Natural-hazard risk by community area
Which natural hazards threaten each part of Chicago most? Search your address to see your community area, or click any area on the map. Switch between FEMA’s composite risk score and individual hazards — cold wave, heat, tornado, winter weather, river flooding, and Lake Michigan coastal flooding.
How to read this map
The FEMA National Risk Index scores each census tract from 0 to 100 by combining a hazard’s expected annual loss with the community’s social vulnerability and resilience. Higher means more risk. We show each community area as the area-weighted average of the census tracts it covers, so an area spanning several tracts blends their scores by how much land each contributes. Switch hazards with the tabs; the composite rolls all of FEMA’s hazards together.
Chicago’s hazard mix is its own — cold wave and heat wave score highest citywide (the 1995 heat wave remains the deadliest weather disaster in the city’s history), tornado and winter weather follow, and river flooding spikes along the Calumet and the Des Plaines. Lake Michigan gives the lakefront a coastal-flooding score that no inland city carries.
The drawer lists each community area’s composite score and, as advisory context only, its social-vulnerability score. FEMA revised the social-vulnerability methodology in the December 2025 release, so treat that number as directional rather than a precise, comparable index.
Source: FEMA National Risk Index (December 2025 vintage), by census tract, intersected with Census TIGER/Line tract boundaries for Cook County. Risk is relative to the nation, so even a lower-scoring Chicago community area faces real hazards. See methodology for details.