Scoring Methodology

The EPI in one paragraph

The Emergency Preparedness Index is a 0–100 composite of six category scores — Weather, Environment, Civil, Infrastructure, Health, and Cyber — reflecting active threat conditions for a location over roughly the last 24–48 hours. It is a "what needs your attention today" number, not a long-term risk rating. Bands: 0–19 Low, 20–44 Moderate, 45–69 High, 70–100 Critical.

How the live categories are scored

• Weather — scored from active National Weather Service alert tiers: Advisory +15, Watch +30, Warning +50 (counted per county under warning), Particularly Dangerous Situation / Extreme +70. Capped at 100.
• Environment — earthquakes within 100 miles over the last 7 days, scored by moment magnitude (under 3.0 negligible; 3.0–4.9 minor; 5.0–6.9 moderate-to-major; 7.0+ severe), combined with the nearest river gauge's current stage against its NWS flood-stage threshold, plus satellite wildfire detections within 50 miles.
• Civil (federal) — active FEMA declarations for the state: none = 0 base, emergency / fire-management declaration +40, major disaster declaration +70.
• Infrastructure — three live signals combined.
  
  Power outages come from ODIN, the Outage Data Initiative Nationwide, run by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Electricity. Utilities report outages county by county in near real time. Customers without power in your county: 50,000 or more +70, 10,000+ +55, 5,000+ +40, 1,000+ +25, 100+ +12, any at all +5. Where we have a reading you'll see the utility's name and its own estimate of when power returns.
  
  Space weather from NOAA measures the two things that take infrastructure down at scale: geomagnetic storms stressing the power grid (G1 +10 through G5 +80) and solar radio blackouts degrading HF communications (R1 +5 through R5 +55).
  
  Airport disruption from the FAA, for airports in your state: ground stop +35, average delay of 45 minutes or more +25, 15 minutes or more +15. Routine closure notices are deliberately excluded — the FAA's closure list is dominated by notices restricting one class of small aircraft, not real shutdowns, and treating those as closures would raise false alarms.
• When we cannot see your power grid, we say so. Reporting to ODIN is voluntary, so some utilities take part and others do not. That creates a trap: an area with no participating utility looks identical to an area with no outages. We refuse to let that silence read as safety. We track which counties have actually been observed reporting, and if yours is not one of them, the Infrastructure card says "no participating utility reporting in your area — grid status unknown", carries a gray Est. badge rather than a green Live one, and never claims your grid is normal. A quiet reading and an unwatched one are not the same thing, and you deserve to know which one you're looking at.
• Health — CDC weekly hospital reporting for your state. Inpatient bed occupancy: 95%+ = +60, 90%+ = +45, 85%+ = +30, 80%+ = +15, 75%+ = +5. Plus confirmed COVID, flu and RSV admissions measured against the prior four-week average: a rise of 50% or more +20, 25% or more +10.
• Cyber (national) — the CISA catalog of vulnerabilities confirmed to be under active attack, counting those added in the last 7 days and banded against a normal week (a typical week runs 3–15). Vulnerabilities tied to known ransomware campaigns add more. This is a national figure, not a local one — cyber threat does not vary meaningfully by ZIP code, and we would rather say so than invent state-by-state variation.

Every category score carries a live flag. Dashboard cards show a green Live badge when the number was computed from real-time feeds, and a gray Est. badge when a feed was unreachable or the category has not been wired to live data yet — so you always know which numbers are real-time and which are estimates.

Data Sources

There is no reliable public real-time feed for local incidents such as active shooter events, so those are added by our team from verified news reports as they're confirmed.