By State › Nebraska

Nebraska: Overview

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Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Nebraska 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 Nebraska go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The 2014 Pilger twin tornadoes: a hazard type new to the site

On June 16, 2014, the small town of Pilger, population under 350, took a direct hit from two tornadoes on the ground side by side at the same time, an EF4 and an EF2, a genuinely rare configuration. The larger tornado alone destroyed 75% of the town, including its entire business district, and the event killed two people and injured 20. This is the first tornado case study on this site involving simultaneous parallel tornadoes rather than one storm or a sequence of separate ones. See the Risks page for the full data.

The March 2019 bomb cyclone flood: one of the costliest inland floods on record

A rapid-intensification “bomb cyclone” in March 2019 combined record snowmelt with heavy rain on ground still frozen from an exceptionally cold February, sending a wall of water and ice through Nebraska’s river systems. The ice-choked Niobrara River burst through and destroyed the Spencer Dam entirely, and three-fourths of Nebraska’s 93 counties declared a state of emergency. NOAA estimated the total multi-state damage at $10.8 billion, one of the costliest inland flood events ever recorded in the U.S. 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 Nebraska: tornado shelter planning needs to account for the real possibility of more than one tornado on the ground in the same area at once, not just sequential storms, and this manual’s dam-failure and river-flood guidance carries extra weight given that an entire dam here failed under conditions many residents hadn’t planned around, ice-choked rivers in late winter, not the more commonly anticipated spring or summer flood pattern.

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