Finding FEMA-funded rebuild and mitigation projects before they go to bid (OpenFEMA)

After a disaster is declared, FEMA provides funding to cities, counties, utilities, and other public entities to repair infrastructure and public buildings. Hazard mitigation programs also fund projects like elevations, drainage, generators, seismic retrofits, and wildfire work, often months before any bidding begins. All of this information is publicly available through the OpenFEMA API.

For professionals in the public sector, this dataset is a list of agencies that have federal funds to allocate. There are two key datasets to focus on: Public Assistance (PA) funded projects, which include every obligated repair or replacement project after a declared disaster, along with damage category, county, project amount, and federal share; and Hazard Mitigation Assistance (HMA) sub-applications, including HMGP, BRIC, FMA, and related programs, with project status details like pending, submitted to FEMA, and approved.

The initial statuses are particularly noteworthy as these projects have not yet been bid on. While the raw API can be challenging to work with, the PA project records use an applicant ID instead of the agency's name, requiring a separate lookup to identify the agency. Additionally, the datasets employ different field names for similar concepts, such as state, county, amount, and status.

Due to pagination, querying a single state can result in tens of thousands of rows. To conduct this search manually, one must query the PA funded projects and HMA sub-application endpoints on fema.gov/api/open, filtering by state and date. Results can be paginated using $skip and $top parameters. By joining the PA records with the applicants dataset, one can obtain agency names and addresses.

Normalizing the field names allows for merging both datasets into a single table. To streamline this process, an Apify Actor called FEMA Disaster Recovery & Mitigation Projects has been developed. This tool retrieves both datasets, resolves applicant names, and presents a unified schema that can be filtered by state, program, status, and amount, and exported to CSV or Excel format.

However, it's important to remember that an obligated amount represents money FEMA has committed, not a contract readily available for bidding. Use the list to identify agencies and projects that warrant attention, then follow each agency's procurement notices for the actual solicitation.