Which Disasters Should I Prepare My Pets For? Build the County Hazard List Yourself

Most pet preparedness advice, this site’s included, starts from a hazard the reader is assumed to have already picked. Pack a waterproof container, because flood. Pack a carrier the animal will tolerate for hours, because evacuation. Stage the kit near an interior room, because tornado. The advice is fine. The picking is the step that gets skipped, and it is the reason two households in the same state can build two kits that would each fail in the other’s disaster.

Ready.gov puts that step first rather than assuming it. Its all-hazards index, which states Last Updated: 07/21/2026 and which we read on August 15, 2026, opens with the instruction: “Know what disasters and hazards could affect your area, how to get emergency alerts, and where you would go if you and your family need to evacuate.” Know what could affect your area. That is a lookup, and this page is about how to run it and then what to do with the answer if you have animals.

It does that by teaching you the lookup rather than by showing you a table. That choice is worth explaining before you read another line, because it is the difference between this page being useful in three years and being quietly wrong.

What This Page Refuses to Do, and Why

It stores no county data. Counting the rows in the Census Bureau’s 2020 national county code file, retrieved August 15, 2026, gives 3,235 county and county-equivalent entries nationwide including territories. A static page carrying a hazard list for each of them would be stale within a season and would have no way of telling you which rows had gone stale. Worse, it would read authoritative while doing it. The lookup below is one sitting plus however long your county takes to send you a document, you run it once, and it puts you on records that update without us.

It computes nothing, so it is not a tool. Some pages on this site really do compute: the pet emergency kit builder takes your animals, your hazard and your destination and produces a list that changes with all three. This page has no inputs and no outputs. It is a method, and calling it anything else would oversell it.

It publishes no risk score, no rating and no ranking. The county-level federal dataset this page was scoped around before we started is FEMA’s National Risk Index. Here is exactly what happened when we went to get it on August 15, 2026. Six routes were tried: hazards.fema.gov/nri/, hazards.fema.gov/nri, /nri/map, /nri/data-resources, /nri/learn-more, and the county data download at /nri/Content/StaticDocuments/DataDownload/NRI_Table_Counties/NRI_Table_Counties.zip. Every one of them returned an HTTP 301 redirect to https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/practitioners/resilience-analysis-and-planning-tool, and that address then returned HTTP 403. So did every other www.fema.gov HTML page we tried the same day, including the agency’s own regional contact page, while the OpenFEMA API endpoints on the same host answered normally, which tells you the 403 is a filter on the site’s pages rather than a fact about any single page or about the host as a whole. The host itself is alive: hazards.fema.gov/ returned a 413-byte redirect page titled “FEMA: Multihazard Information Platform” pointing at a portal that loads.

That is a retrieval gap and nothing more. We are not telling you the National Risk Index has been retired, moved, discontinued or replaced. A redirect plus a block describes our connection on one afternoon; it says nothing about a programme. Because we could not open it, this page publishes no number, no methodology detail, no hazard-type count and no rating band from it, and you should treat any page that publishes those without saying when it read them the same way.

One partial route did answer. https://gis.fema.gov/arcgis/rest/services returned a folder list on August 15, 2026 that includes a folder named NRI, and https://gis.fema.gov/arcgis/rest/services/NRI?f=json returned four entries, CustomNRITemplate_v3 through v6, all of type GPServer. Those are geoprocessing services, not a county feature layer you can read down, so they did not give us county values either.

And it will not substitute the easy dataset for the hard one. More on that in a moment, because it is the trap this whole subject is built on.

The Substitution That Looks Rigorous and Is Not

FEMA’s OpenFEMA API is open, fast, well documented and live. When we queried DisasterDeclarationsSummaries on August 15, 2026 it answered immediately, and the record it returned carried fields including declarationType, incidentType, fipsCountyCode and a designatedArea naming a single parish. County-level, federal, current, free. It is extremely tempting.

It is also not a hazard risk profile, and a page built on it would look more rigorous than a page built on nothing while being less honest.

Read what those fields are. In the record we retrieved, every field is an identifier, a date, a state or county code, a designated-area name, an incident label, a declaration type, or a yes/no administrative flag such as whether a given assistance program was declared or whether a Tribal government made the request. That is a record of a decision made by people about one event. None of those fields is a probability, a frequency or an exposure measure. A county can sit under a serious hazard and carry few declarations because its events have stayed under the thresholds that trigger one. A county can carry many declarations from a single bad decade. And the incident label recorded is the incident that was declared, not the full set of hazards the county faces.

That reading is this page’s own reasoning about what those fields mean, not an instruction FEMA publishes about how not to misuse its own API. We are labelling it because a reader deserves to know which sentences on a page are the site’s own inference. If you see a county hazard page whose evidence is a count of past declarations, you now know what it is actually counting.

FEMA does publish limits on this dataset. Its OpenFEMA dataset description states that county is “not available before 1964” and that this is “raw, unedited data from FEMA’s National Emergency Management Information System (NEMIS) and as such is subject to a small percentage of human error”, but neither of those is an instruction about using declarations as a risk measure. The other federal record on this page publishes that kind of warning about itself in one sentence, which is the single most useful line either dataset gives a reader. It comes up in step two.

The Method

Four steps, plus one branch for the case where the first step comes back empty. Do them in this order, because each one narrows what the next one has to answer.

Step 1: Get the document that already lists your hazards by name

Start here, because this is the step that answers the question outright rather than approximating it. Your jurisdiction very likely has an adopted document whose entire job is to name the natural hazards that can affect it, and federal regulation specifies what has to be in it.

44 CFR 201.6 governs local mitigation plans. We read the current text two independent ways on August 15, 2026, through the eCFR versioner API and through Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, and the load-bearing sentences matched. At 201.6(c)(2)(i), the risk assessment in such a plan must include:

“A description of the type, location, and extent of all natural hazards that can affect the jurisdiction. The plan must include information on previous occurrences of hazard events and on the probability of future hazard events.”

That is the list you came here for, written by people who live where you live, adopted by a body you can vote for. Ask the county emergency management office for the local hazard mitigation plan that covers your address. If you do not know who that is, USA.gov publishes a local governments and elected officials directory that will get you to your county’s own site, and the emergency management office is normally reachable from there. We used that directory as the route rather than checking it against any particular county, so treat it as a starting point rather than as a guarantee about yours.

Now the qualifiers, because each one changes what you should expect to be handed.

Not every plan is an all-hazards plan. 201.6(a)(2) states that plans prepared for the FMA program “need only address these requirements as they relate to flood hazards in order to be eligible for FMA project grants”, and the same paragraph adds that such plans “must be clearly identified as being flood mitigation plans” and will not meet the eligibility criteria for other mitigation grant programs “unless flooding is the only natural hazard the jurisdiction faces”. If what you are handed is a flood mitigation plan, it is not your hazard list. Ask whether an all-hazards plan also exists.

Not every jurisdiction has one. The plan requirement in 201.6(a)(1) is tied to grant eligibility: “A local government must have a mitigation plan approved pursuant to this section in order to receive HMGP project grants.” The same paragraph continues, broadening it: “A local government must have a mitigation plan approved pursuant to this section in order to apply for and receive mitigation project grants under all other mitigation grant programs.” And 201.6(a)(3) provides that “Regional Administrators may grant an exception to the plan requirement in extraordinary circumstances, such as in a small and impoverished community, when justification is provided.” Read the two sentences that follow that exception before you assume it means no plan will ever exist, because it is a deadline rather than a permanent pass: “In these cases, a plan will be completed within 12 months of the award of the project grant. If a plan is not provided within this timeframe, the project grant will be terminated, and any costs incurred after notice of grant’s termination will not be reimbursed by FEMA.” So the honest expectation is that a plan probably exists, not that one certainly does today.

The plan covering you may not have your county’s name on it. 201.6(a)(4) states that “Multi-jurisdictional plans (e.g., watershed plans) may be accepted, as appropriate, as long as each jurisdiction has participated in the process and has officially adopted the plan”, and adds that “State-wide plans will not be accepted as multi-jurisdictional plans.” Ask which plan covers your address rather than searching for one with your county in the title. Then read what a multi-jurisdictional plan owes your county specifically, because 201.6(c)(2)(iii) conditions it: “For multi-jurisdictional plans, the risk assessment section must assess each jurisdiction’s risks where they vary from the risks facing the entire planning area.” Where your county’s risks match the wider planning area’s, the plan is not required to break them out separately, so the guarantee in 201.6(c)(2)(i) may reach you as a regional list rather than a county one. Ask the office whether your jurisdiction has its own risk section.

Check the date on your copy. 201.6(d)(3) states that a local jurisdiction “must review and revise its plan to reflect changes in development, progress in local mitigation efforts, and changes in priorities, and resubmit it for approval within 5 years in order to continue to be eligible for mitigation project grant funding.” A five-year cycle is a long time in wildfire and flood terms. The date matters more than the letterhead.

One thing 201.6 does not do, reading the section end to end, is require the plan to be posted on a website. It requires content, adoption and review. 201.6(b)(1) requires the planning process to include “An opportunity for the public to comment on the plan during the drafting stage and prior to plan approval”, and 201.6(c)(5) requires “Documentation that the plan has been formally adopted by the governing body of the jurisdiction requesting approval of the plan (e.g., City Council, County Commissioner, Tribal Council).” Public comment and public adoption are both real, and neither is the same as a downloadable PDF. We are only speaking to what 201.6 requires; a state public-records law or a local ordinance may oblige your county to publish it, and we did not check any state’s. If a search does not turn the plan up, the office is the route, and asking for it by its regulatory name tends to work better than asking what disasters happen here.

Step 1b: If the county has no plan, or will not send it, go up a level rather than in a circle

Step one can come back empty, and the qualifiers above are the reasons why: the plan may be flood-only, the office may never send it, and 201.6(a)(3) allows an exception to the requirement in the first place. There has to be somewhere to go that is not back to the start.

Go up a level. USA.gov’s state government websites directory, already a source on this page, is the route to your own state’s site, and the state emergency management agency is normally reachable from there. Ask it the same question you asked the county, and read whatever hazard pages it publishes for your region. We used that directory as a route and did not check any individual state’s pages, so we are not telling you what yours will hold. And 201.6(a)(4) says a state-wide plan will not be accepted as a multi-jurisdictional plan, so a state-level answer is a second-best one rather than a substitute for the county list. It is still an answer where the county loop gives you none. Write down what the state names for your region, and write down that it is a state-level list, so you know which parts of it were never checked against your address.

Step 2: Check the weather record for your county, and read its limits first

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information run the Storm Events Database, and it searches by state and county. Its landing page, read August 15, 2026, states that it “contains the records used to create the official NOAA Storm Data publication” and that “The database currently contains data from January 1950 to April 2026, as entered by NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS).” That end date advances, so the range you see will be later than the one we read.

Before you search, read the four limits the database publishes about itself. This is a source that tells you how to misread it, in its own words, and every one of these limits is the kind of qualifier a summary would drop.

It records impact, not weather. The landing page describes what Storm Data documents as, first, “The occurrence of storms and other significant weather phenomena having sufficient intensity to cause loss of life, injuries, significant property damage, and/or disruption to commerce”. Read the two items that follow that one before concluding the record is loss-only, because they widen it: the same list continues with “Rare, unusual, weather phenomena that generate media attention, such as snow flurries in South Florida or the San Diego coastal area” and with “Other significant meteorological events, such as record maximum or minimum temperatures or precipitation that occur in connection with another event.” Even with those two, the organising idea is still an event that was notable enough to be written up. A hazard that has not yet produced one near you can be genuinely present and genuinely absent from this record.

Its history has seams. The same page states that “Due to changes in the data collection and processing procedures over time, there are unique periods of record available depending on the event type.” The Database Details page spells that out: from 1950 through 1954 only tornado events were recorded, from 1955 through 1992 only tornado, thunderstorm wind and hail events were keyed in from the paper publications, and “From 1996 to present, 48 event types are recorded as defined in NWS Directive 10-1605.” A thin 1970s is a collection artifact, not a calm decade.

Some hazards are not county-shaped. The search page states that “Storm Data are geographically categorized by County or by NWS Forecast Zone. Smaller (areal coverage) are collected by county (Tornado, Thunderstorm Winds, Flash Floods and Hail) while larger scale events are collected by forecast zone (Heat, Cold, Drought, Flood, Tropical & Winter Weather).” It adds that “All searches are by county. For zone-based events, all zones intersecting or within a selected county will be returned from a search.” So a heat or flood result you get back may describe an area larger than your county.

And the emptiest result is the most misleading one. The same page states: “The county selection list is built from the events recorded in the Storm Events Database. An unlisted county means that no records are present.”

That sentence deserves to be the one you carry away from this whole page. No records is not no hazard. If your county does not appear, you have learned something about the database, not about your risk, and the answer is to go back to step one, or to step 1b if step one has already come back empty, rather than to relax.

For the state-level view of which weather hazards actually kill and injure people, the National Weather Service publishes its Weather Related Fatality and Injury Statistics, with both U.S. and state summaries by year. It is a state picture rather than a county one, and it is a fatality and injury picture rather than a frequency one, so read it as context for the hazards your county named in step one rather than as a substitute for them.

Step 3: Set up how the warning will reach you

A hazard list is only useful if something tells you when the hazard is arriving, and this is where a pet household is different: the loading takes time that only starts once the alert reaches you, so the alert has to arrive earlier than it would need to for a household with no animals. That last inference is this page’s own reasoning, not an agency’s instruction, though ready.gov’s own large-animal advice quoted further down runs the same direction.

Which raises a number this page cannot give you and one of ours can: how long your own household actually takes to load. How early to leave with pets turns published hazard lead times into a departure time, and it is where you work that backwards against the hazards you just wrote down. A hurricane’s lead time and a wildfire’s are not the same size, and the same loading time passes or fails against them differently.

Ready.gov’s alerts page, which states Last Updated: 05/27/2026 and which we read on August 15, 2026, has sections on five things: Wireless Emergency Alerts, the Emergency Alert System, NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards, IPAWS, which is the system authorities send through rather than one you receive, and the FEMA App. On WEA it states “You are not charged for receiving WEAs, and there is no need to subscribe.” It also publishes the caveat in the same section, under troubleshooting: “Older phones may not be WEA capable, and some cell phone models require you to enable WEAs.” Check your own handset settings rather than assuming.

One of those five is nationwide and configurable by you, and it is worth naming precisely so you do not over-read it. Of the FEMA App the page states: “Receive real-time weather and emergency alerts from the National Weather Service for up to five locations nationwide.” That is a National Weather Service feed for locations you choose. It is not your county’s own alert list, which is a different thing carrying road closures, shelter openings and evacuation notices that the Weather Service does not issue.

That county list is the one you have to go and find. Local opt-in alert systems are run by states, counties and municipalities one at a time, each with its own operator and its own sign-up page, and none of the channels on ready.gov’s page is a single registration that subscribes you to your own county’s notices wherever you live. Your county’s system has to be found on your county’s own page and signed up for there, before anything happens. Our wildfire evacuation alert apps guide works that layer in detail for fire-exposed households, including why a phone-only stack has a single shared weakness. And because the words a warning arrives in are set locally too, evacuation levels decoded for pet owners covers why the level or zone language you learned in one state may mean nothing in another.

Step 4: Turn the list into a pet prep profile

You now have a list of hazard names. Here is how to convert it, and here is which parts of the conversion are ours.

Ready.gov’s all-hazards index states the goal plainly: “Know what disasters and hazards could affect your area, how to get emergency alerts, and where you would go if you and your family need to evacuate.” That page states Last Updated: 07/21/2026. It is a three-part instruction, and steps one through three above are the first two parts of it.

The third part, where you would go, is the one that changes a pet plan most, and ready.gov’s pet page gives both the reason and the instruction in the same bullet: “Many public shelters and hotels do not allow pets inside. Know a safe place where you can take your pets before disasters and emergencies happen.” The same page, which states Last Updated: 03/20/2026, closes the loop back to the local office this method is built on: “Contact your local emergency management office, animal shelter or animal control office to get additional advice and information if you’re unsure how to care for your pet in case of an emergency.”

Read that sentence as what it is. The national page is telling you it cannot answer the local question. Neither can we, which is why the last step of this method is a phone call.

Sorting your hazards into the four things a pet plan is made of. This site is organised around four hubs, evacuation kits, multi-pet planning, disaster playbooks and power outages, and mapping a hazard list onto them is this page’s own reasoning rather than anything an agency publishes. Two of the four are hazard-shaped and two are not, which is worth knowing before you sort:

• If your list includes anything with an evacuation in it, hurricane, wildfire, flood, tsunami, dam failure, the pet emergency playbooks hub is the per-hazard layer, and the destination question is the expensive one to leave unanswered.
• The pet evacuation kits hub is not tied to any one hazard; it covers kit structure and staging, and it matters most for whatever arrives with minutes or no warning, tornado and earthquake being the two obvious ones, where the kit has to be staged rather than assembled. Earthquake and tornado pet prep is the per-hazard page filed under that hub, not a hub in its own right.
• If your list includes anything that takes the power out, and almost every list does, pets through power outages is the shelter-in-place layer.
• The fourth hub, multi-pet emergency planning, is not on your hazard list at all, because it is set by your household rather than your county. It applies to a three-animal household whichever hazard arrives, and it is the reason a hazard lookup cannot finish a pet plan on its own.

Then hand the hazard names to the builder, once each. The pet emergency kit builder asks you to choose a single value under “Biggest regional hazard” from seven options, alongside your animal counts and your intended destination, and it rewrites the list around that choice. The builder takes six named hazards plus a general setting: hurricane, flood, wildfire or smoke, winter storm, earthquake and extreme heat. If your plan names a hazard it does not carry, tornado and dam failure being the common ones, run it on “Not sure / general prep” and take the hazard-specific items from that hazard’s page in the pet emergency playbooks hub instead. A county with four hazards does not have a single biggest one in any useful sense. Run the builder once per hazard you found, print each result, and keep the union of the items, noting which hazard each unusual item belongs to so you know what you can leave behind when only one of them is happening. That instruction is ours, not a published protocol, and it exists because our own tool takes one hazard while step one hands you several. A union of four lists is heavier than any one of them, so weigh it against what one person can carry alongside the animals before you call it a go-bag, which is the arithmetic in multi-pet go-bag math. The builder’s own page also makes a point worth carrying into this step: the destination changes the kit more than the hazard does.

Species. Where a source publishes a species-specific instruction, we quote it instead of inventing a matrix. Ready.gov’s pet page carries a section headed “Tips for Large Animals” which opens “If you have pets such as horses, goats or pigs on your property, be sure to prepare before a disaster” and includes “Evacuate animals earlier, whenever possible. Map out primary and secondary routes in advance.” Two things to notice. Ready.gov splits that advice by species, not by hazard. And its instruction is about lead time, which is the same variable your hazard list controls: a hurricane gives you days to use that advice and a wildfire may give you an hour.

Read the rest of that same list rather than stopping at the lead-time bullet, because it does not assume evacuation succeeds. It continues with “Make available vehicles and trailers needed for transporting and supporting each type of animal. Also make available experienced handlers and drivers.”, with “Ensure destinations have food, water, veterinary care and handling equipment.”, and then with the case the lead-time bullet does not cover: “If evacuation is not possible, animal owners must decide whether to move large animals to a barn or turn them loose outside.” That last sentence is ready.gov describing a decision it leaves to the owner rather than an instruction it gives, and a large-animal household should have settled which way it would go before the hazard list is anything but paper. It is not a free choice, and two things have to travel with that sentence.

The first is that which branch is right depends on the hazard, and at least one jurisdiction publishes a flat rule against turning a horse loose. The Town of Woodside, California states “Remain calm and never free your horse to fend for itself.” Woodside writes that about evacuating when time is short rather than about the case where evacuation is impossible, so read it as a jurisdiction’s position on the release option and not as a direct answer to ready.gov’s sentence. Our horse and livestock evacuation basics page works the fire, wind and flood branches separately, because they do not point the same way. Read the branch for your hazard before you open a gate.

The second is that if you are working from ready.gov’s Spanish page rather than its English one, that sentence does not name the same destination in both languages. The Spanish section below sets out what each one names, and it is the divergence on this pair with the most riding on it.

This page does not publish a species-by-hazard grid. A cell in one needs a source for that exact pairing, and we have sourced cells for only a handful. The per-species pages carry what we do have, horse and livestock evacuation basics for large animals and where exotic pets are accepted during an evacuation for the animals a door turns away.

And the destination question, which your hazard list sets and your county answers. Whether your county runs a pet-friendly shelter is not a hazard question but it is a county question, and it is answered in the same phone call. Our state pet shelter policy finder gives you each state’s own published wording as a starting point, and when your county has no pet-friendly shelter builds the fallback ladder for the answer nobody wants.

Reading Ready.gov in Spanish

Ready.gov publishes a Spanish hazard tree, and we verified the following addresses returned HTTP 200 on August 15, 2026: ready.gov/es/cuidado-de-los-animales, ready.gov/es/huracanes, ready.gov/es/inundaciones, ready.gov/es/incendios-forestales, ready.gov/es/tornados and ready.gov/es/terremotos.

The Spanish pet page, which also states Last Updated: 03/20/2026, publishes the local-office instruction in its own words:

“Comuníquese con la oficina local para el manejo de emergencias, albergue de mascotas o de control de animales para obtener más consejos o información en caso de que usted no esté seguro de cómo cuidar a sus mascotas si ocurre una emergencia.”

That is ready.gov’s Spanish text, quoted directly. This page does not translate agency material and does not compose care instructions in any language, so the block above is a quotation and no Spanish on this page is our own wording.

We also will not tell you the Spanish and English pages say the same thing, because on this pair they demonstrably do not. In the large-animal section, the English page reads “Evacuate animals earlier, whenever possible. Map out primary and secondary routes in advance.” The Spanish page reads “Evacúe a los animales siempre que sea posible. Prepare mapas de rutas principales y alternativas con anticipación.” In the first sentence of that pair the English carries the word “earlier” and the Spanish does not carry an equivalent of it, while the second sentence of the pair does have “con anticipación” against the English “in advance”. That is a difference in wording we read on both pages on August 15, 2026, stated as an observation rather than as a judgment about which page is right. This comparison is ours, not something ready.gov publishes, and we are not asserting that either page is a rendering of the other on any other point either. If you are working from the Spanish page and lead time matters to you, and with large animals it does, read the English page as well rather than assuming one is a rendering of the other.

A second divergence sits in the last bullet of the same list, and it matters more. The English page reads “If evacuation is not possible, animal owners must decide whether to move large animals to a barn or turn them loose outside.” The Spanish page reads “Si no es posible desalojar, los dueños de animales deben decidir si trasladan a los animales grandes a un refugio o si los liberan al aire libre.” The English names a barn. The Spanish names un refugio, which is the same word the Spanish page uses for a public emergency shelter higher up on itself, in “Muchos refugios públicos y hoteles no permiten que las mascotas se alojen.” Both pages were read on August 15, 2026.

Reading the refugio of the large-animal bullet as the same kind of place as the refugios públicos of the earlier one is ours, not something ready.gov publishes, and we are not telling you which meaning the agency intended. We are naming it because of where it lands: a Spanish-reading large-animal owner who takes it that way would head for the one kind of destination the same page says often will not take animals, at the moment evacuation has already failed. If that bullet is the one you are acting on, read the English wording alongside it, and settle the destination in advance with the office rather than at the gate.

Retrieval Status for This Page

Named so you can weigh what is here, in the shape this site uses whenever a source will not open.

Reached and quoted: eCFR and Cornell LII for 44 CFR 201.6, by two independent routes with the load-bearing sentences matching. NOAA NCEI Storm Events Database landing, search and Database Details pages. NWS hazstat. Ready.gov’s pet page in English and Spanish, its all-hazards index, and its alerts page. The English pet page was retrieved at both ready.gov/pets and ready.gov/animals, which returned identical page text. NOAA Weather Radio’s own page. USA.gov’s local and state government directories. The Town of Woodside’s horse evacuation planning page, opened directly rather than relayed from our own coverage of it.

Reached, and it did not contain what we needed: the FEMA ArcGIS services directory, whose NRI folder returned four geoprocessing services and no county layer. FEMA’s OpenFEMA DisasterDeclarationsSummaries endpoint, which answered fully and is the wrong instrument for this question.

Not reached: every hazards.fema.gov/nri path, each via a 301 to a www.fema.gov address that returned 403; and www.fema.gov HTML pages generally, which returned 403 on every page path tried, though the OpenFEMA API on the same host answered. Those are gaps in our retrieval on August 15, 2026 and are not claims about the status of anything FEMA runs.

The One-Sitting Version

• Find your county emergency management office through your county’s own site, and ask which local hazard mitigation plan covers your address. Ask by name.
• When you get it, check three things before reading it: the adoption date, whether it is an all-hazards plan or a flood mitigation plan, and whether it is a multi-jurisdictional plan covering more than your county.
• Write down every natural hazard the plan names for your jurisdiction. That list, not a national ranking, is your prep scope.
• If no plan covers you, or the office will not send one, do not loop back to the same call. Take whatever hazards your state emergency management agency’s own pages name for your region, reached through USA.gov’s state government websites directory, and write down that what you have is a state-level list rather than your county’s.
• Search NOAA’s Storm Events Database for your state and county. Treat a thin or empty result as a gap in the record rather than as reassurance, and remember that heat, cold, drought, flood, tropical and winter weather come back by forecast zone rather than by county.
• Sign up for your county’s own alert system on your county’s own page, since none of the national alert channels subscribes you to your own county’s notices. County systems are opt-in, one jurisdiction at a time. Then check Wireless Emergency Alerts on every handset in the household, because ready.gov’s alerts page states that “Older phones may not be WEA capable, and some cell phone models require you to enable WEAs.”
• Sort the hazard list: which entries force an evacuation, which arrive with no warning, and which take the power out. An entry can land in more than one column.
• Time your own loading once, with the animals, and set it against the lead time your worst hazard actually gives you. That arithmetic is on how early to leave with pets.
• Run the kit builder once per hazard, print each list, and keep the union. Then weigh the union against what you can actually carry with the animals in your other hand, which is what multi-pet go-bag math is for.
• Ask the same office two more questions while you have them: whether the county operates a pet-friendly shelter, and whether it requires pre-registration.
• Put the hazard list, the office’s phone number and the shelter answer on one page in the go-bag, dated.
• Redo the whole thing when your plan’s date rolls over, which the regulation puts on a five-year cycle.

Where to Go Next

This page is the scoping step for our pet emergency playbooks hub. Once you know your hazards, three routes open.

Pack for them. The pet emergency kit builder turns a hazard, an animal roster and a destination into a list, and the pet evacuation kits hub covers the structure underneath it.

Time them. If a hurricane is on your list, the hurricane-season pet prep calendar puts dated rows against your basin’s published season. If your list is mostly no-warning hazards, staging beats scheduling, and shelter in place or evacuate is the decision that sits on top of both.

Settle the destination. When your county has no pet-friendly shelter builds the ladder, and the state pet shelter policy finder gives you each state’s own words to start the call with.

Then make the call this week, while nothing is happening. The office that would be swamped during an event answers the phone on a Tuesday afternoon. Ask the date of the plan they send you, and put your own reminder at the five-year mark that 201.6(d)(3) sets for the county’s own review, rather than assuming the list stays accurate until then.