The Federal Emergency Management Agency declared 11 major disasters on Tuesday 1 September — storms in North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Kentucky, a flood in Texas, an earthquake in Hawaii and wildfires, floods and mudslides in Colorado. That ties 30 June 2026 as the largest single-day batch of major disaster declarations in FEMA's own records, which run back to 1953, and it comes nine weeks after that record was set.
The eleven had waited a median of 35 days since their states asked. North Dakota's request, for storms that struck on 7 to 9 June, reached FEMA on 6 July and was granted 57 days later. Texas asked on 17 July, 46 days before the answer; Hawaii, whose earthquake struck on 22 May, asked on 21 July and waited 42 days, so the declaration came 102 days after the ground moved. Kentucky waited 40 days, the two South Dakota requests 39 and 34, Kansas's two 35 and 21, Missouri's 35 and Iowa's 29. The fastest was Colorado's, filed on 23 August for fires, floods and mudslides that began in late June, and granted in nine.
The record has now been set twice in nine weeks, and the four largest single-day batches in the register all fall within the past 16 months: 11 on 30 June and on 1 September 2026, nine on 21 May 2025 and nine on 7 April 2026. The next largest are seven, on 9 July 2020 and 22 July 2025. The register contains 2,942 major disaster records across more than seven decades.
This is a change in how the declarations are issued, not in how many there are. From 2015 through 2024, FEMA declared 648 major disasters on 484 different days — an average of 1.3 a day — and only 5.9 per cent came on days when five or more were signed together. Since 20 January 2025 it has declared 85 on just 24 days, an average of 3.5, and 75.3 per cent have come in batches of five or more.
The effect is gaps. In the fiscal year that ends on 30 September, 52 major disasters have been declared on 11 dates, and six times FEMA has gone 30 days or more without declaring one — the longest 58 days, from 22 October to 19 December 2025, and most recently 34 days, from 30 June to 3 August. Emergency declarations and fire management grants — decided while an event is unfolding, and usually the same day — have continued in between.
What the eleven unlock is narrower than the headline count suggests. Only two include the Individual and Households Program, which pays people directly: South Dakota's declaration for the 2 to 4 June floods and Hawaii's for the earthquake. The other nine provide public assistance — money to repair roads, bridges and public buildings and to reimburse emergency work — and nothing for households.
This publication first reported the batching pattern on 4 August, when all 35 major disasters declared in 2026 had come on seven days. Two batches later the count is 47 on nine. The declarations are recorded in FEMA's FemaWebDisasterDeclarations dataset, the only one of its public datasets that carries the date a state's request was received; the table of fiscal-2026 decision times that this publication maintains from it has been updated with the 17 declarations made since 22 August.