FEMA NFIP Claims

First, a caveat: the NFIP data does NOT provide information specific to individual homes or parcels. This information is protected under federal law. All personal identifying information about policy holders has been redacted, and data has been anonymized to census tract, reported ZIP code, and one decimal point digit of latitute and longitude. If mapped, flood insurance policies and claims may appear to be clustered at a particular location due to this anonymization.

What all that means: you cannot search for an address to see whether it has flooded.

However, among many things, this data shows flooding trends in Norfolk over the last 40+ years. It shows the census tracts that flood most frequently. And it shows where the largest number and highest value of claims occur.

FEMA believes this historic release of NFIP data promotes transparency, reduces complexity related to public data requests, and improves how stakeholders interact with and understand the program. This is the largest, most comprehensive release of NFIP data coordinated by FEMA to date. This dataset allows for customizable searches to create reports, analyze and visualize present and historical NFIP data faster and easier than before.

This data will help FEMA build a national culture of preparedness by providing claims and policy information people need to make better choices about their flood risk and the insurance they need to protect the life they've built.

Norfolk's Open Data team extracted city-specific information from the FEMA dataset. The dataset included here represents almost 6,000 claims on record from 1977 through 2019, totaling 67 million dollars in damage in the City of Norfolk.

Querying over HTTP

Splitgraph serves as an HTTP API that lets you run SQL queries directly on this data to power Web applications. For example:

curl https://data.splitgraph.com/sql/query/ddn \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d@-<<EOF
{"sql": "
    SELECT *
    FROM \"norfolk-gov/fema-nfip-claims-suf7-r643\".\"fema_nfip_claims\"
    LIMIT 100 
"}
EOF

See the Splitgraph documentation for more information.