About
NYC Hazard Historian brings New York City hazard events and their documented consequences into one record, with each figure's source, period and status.
Why
New York City Emergency Management publishes a Hazard History and Consequence Tool. The record inside it is rich, but getting a question answered out of it is hard. Thirteen consequence datasets sit on their own pages. A search cannot be linked or shared, because it is a form post. A measure nobody collected can print as a zero: the tool reports 0 percent of students absent during Hurricane Sandy, when schools were closed for a week.
This site rebuilds the record from the same public sources, and shows every figure next to its source, its period and its status: reported, deferred, or not collected. The event pages bring weather records and reported consequences together, with source notes for each measure.
Scope
- It does not rank events. The measures have different coverage and cannot support a single event ranking. Federal assistance is the sharpest case: it is obligated against a declaration, one declaration can cover fourteen events here, and no page sorts events by it.
- It does not answer questions in plain language. Search and filter controls show which criteria are active.
- It does not fill gaps. Unavailable measures are labeled with the reason they are missing.
- It does not estimate, interpolate or repair a source value. Where a published figure looks wrong, the site shows it as published and flags it.
Built
Python's standard library joins and validates the source data in five pipeline stages. The website uses static HTML, CSS and JavaScript, served from GitHub Pages, with MapLibre GL for maps, City of New York basemaps, Natural Earth land outlines and Iowa radar tiles.
Independence
No agency reviewed this site.
Credits
Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Environmental Protection Agency, NYC Open Data and the Iowa Environmental Mesonet at Iowa State University. Basemap from the City of New York, and land outlines from Natural Earth. Each source is listed with its grain, its coverage and its caveat on the Data page.
Claude was used in development.
Reuse
Code is BSD 3-Clause licensed. Compiled data can be reused with attribution; the source data retain their own terms. Carry a figure's status and period when republishing it.
Contact
If you find an error, open an issue.