Trinity County, California: hazard history

FEMA declared 32 disasters that named Trinity County between 1964 and 2023.

Most recent declarations

• EM-3592 2023 · Flood · Severe Winter Storms, Flooding, Landslides, And Mudslides
• DR-4699 2023 · Severe Storm · Severe Winter Storms, Straight-line Winds, Flooding, Landslides, And Mudslides
• DR-4683 2022 · Flood · Severe Winter Storms, Flooding, Landslides, And Mudslides
• FM-5412 2021 · Fire · Monument Fire
• DR-4610 2021 · Fire · Wildfires
• DR-4558 2020 · Fire · Wildfires
• EM-3428 2020 · Biological · Covid-19
• DR-4482 2020 · Biological · Covid-19 Pandemic
• DR-4434 2019 · Severe Storm · Severe Winter Storms, Flooding, Landslides, And Mudslides
• DR-4431 2019 · Severe Storm · Severe Winter Storms, Flooding, Landslides, And Mudslides

Not counted above: 33 statewide declarations, which covered every county in California. A declaration is a decision to send federal help, not a measure of how bad an event was. Records run from 1953. Source: FEMA OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations Summaries.

Records start in 1996. Damage is NOAA's estimate at the time, in nominal dollars, and is often rounded; it is not insurance claims data. A storm that crossed two NOAA zones in this county is recorded, and counted, once per zone.

NOAA storm event records in Trinity County each year. The busiest year was 2021, with 74 records.

Years with no record are left out of the table, not shown as zero.

Costliest records

1. Wildfire · Sep 1, 2020$27.2M
   NOAA name: SOUTHERN TRINITY · NOAA record 918603
2. Wildfire · Oct 1, 2021$21.5M
   NOAA name: NORTHERN TRINITY · NOAA record 984430
3. Wildfire · Oct 1, 2021$17.9M
   NOAA name: NORTHERN TRINITY · NOAA record 984425
4. Heavy Rain · Feb 9, 2017$4.0M
   NOAA name: TRINITY · NOAA record 682311
5. Wildfire · Aug 28, 2001$3.5M
   NOAA name: TRINITY · NOAA record 5265820

Each line is one NOAA record, linked to its page at NOAA. One large storm can appear more than once if NOAA recorded it in several zones of this county. Dollars are nominal.

The National Flood Insurance Program paid $116K on 22 claims in Trinity County from 1986 to 2019.

A count of claims, not a rate: NFIP publishes no count of insured homes beside it, and most flood damage is uninsured. Nominal dollars. Records run from 1978 to 2024; claims filed without a county code are not on any county page. Source: FEMA OpenFEMA FIMA NFIP Redacted Claims.

A hazard vulnerability analysis rates each hazard for probability, impact, preparedness and response. Probability is the one column the county’s federal record can fill — NCEI storm events from 1996 to 2025 and FEMA declarations naming the county — and this is what it says for a facility here, on the 0–3 scale of the all-hazards structure surveyors expect. The other six columns are the facility’s own judgment about its building, and Calchis leaves them blank.

A dash means the record does not speak to that hazard; it is not a zero. Whether a finished document satisfies the CMS Emergency Preparedness Rule is the facility’s finding and its surveyor’s. Complete the HVA for a facility in Trinity County — the technological, human and hazardous-materials rows, the six facility columns, the approval and the printed document — or read the sample analysis on that page first.

• Every figure is counted from public federal records held by Calchis: NOAA NCEI Storm Events, FEMA OpenFEMA Disaster Declarations, and FEMA NFIP claims. Nothing is modeled or estimated.
• NOAA files some events by county and others by forecast zone, and names both. Records are counted as Trinity County when their NOAA name is this county's name, alone or with a word like “Coastal” or “Inland” in front. The county codes NOAA also publishes have not been loaded for California yet; when they are, this page will count by code instead, and some counties' records will grow. NOAA names counted here: NORTHERN TRINITY, SOUTHERN TRINITY, TRINITY. Zones named for something else, such as a mountain range or two counties at once, are left out: 47% of California's NOAA records.
• Counts last rebuilt from the source records on Sep 15, 2026.