The Community Resilience Estimates (CRE) identify communities that may have difficulty withstanding and recovering from disasters because of certain factors like poverty, vehicle access and housing conditions.

These indicators are available for every state, county and neighborhood (census tract) in the United States and Puerto Rico.

The Community Resilience Estimates Viewer is an interactive tool that highlights the CRE and areas that may be vulnerable to disasters.

According to the map, for example,18.5% of people in Buncombe County may have difficulty recovering from natural disasters. This is statistically similar to the national estimate of 20.4% of the population. 

The CRE program continues to develop data products to assist with all stages of a disaster. To share feedback on current tools or suggest ideas for new disaster-related information, email the team at [email protected].

Hurricane Helene was one of the most devastating hurricanes in American history, responsible for at least 249 fatalities, more than 4 million power outages, and countless road and bridge collapses. The Census Bureau is currently prototyping tools to help gauge the full scale of its impact and in recovery efforts.

One resource is the Census Bureau’s Assessment, Recovery, and Evaluation datasets (CAREs), which curates data from multiple federal sources, including the Census Bureau; Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); Department of Energy (DOE); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

CAREs provides data users with relevant information about the population, disaster exposure and recovery all in one place.

Among the major findings: Nearly 1.5 million households registered for aid in counties with a disaster declaration.

This amounted to approximately 18 registrations for every 100 occupied households throughout the disaster area. In Buncombe County, that rate jumped to 86 registrations per 100 occupied households, underscoring the immense need for assistance within the county.  

The Census Business Builder (CBB) is an interactive resource that provides key economic and demographic data down to the census tract level.

During declared disasters, this tool allows users to access detailed supply chain reports highlighting top imports, employment patterns, and potentially impacted products to help inform response and recovery efforts.

According to the CBB, some 826 U.S. employer establishments (those with at least one paid employee) closed and around 960 opened from March 2022 to March 2023 in Buncombe County.

Tracking future business shifts is important because it can help measure recovery efforts.

OnTheMap for Emergency Management is a tool that provides an easy-to-use mapping interface for viewing the potential impacts of natural disasters in the United States.

Maps, charts and reports include workforce, population and housing characteristics for hurricanes, floods, wildfires, winter storms and federal disaster declaration areas.

To provide users with information for rapidly changing hazard events, OnTheMap for Emergency Management automatically incorporates real-time data updates from the National Weather Service’s (NWS) National Hurricane Center, the Department of Interior (DOI), the Department of Agriculture (DOA), and FEMA.

Every four hours, these current disaster event boundaries are combined with the latest American Community Survey (ACS), Decennial, and LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) data. This pipeline gives emergency preparedness and response professionals information they can use in real time.

Demographic and economic data for disaster-impacted areas are available for both current and historical events.

All of these data resources can be found on the Census Bureau’s Emergency Management Hub at disasters.census.gov.

Along with data tools, the hub contains America Counts articles, data visualizations and pages that allow users to quickly find pertinent information about specific events.