By State › Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania: Overview

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

A landlocked state, but not a hurricane-free one

Pennsylvania doesn’t take direct hurricane landfalls, it’s nowhere near the coast, but that doesn’t make it immune to hurricanes. A weakening tropical system’s remnant moisture can still dump enormous rainfall on the state’s river basins in a matter of hours, and Pennsylvania’s hilly terrain and dense network of rivers turn that rain into flash flooding fast. Hurricane Agnes did exactly that in June 1972, killing 50 people in Pennsylvania and causing $2.3 billion in damage, the governor at the time called it, without qualification, the worst disaster in Pennsylvania’s history. The mechanism repeated on a smaller scale in September 2021, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida pushed Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River to heights not seen in over 150 years.

What makes this risk easy to underestimate

Because Pennsylvania isn’t in any conventional hurricane risk zone, it’s easy to treat hurricane season as somebody else’s problem. The data says otherwise: the state’s worst disaster on record was a hurricane’s remnants, not an earthquake, wildfire, or blizzard, and it happened specifically because a weakened tropical system stalled over the state’s river basins rather than passing through quickly. See the Risks page for the full comparison between 1972 and 2021.

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 Pennsylvania: households anywhere near a river, not just the obvious floodplain, should treat remnant tropical moisture as a real flash flood risk during hurricane season (June through November), and this is true statewide, not just in coastal-adjacent counties the way it is in most other states covered on this site.

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