EPA enforcement, energy systems, water, climate and weather records, and natural-hazard and disaster programs, grouped deliberately as the physical-world datasets.
The United States runs on 1.38 terawatts of generating capacity, and the federal filings say who owns every megawatt. Computed from Form EIA-860: independent power producers now out-own the investor-owned utilities on your bill; the federal government is one of the largest owners in the country; and a quarter-terawatt is jointly owned through capacity shares most customers have never heard of.
The USGS National Earthquake Information Center maintains a catalog of every recorded earthquake globally — magnitude 2.5+ events back to 1900, with 100,000+ events per year above M4 globally. Here is the data structure, how to access the API and bulk downloads, and what the catalog reveals about fault hazard zones, the Oklahoma induced seismicity surge from wastewater injection, and historical earthquake patterns.
EPA's Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) publishes every CAA, CWA, RCRA, and TSCA enforcement case — facility violations, formal actions, penalties assessed, and compliance status for 800,000+ regulated facilities. Here is the data structure, how to query it, and what the database reveals about which facilities violate the most, which industries face the steepest penalties, and where environmental justice and enforcement gaps align.
A guide to building a single facility view from four EPA compliance datasets — joining the RCRA hazardous-waste registry, the Toxic Release Inventory, Clean Air Act compliance, and the ECHO enforcement record through the Facility Registry Service ID, so a site’s permits, pollution, violations, and penalties come together in one place. Covers the join key, the program identifiers, the environmental-justice questions the assembled data answers, and a worked Python walkthrough against EPA’s key-free public APIs.
Four federal hazard datasets — the National Weather Service alert feed, NOAA’s Storm Events Database, the USGS earthquake catalog, and FEMA’s disaster declarations — line the warning, the event, the damage, and the federal response up in one view. A guide to joining them on place and time so an analyst can measure warning lead time against casualties and see what share of damaging events ever became a federal disaster.
Four federal energy datasets — EIA’s plant and generator inventory, the ownership schedule, the electricity generation and price series, and FERC’s market-manipulation enforcement record — joined on the plant code and the operator name into one view of the physical grid, who owns it, what it produces, and who polices it.
A guide to reconstructing the full arc of a US catastrophe from four OpenFEMA datasets — joining the disaster declaration, the Public Assistance grants that rebuild, the Hazard Mitigation projects that prevent the next loss, and the NFIP flood claims that pay homeowners — so one hurricane, wildfire, or flood can be followed from the day the President signs the declaration through every dollar the federal government spends in response.
EIA Form 860’s ownership schedule records who actually holds the equity in every US electric generator — the regulated utilities, merchant producers, public power authorities, and financial investors — and the joint-ownership percentages that untangle who controls how many megawatts across the fleet. A field-level guide to the ~5,400-record ownership file, joint ownership in baseload coal and nuclear plants, parent-company rollups, and the Python to aggregate owned capacity and flag co-owned plants.
The EPA’s inventory of every public water system in the country — an inventory file of roughly 400,000 records keyed by PWSID, of which about 150,000 are active systems, from the largest city utilities to the campground wells that serve twenty-five people. A field-level guide to system types, size categories, source water, state primacy, and the inventory that the violations and inspection datasets all hang off of.
FEMA’s Assistance to Firefighters Grants and its sister programs — SAFER staffing, Fire Prevention and Safety, and EMPG — are the everyday-readiness side of FEMA, putting turnout gear, breathing apparatus, apparatus, training, and firefighters themselves into local departments. OpenFEMA publishes the awards as roughly 74,000 grant records: who got funded, where, for what, and how federal dollars reach volunteer and rural departments.
FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants pay to reduce disaster risk before and after the storm — the preventive complement to the rebuild-after Public Assistance program — and OpenFEMA publishes roughly 56,000 funded mitigation projects. A field-level guide to HMGP, FMA, PDM, and BRIC; buyouts, elevations, safe rooms, and mitigation plans; the “$6 saved per $1 spent” finding and the equity debate over benefit-cost scoring; and a Python workflow that sums federal share by program, state, and project type.
The National Weather Service issues every official US watch, warning, and advisory in the Common Alerting Protocol — the same machine-readable feed that drives the Emergency Alert System, Wireless Emergency Alerts, and NOAA Weather Radio. Our weather_alerts table is a rolling snapshot of roughly 3,000 active and recently expired messages, keyed by alert identifier, mapped to NWS zones, and complementary to the deep NOAA storm-events archive.
The Public Assistance program is the federal government’s largest disaster-recovery grant — the money that rebuilds roads, schools, hospitals, and water systems after a presidential disaster declaration. OpenFEMA publishes roughly 195,000 funded-project summaries showing what was rebuilt and at what cost; this guide explains the Stafford Act frame, the work categories, the cost-share, and how to join the spending to the declarations.
When a nuclear licensee breaks a safety requirement, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issues a Notice of Violation, a civil penalty, or an order — and records it. This guide reads the ~1,800-action enforcement file as the federal ledger of nuclear-safety accountability, from the color-coded Reactor Oversight Process to the lessons of Three Mile Island and Fukushima.
The US Geological Survey runs ComCat, the authoritative catalog of global earthquakes — our slice holds ~101,000 magnitude-4-and-greater events worldwide since 2020, each with an origin time, location, depth, and magnitude type. A field guide to the ANSS comprehensive catalog, why depth and magnitude type matter, the ShakeMap–PAGER impact pipeline, and the no-key FDSN web service that serves it all in minutes.
Before a public water system ever incurs a drinking-water violation, a sanitary surveyor usually walks the site — the wellhead, the chlorination room, the storage tank, the operator logbook — and records what is wrong. EPA stores those inspections in the Safe Drinking Water Information System: roughly 433,150 site visits, each keyed to a public water system and scored across eight evaluation areas.
Every factory, refinery, power plant, and chemical works in America that emits to the air sits somewhere between in compliance and High Priority Violator, and EPA keeps the ledger in ICIS-Air — roughly 279,262 stationary sources, each carrying its Clean Air Act program classification, permitted pollutants, compliance status, last full compliance evaluation, and formal enforcement actions.
Behind every EPA enforcement action is a list of names — the companies, municipalities, and individuals the United States actually pursued. EPA keeps that list in the Integrated Compliance Information System, and surfaced through ECHO it amounts to 199,682 defendant records, each tying a named party to a case number and flagging whether it appears in the complaint, the settlement, or both.
EPA combines the National Emissions Inventory and the Toxics Release Inventory into a single facility-level record of what American industry emits — 10.4 million rows, one per facility per pollutant per year, each keyed to an FRS Registry ID that links a smokestack to its permits, enforcement history, and census tract.
The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information Storm Events Database is the official federal record of severe weather in the United States — 48 event types including tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and winter storms with records back to 1950, covering property damage estimates, crop damage, injuries, deaths, and event narratives across every county in the country.
The EPA Resource Conservation and Recovery Act database tracks every generator, transporter, and disposal facility in the US hazardous waste management system — 400,000+ regulated facilities from small quantity generators to commercial hazardous waste incinerators — creating the most comprehensive federal record of hazardous waste compliance, violations, and enforcement.
The EIA Annual Electric Generator Report (Form 860) collects data from every utility-scale generator in the United States — 25,000+ generating units at 8,000+ plants covering coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, and hydropower — providing the most comprehensive public inventory of US electricity generating capacity, ownership, location, and operational status.
The EPA Safe Drinking Water Information System tracks every violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act by the 150,000 public water systems in the United States — health-based violations for exceeding maximum contaminant levels, monitoring failures, reporting violations, and treatment technique violations — creating the most comprehensive federal record of drinking water safety failures.
The Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Station Locator database tracks every publicly accessible electric vehicle charging station, hydrogen station, propane station, CNG station, and other alternative fuel outlet in the United States — 180,000+ stations as of 2024, with real-time status for DCFC fast chargers, providing the most comprehensive federal dataset on EV charging infrastructure deployment.
The United States Geological Survey maintains the most comprehensive public databases of wind turbine locations and utility-scale solar photovoltaic facility data in the United States — 72,000+ wind turbines with GPS coordinates, capacity ratings, hub heights, and rotor diameters, plus a growing solar PV database covering thousands of utility-scale installations.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission Reactor Oversight Process evaluates every US commercial nuclear power plant across seven safety cornerstones — yielding publicly available performance indicator data, inspection findings, and action matrix dispositions.
The FEMA disaster declaration database records every major disaster, emergency, and fire management assistance declaration since 1953 — over 4,600 major disaster declarations covering hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, and pandemics.
The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Storm Events Database records every significant weather event in the US from 1950 to present — ~2.1M event records, 48 standardized event types (tornado, hurricane, flash flood, hail, winter storm, wildfire, and more), with property damage, crop damage, injuries, fatalities, and county-level geography. Bulk download at ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/swdi/stormevents/csvfiles/ with annual gzipped CSVs; CDO API at www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/. DAMAGE_PROPERTY field uses K/M/B suffix encoding requiring parsing. NOAA Billion-Dollar Disasters tracker covers 376 events since 1980 totaling $2.6T in CPI-adjusted damages; 2023: 28 events exceeding $1B each — a record. Tornado climatology: ~1,200-1,500 annually, EF0-EF5 scale, 2011 Super Outbreak 362 tornadoes/3 days, Dixie Alley shift. Hurricane damage: Harvey $125B, Ian $112B county-by-county in Storm Events. Flood events: deadliest weather type most years, ~88 fatalities/year average, AHPS stream gauge network. Climate change signal in increasing damage frequency and extreme precipitation. Here is event type taxonomy, data quality caveats, NCEI CDO API, Billion-Dollar Disasters methodology, tornado EF scale, hurricane storm surge vs. wind damage distinction, and a Python DAMAGE_PROPERTY parsing analysis by event type and state.
NFIP (National Flood Insurance Act 1968) provides flood insurance for ~5M policyholders across 22,000+ communities; ~$1.3T total coverage in force. Flood zones: SFHAs (Zone A/AE/V, 1% annual chance) require federally-backed mortgages to carry NFIP. Coverage limits: $250,000 building/$100,000 contents residential. Katrina 2005: $16B, 267k claims; Harvey 2017: $8.9B, 89k claims; Ian 2022: $3.6B. NFIP was $20B+ in debt to Treasury. Risk Rating 2.0 (Oct 2021): property-specific pricing by flood frequency, distance to water, foundation type; 18% annual cap; 1.2M policies canceled/non-renewed. National Flood Hazard Layer (NFHL) at msc.fema.gov; WFS API at hazards.fema.gov. OpenFEMA API: FimaNfipClaims and FimaNfipPolicies datasets. Repetitive loss: ~25,000 severe repetitive loss structures = 25-30% of total claims. First Street Foundation alternative risk model. Here is flood zone mechanics, Risk Rating 2.0 reform, NFHL GIS data, OpenFEMA API structure, repetitive loss dynamics, and a Python Harvey claims analysis by county.
EPA GHGRP requires ~8,000 facilities emitting ≥25,000 tCO2e/year to report annually, covering ~85-90% of US stationary source emissions. 41 source categories: power plants (Subpart D), petroleum/natural gas systems (Subpart W, largest by count), refineries (Subpart Y), landfills, cement, iron/steel, chemical manufacturing. Six GHGs: CO2, CH4 (28-34x GWP), N2O (265-298x), HFCs (up to 14,800x), PFCs, SF6 (23,500x). FLIGHT tool at ghgdata.epa.gov for facility search. ECHO bulk download. Satellite methane validation controversy: TROPOMI/Sentinel-5P, GHGSat, MethaneSAT finding higher Permian Basin emissions than Subpart W reports. EPA 2024 Subpart W methodology revision. Here is sector composition, data access via ENVIRO API, and a Python top-emitter analysis.
NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) archives 150+ petabytes of atmospheric, ocean, and geophysical data serving 25+ billion online requests per year. The Global Historical Climatology Network Daily (GHCN-Daily) covers ~120,000 stations worldwide with daily Tmax/Tmin/PRCP/SNOW back to the late 1800s. NOAAGlobalTemp made 2023 the warmest year on record (+1.45°C above pre-industrial). US Climate Normals (1991–2020) define 30-year averages for 15,000+ stations. NCEI's Billion-Dollar Disasters database counted 28 events totaling $94B in losses in 2023. The CDO REST API provides programmatic access with daily and monthly summary endpoints.
The USGS National Water Information System runs 8,000+ streamflow gauging stations and feeds NWS River Forecast Centers and the National Water Model (2.7 million reaches, 15-minute forecasts). Here is ADCP gauging methodology, annual peak discharge feeding FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Maps, the Ogallala Aquifer (174,000 sq miles, declining 1–3 ft/year in TX/KS), Central Valley land subsidence from groundwater pumping, the NAWQA water quality monitoring program, water use surveys (thermoelectric power 41% of withdrawals), the 7Q10 low-flow statistic driving NPDES permits, the NWIS REST API (parameterCd/statCd parameter table), and a Python script plotting 5-year discharge with drought-period shading.
The Energy Information Administration is the primary federal authority for US energy data, publishing the market-moving Short-Term Energy Outlook, the Weekly Petroleum Status Report (Cushing OK crude stocks that move WTI crude prices $1–2/barrel), the Natural Gas Storage Report (five-region EIA-914 data), EIA-860 and EIA-923 power plant databases (15,000+ generators, monthly fuel consumption and generation), the Electric Power Monthly, Petroleum Supply Monthly, and the EIA Open Data API (500,000+ series). Here is the 2019 US net petroleum export milestone, the 2022 European energy crisis Henry Hub spike to $9/MMBtu, and a Python EIA v2 API script pulling WTI crude and Henry Hub weekly prices with a dual-axis chart annotating the 2022 spike.
The EPA Air Quality System aggregates hourly and daily pollutant readings from 4,000+ monitoring sites operated by state, local, tribal, and federal agencies. Here is the six criteria pollutant NAAQS framework (PM2.5, PM10, ozone, CO, SO2, NO2), the 2024 PM2.5 standard tightened to 9 μg/m³, the AQI 0–500 scale and daily worst-of-pollutants calculation, nonattainment designation and State Implementation Plan mechanics, the Harvard Six Cities study and BenMAP health burden model (100,000+ annual PM2.5-attributable deaths), environmental justice monitoring gaps, wildfire smoke exceptional events provisions, and a Python script using the EPA AQS API to download daily PM2.5 readings and identify exceedance days.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission publishes quarterly Performance Indicators, inspection findings, and daily Event Notification Reports for all 99 operating US nuclear reactors. Here is the Reactor Oversight Process cornerstones (Initiating Events, Mitigating Systems, Barrier Integrity), the Significance Determination Process (Green/White/Yellow/Red), Licensee Event Reports, the TMI and Fukushima reform trail, probabilistic risk assessment (core damage frequency ~1E-5/reactor-year), the ADAMS document management system with 7M+ public records, the 92–93% nuclear capacity factor record, and a Python NRC PI XML parser to rank plants by unplanned scram rate.
EPCRA Section 313 requires 20,000+ industrial facilities to report annual releases of 800+ toxic chemicals — air, water, land, and off-site transfers. Here is the full TRI field schema, the 75% release decline since 1988, the 2024 PFAS additions, how to use the RSEI model for toxicity-weighted population exposure, and how to join TRI to Census ACS for environmental justice analysis.
FERC investigates electricity and gas market manipulation with penalties up to $1.4M per day per violation. Here is the enforcement database, the JP Morgan ($410M) and Barclays ($488M) market manipulation cases, how Electric Quarterly Reports expose every bilateral power transaction, and how to search FERC eLibrary enforcement dockets.
The EIA publishes Form 923 (monthly plant-level generation and fuel use), Form 861 (annual utility retail sales and pricing), Form 860 (every generator's nameplate capacity and status), and EIA-930 (hourly real-time grid data by Balancing Authority). Here is the fuel mix transformation from 2000–2023 (coal 52% to 16%, gas 17% to 43%, wind/solar near zero to 16%), the ERCOT Texas grid isolation and Winter Storm Uri generation collapse, EIA API v2 structure, and a Python stacked-area chart of the energy transition.
FEMA's NFIP claims dataset covers 2.7 million paid flood insurance claims. The "multiple loss properties" subset shows properties paid out more than their assessed value — some 10–15 times. FEMA redacted addresses after journalists used the data to identify specific owners. Here is what's left and what it shows.