days, and sea level rise, a standing risk projected to submerge over a tenth of the state's land mass.
• FL Florida The state that takes more hurricane landfalls than anywhere else in the country, paired with a slower-moving, less dramatic risk that shapes real estate and infrastructure decisions decades out: rising sea level along a coastline most of the population lives on.
• GA Georgia A state with two very different risk profiles at once: real tornado exposure that has reached directly into downtown Atlanta, and a slow-moving water supply crisis serious enough to trigger three decades of interstate litigation and, at its worst point in 2007, leave Atlanta roughly a month from running dry.
• HI Hawaii The 2023 Lahaina wildfire, the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century, and the 2018 Kilauea lower Puna eruption, the site's first volcanic hazard, a genuinely different kind of disaster from anything covered on the mainland.
• ID Idaho The 1910 Big Burn, one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history and the event that shaped a century of American fire policy, and the 1976 Teton Dam failure, one of the costliest dam failures in U.S. history.
• IL Illinois A state that produced the deadliest tornado in U.S. history, sits close enough to the New Madrid Seismic Zone for real earthquake risk in its southern counties, and recorded the coldest temperature in state history during a single week in 2019.
• IN Indiana The deadliest tornado outbreak in Indiana's recorded history, and a still-fresh reminder that flood records don't stand forever: in August 2026, the White River at Anderson broke a crest record that had stood since 1913.
• IA Iowa Cedar Rapids absorbed two of the most significant disasters in modern Midwest history 12 years apart: a record-shattering flood in 2008, and the costliest thunderstorm event ever recorded in the United States in 2020.
• KS Kansas The 2007 Greensburg EF5 tornado, which erased 95% of an entire town in minutes, and the slow-moving Ogallala Aquifer depletion, a standing water-supply risk directly descended from the same conditions that caused the 1930s Dust Bowl.
• KY Kentucky Two catastrophic disasters seven months apart in opposite ends of the state: the deadliest tornado in Kentucky history tore through the western plains in December 2021, and flash flooding devastated the eastern Appalachian hollows in July 2022.
• LA Louisiana Hurricane Katrina remains the costliest and one of the deadliest disasters in modern U.S. history, driven as much by levee engineering failures as by the storm itself, and Louisiana absorbs more than 90% of the entire nation's coastal wetland loss, a standing, ongoing crisis distinct from any single storm.
• ME Maine The Ice Storm of 1998, identified by a later study as the worst natural disaster in Maine history, and the January 2024 back-to-back coastal storms that set all-time record water levels along the state's coastline.
• MD Maryland The state where a cargo ship's power failure brought down a major bridge in under a minute in 2024, and where more than 500 Chesapeake Bay islands, entire communities among them, have already vanished beneath the water.
• MA Massachusetts The state that produced the deadliest tornado in New England history and, a quarter-century later, one of the most catastrophic blizzards ever recorded in the Northeast, a reminder that New England's two defining severe-weather risks are almost total opposites: a summer afternoon and a three-day winter siege.
• MI Michigan The two most consequential disasters in modern Michigan history weren't storms, they were infrastructure failures: a municipal water switch that poisoned a city with lead, and two aging dams that failed within hours of each other and forced 11,000 people to evacuate.
• MN Minnesota A flood that caused $3.5 billion in damage and forced 50,000 people to evacuate without a single death, proof that a well-executed warning and evacuation can work even against a historic disaster, and a blizzard so far outside seasonal norms it still holds Minnesota's snowfall records more than three decades later.
• MS Mississippi Hurricane Katrina's record storm surge devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast by a different mechanism than the levee failures that flooded New Orleans, and the 2011 Smithville EF5 was one of two EF5 tornadoes that struck Mississippi the same day Alabama's page already covers.
• MO Missouri Missouri is both the deadliest single-tornado state covered on this site, the 2011 Joplin tornado remains the deadliest U.S. tornado since modern record-keeping began, and the literal namesake and epicenter of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, already covered from Illinois's and Tennessee's more distant vantage points.
• MT Montana The 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake, the deadliest earthquake ever recorded in Montana and the Intermountain West, which triggered a landslide that dammed a river overnight, and the 2017 Lolo Peak wildfire, a major modern fire season case study.
• NE Nebraska The 2014 Pilger twin tornadoes, a rare simultaneous double-tornado event that destroyed 75% of a small town, and the March 2019 bomb cyclone flood, one of the costliest inland flood events on record in the United States.
• NV Nevada Las Vegas's heat death toll grew 78% in a single year even as Phoenix's declined, and the Reno-Carson City corridor carries earthquake probability figures most people would never associate with Nevada, a genuinely underappreciated risk hiding behind the state's desert reputation.
• NH New Hampshire The Great Hurricane of 1938, widely considered New Hampshire's worst natural disaster, and the December 2008 ice storm, the most damaging storm in the state's power-grid history.
• NJ New Jersey The state where Hurricane Sandy actually made landfall, not just felt its surge, and the state that leads the nation in Superfund sites, a chronic, distributed industrial-contamination risk that doesn't announce itself with a single dramatic event the way a storm does.
• NM New Mexico The 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire, the largest wildfire in New Mexico history and one the federal government itself started, and the just-resolved Rio Grande Compact dispute, a 13-year interstate water fight the Supreme Court finally settled in May 2026.
• NY New York A state with three genuinely different disasters on record within the last 15 years: a coastal storm surge that reshaped lower Manhattan, an inland flash flood that killed people inside their own basement apartments, and a lake-effect blizzard that buried Buffalo under more snow than the city's plows could move.
• NC North Carolina The deadliest hurricane in modern North Carolina history didn't hit the coast, it hit the mountains: Hurricane Helene's September 2024 remnants dropped up to 30 inches of rain on the Blue Ridge, destroyed Asheville's water system, and killed more people here than in any other state Helene touched.
• ND North Dakota Grand Forks's specific story within the 1997 Red River flood, including a major fire that broke out during the evacuation, and the Blizzard of 1966, widely considered the worst storm in North Dakota's recorded history.
• OH Ohio Two genuinely different kinds of disaster: an F5 tornado that leveled half a town in 1974 during the largest tornado outbreak in U.S. history at the time, and a 2023 freight train derailment that turned a small town into the country's most closely watched hazmat disaster in years, a reminder that not every risk this manual covers comes from the weather.
• OK Oklahoma The same town, Moore, Oklahoma, took direct hits from two separate EF5 tornadoes 14 years apart, and the first of the two set a wind speed record that still stands as the highest ever measured on Earth.
• OR Oregon Oregon's risk profile is dominated by a single, well-documented, overdue megathrust earthquake, layered on top of severe wildfire and extreme heat risk that most of the state's population has already lived through firsthand.
• PA Pennsylvania The first inland state in this section, and a state whose defining risk isn't a hurricane making landfall, it's a hurricane's remnants dumping their rain on a river basin hundreds of miles from the coast, a mechanism that produced Pennsylvania's worst disaster on record in 1972 and hit Philadelphia again in 2021.
• PR Puerto Rico Hurricane Maria's 328-day island-wide blackout, the longest in U.S. history, and the grid's continued fragility since: two island-wide outages in a five-month span in 2024-2025 alone, on a system that fails 3-6 times more often than a typical mainland utility.
• RI Rhode Island The Hurricane of 1938, one of Rhode Island's deadliest storms, which drowned downtown Providence under 13 feet of water, and the March 2010 floods, the worst flooding the state had seen in more than 200 years.
• SC South Carolina Hurricane Hugo's 1989 landfall near Charleston produced the highest storm tides ever recorded on the East Coast at the time, and the 2015 floods dropped rainfall so extreme it met the statistical threshold for a 1-in-1,000-year event across parts of the state.
• SD South Dakota The 1972 Black Hills flood, the deadliest flood in South Dakota history and one of the deadliest in the United States, driven by a dam failure on top of extreme rainfall, and the 2015 Delmont tornado, a modern small-town EF2 case study.
• TN Tennessee Memphis, a metro area of more than a million people, sits inside the New Madrid Seismic Zone, a far larger population exposure than the small Illinois counties covered elsewhere on this site, and the Great Smoky Mountains produced the deadliest wildfire in the eastern United States since the 1940s.
• TX Texas The country's second-most-populous state carries three distinct, well-documented hazards at once: Gulf Coast hurricanes, a grid that has already failed catastrophically in extreme cold, and flash flooding severe enough to produce the deadliest inland flood disaster in the U.S. since 1976.
• UT Utah Utah isn't a delta from the rest of this site, it's the state the whole manual, every addendum, and every skill guide was written for directly. This page exists to point you to that content instead of duplicating it.
• VT Vermont Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, Vermont's worst natural disaster since 1927, and the July 2023 floods that broke Irene's own river-crest records just 12 years later in the same towns.
• VA Virginia Home to the highest rate of sea level rise on the entire East Coast, concentrated around the world's largest naval base, and the state hit hardest by a 2012 derecho that caused the largest non-hurricane power outage in Virginia history.
• WA Washington Two hazard types genuinely new to this site: a volcano whose real danger isn't lava but a wall of mud capable of reaching a populated valley in 30 minutes, and the deadliest landslide in U.S. history, which buried a small community north of Seattle in 2014.
• DC Washington, D.C. The August 2011 Virginia earthquake, which closed the Washington Monument for 32 months and left the National Cathedral mid-repair more than a decade later, and the June 2012 derecho, a single storm that knocked out power across the district in the middle of a life-threatening heat wave.
• WV West Virginia The June 2016 thousand-year flood that devastated Greenbrier County, and the 2014 Elk River chemical spill that cut off safe tap water for 300,000 people in Charleston, a slow-moving contamination disaster rather than a sudden storm.
• WI Wisconsin Wisconsin is home to the deadliest wildfire in recorded American history, a disaster most people have never heard of because it happened the same night as the Great Chicago Fire, and to an F5 tornado in 1984 that was the state's first since 1958.
• WY Wyoming The Yellowstone Caldera, a genuine standing supervolcano risk with odds comparable to a large asteroid strike, and the Blizzard of 1949, widely considered the worst winter storm in Wyoming's recorded history.