County disaster narrative
A dated account of a county’s flood history that places NOAA flood-event evidence alongside FEMA disaster declarations for the same area and period, without assuming the two describe the same incident.
GovBot Disaster History · by Ideation Lab, Corp.
Build a sourced disaster-history brief
Ask about a county and a period, and get a short, dated account drawn from NOAA flood-event records and public FEMA data — with links to the underlying sources, the period each source covers, and a plain statement of what the records can and cannot tell you.
- ChatGPT plugin published
- No sign-in required
What you can ask
Three kinds of county research
Each one answers a specific question a planner, reporter, researcher or resident might bring. They draw on six read-only searches of public records, and nothing is submitted or changed on your behalf. The application has no persistent search-history store. Public FEMA responses can be cached in memory for five minutes. See the privacy notice for log retention details.
Recovery-project research
Public Assistance projects for a declared disaster and county, with each kind of dollar figure labeled for what it is, so project amounts and federal obligations are never blended into one number.
Redacted flood-claim summaries
A qualified summary of a county’s publicly released, redacted National Flood Insurance Program claims, with a handful of example rows and clear notes on what redaction hides.
What a useful answer contains
A brief you can check, not just read
A brief is organized so you can check it against the original records.
-
Location and period
The county name, state and FIPS code, and the exact years or disaster number the answer covers.
-
Dated evidence rows with links
Individual records with their dates and a link back to the public source, so each statement can be traced.
-
Source period and retrieval date
When the underlying data runs from and to, kept separate from when it was looked up. These are different facts, and both matter.
-
Page limits
A note when results were capped or paged, so a partial list is never mistaken for a complete one.
-
A short conclusion
A few plain sentences on what the records show — and what they leave open.
Example prompts
Start with a county and a question
Select the text of any example to copy it. Naming the county, state, FIPS code and period helps the answer stay precise.
Build a sourced disaster-history brief for Bartholomew County, Indiana (FIPS 18005) from 2000 through 2025. Combine NOAA flood events with FEMA disaster declarations, and include dates, links and the source period for each.
For FEMA disaster 4827, research Public Assistance projects in Buncombe County, North Carolina (FIPS 37021). Keep project amounts and federal obligations separate, and note any page limits.
Summarize redacted NFIP flood-insurance claims for county 18005 from 2020 through 2025, show five example records, and explain what the redacted data can’t tell me.
Reading the records carefully
Different records answer different questions
A flood event, a disaster declaration, a recovery project and an insurance claim can appear in the same county in the same year. That alone does not establish that they describe the same incident, the same property, a total loss, or anything about future risk. Likewise, finding no matching records, or being unable to reach a source, does not mean there was no disaster or loss.
Dollar figures are kept distinct
Public records use several kinds of amounts. Answers label each one and do not add them together.
- Damage estimates
- Reported estimates attached to a storm-event record; approximate, not audited losses.
- Project amounts
- The amount recorded on a recovery project, which can change as the project is revised.
- Obligations
- Federal funds committed to a project, which is not the same as money already spent.
- Payments
- Amounts paid on an insurance claim.
- Coverage
- Coverage amounts reported for a policy. They are not a promise of what would be paid in future, because eligibility, deductibles and exclusions differ.
- Requests
- Amounts requested or claimed. For hazard mitigation, requested funding is still shown as a request, even where the source status later shows a decision.
What this is not
- It is county-level historical research. It does not provide current warnings, forecasts or emergency guidance — follow local officials and the National Weather Service in an emergency.
- It does not determine a property’s flood zone, insurance premium, or eligibility for any program, and it does not certify that any place is safe.
- It will not attempt to reidentify people or properties behind redacted claim records.
Sources
Where the evidence comes from
The workflows keep each source’s coverage period separate from the date the records were retrieved.
NOAA Storm Events flood records
Flood-related Storm Events records from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, held as a fixed 1996–2025 snapshot. Hash checks confirm file integrity, not the factual accuracy of the reports. Counts are records, not unique disasters, and records can share episodes. County searches return county-coded records only and exclude forecast-zone records, including older Flood records coded to zones; no zone-to-county crosswalk is performed.
- Coverage
- 1996–2025
- How it’s read
- From the held snapshot, not refreshed at lookup
- Original
- NOAA Storm Events Database
OpenFEMA public datasets
Four public FEMA datasets covering disaster declarations, Public Assistance funded projects, redacted NFIP claims and hazard mitigation subapplications.
- Coverage
- As published by FEMA at the recorded retrieval time
- How it’s read
- Fetched from OpenFEMA; successful responses may be reused for up to five minutes
- Original
- OpenFEMA data sets
Availability
Available in ChatGPT
The GovBot Disaster History plugin for ChatGPT is published in the OpenAI plugin directory and available to install. To find it, search ChatGPT's plugin directory for the exact name GovBot Disaster History. Current statuses for all GovBot plugins are listed at govbot.ai/openai-plugins.html.
The service requires no sign-in and reads only public records. Questions are welcome at hello@govbot.ai.