On April 1, 1979, President Carter established the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Its two functions are civil defense and emergency management. In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act. This Act created the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on March 1, 2003. It united FEMA and 21 other organizations.
FEMA’s mission is helping people before, during, and after disasters. FEMA gets its authority from the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (Stafford Act). FEMA may provide support when the President of the United States declares an emergency or major disaster under the Stafford Act. FEMA's staff assist with emergencies, disaster response, and recovery.
About This Report
In the data file, we provide deployment data for all events authorized under the Stafford Act. We also have a report file that explains more about the data and shows examples of how to use the data.
Methodology
Data Source
The data in this report come from FEMA’s Deployment Tracking System (DTS). The FEMA Workforce Management Division Deployment and Analysis Branch operates the D TS. This web-based system assigns and tracks the deployment of disaster personnel.
Date
Data are as of July 26, 2024.
Data Processing
To get data for this OHSS report, we link DTS data to OpenFEMA declaration data using the disaster number to match records. We create the Event Group variable using network analysis of DTS data on event predecessors. We anonymize the Deployment ID to protect the confidentiality of the people being deployed. We also correct for various data entry errors that may appear in the DTS data (e.g., negative days deployed).
Unit of Measure
The units of measure for fields in this report are:
- Deployments — count of Deployment ID, representing the number of deployments of a person to an event for a continuous number of days.
- Active Deployments — For a given date, count of Deployment ID with the given date between the Date on Site and Departure Date.
- Person-days Deployed — For a given date range, cumulative sum of Active Deployments on each date in the date range.
- Events — count of Event ID, representing the number of events people were deployed to. ere deployed to. Data Fields and Definitions
Data Fields and Definitions
Deployment
A deployment is the assignment of an individual to an event for a defined period. The following fields relate to deployments:
| Data Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Deployment ID | Unique identifier for each deployment |
| Date on Site | The date the individual arrived at their duty station for the deployment |
| Departure Date | The date the deployment concluded. If the deployment was still active as of September 30, 2023, the departure date is blank. |
| Days Deployed | The duration of the deployment, equal to the number of days between the Departure Date and the Date on Site. If the deployment was still active as of September 30, 2023, the days deployed is blank. |
Event
Deployments are all made to support specific events. There are five fields in our data that describe an event:
| Data Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Event ID | Four- or five-digit unique identifier for each event |
| Event Start Date | The first date deployments could be made in support of the event |
| Event Type | Five categorical events described in Declaration/Deployment Type section |
| Event Region | FEMA Regional Office responsible for the event |
| Event Location | State or territory the duty station the deployment is in |
Hazard
An incident is a natural, technological, or human caused occurrence that may cause harm and that may require action. The source of an incident is a hazard. Each event is associated with a single hazard. There is one field in our data that describes the hazard:
| Data Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Hazard Type | Categorical grouping of hazards |
Declarations
FEMA releases data about declarations made by the president of the United States on OpenFEMA. There are two fields in our data that can be matched to the declarations.
| Data Field | Description |
|---|---|
| OpenFEMA Declaration String | Agency standard method for uniquely identifying Stafford Act declarations — concatenation of declaration type, disaster number and state code |
| OpenFEMA Declaration Title | Title for the disaster |
Grouping
All events are unique to a single state, but many incidents FEMA responds to impact several states. Also, within a single state, deployments often transition from one event to another based on the lifecycle of FEMA’s response to an incident. There are two grouping fields in the data to explain the relationships between events.
| Data Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Incident | Groups events across the country related to the same incident. This is a discretionary field in DTS and not all events are grouped into an incident.& |
| Event Group | Unique identifier to group all predecessor events within a single state through the lifecycle of FEMA’s response to an incident. A blank Event Group means the event did not have a predecessor or successor event. |
