Florida Hurricanes, Measured: 59 FEMA Declarations, and the Decade With Three

Part two of three. Part one counts hurricanes city by city; part three counts flood claims.

A hurricane becomes a federal event in two ways. An emergency declaration funds protective measures, often before landfall: evacuation, sheltering, debris pre-positioning. A major disaster declaration opens the full recovery programs for people and public infrastructure afterward. OpenFEMA lists every one, and every county each designated.

For Florida hurricanes since 1960 there are 59: 38 major disasters and 21 emergencies.

Three decades, very different

Period	Hurricane declarations
1996–2005	16
2006–2015	3
2016–2024	28

The middle decade is the one people forget. After the 2004 and 2005 seasons Florida went ten years with only three hurricane declarations. Since 2016 it has averaged three a year. A response plan, a staffing model or an insurance book calibrated on the quiet decade was calibrated on the outlier.

By county

County	Hurricane declarations	Major disaster	Emergency
Franklin	28	20	8
Bay	26	18	8
Gulf	26	18	8
Monroe	26	15	11
Broward	25	14	11
Collier	25	17	8
Escambia	24	15	9

The Panhandle leads. Franklin, Bay and Gulf counties, from Apalachicola to Panama City, have been designated more often than Miami-Dade or the Keys. Gulf storms that make landfall anywhere from Pensacola to the Big Bend tend to designate them, and Michael (2018) struck Bay and Gulf directly.

Monroe and Broward have the most emergency declarations, eleven each: the Keys and the Atlantic coast are where evacuations are called before storms that then turn away.

What the record cannot tell you

A declaration counts a request granted, not damage. One declaration usually designates many counties, and a county designated for an emergency may have seen no damage at all. Requests denied are not in the data.

Policy changes over time. What qualifies for a declaration, and how quickly a governor requests one, has changed since 1960. Compare decades with that in mind.

For the county emergency manager

The declaration that follows a storm is built on the record a county keeps during it: when it activated, what it asked for and when, what it spent. Calchis keeps that record as the incident runs, from the ICS-213 resource requests to the numbered situation reports, and every county above has its own county page built from the same federal records.

Sources: FEMA, OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries, incident type Hurricane, Florida, 1960–2024, as loaded into Calchis and queried October 7, 2026; counts are distinct disaster numbers.