By State › Delaware

Delaware: Overview

Download all of Delaware as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Delaware exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Delaware go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962: a storm that wouldn’t leave

Between March 5 and 9, 1962, an unusually slow-moving nor’easter parked itself off the mid-Atlantic coast and refused to move on, flooding Delaware’s coastline across five separate high tides over three days rather than the single tidal surge a typical storm produces. An estimated 6,000 people along the Delaware coast ended up in emergency shelters, and the storm killed 40 people across six affected states. See the Risks page for the full data.

Sea level rise: Delaware’s coast at nearly twice the global rate

Delaware is uniquely exposed among the states covered on this site: low elevation, flat terrain, and ongoing land subsidence combine so that sea levels along its coast are rising at roughly twice the global average, and tidal flooding has already increased 260% since 2000. Current projections put the state on track to lose 11% of its total land mass to beach erosion at current rates, and some coastal properties already facing repeated tidal flooding are projected to see that risk expand significantly within the next decade. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Delaware: a slow-moving coastal storm can produce repeated flooding across several tide cycles rather than one surge, so this manual’s flood-evacuation guidance should account for a multi-day event, not just a single high-water moment, and coastal Delaware households face one of the more severe standing sea-level-rise trajectories covered on this site, a genuine long-term planning consideration beyond any single storm.

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