Heat, floods, and fire hit tens of millions in July 2026

The dominant story of July 2026 was heat. It built slowly and then broke wide open in the final week of the month. According to Phys.org, nearly 100 million Americans were under heat alerts during a mid-July surge. By July 25, The Guardian reported that extreme heat advisories covered about 70 million people. The next day, ABC News reported the number had climbed past 100 million under extreme-heat warnings.

The archive recorded 164 extreme heat alerts on July 25, 169 on July 26, and 195 on July 27 — the three busiest days for this hazard, in ascending order, each one confirming what the news organizations were reporting in real time. Texas led all states with 238 heat alerts across the month, followed by Kansas with 184, California with 183, Arkansas with 180, and North Carolina with 152. Altogether, heat advisories and extreme-heat warnings reached 3,009 counties — more counties than any other hazard this month.

Heat is the hazard that arrives without a sound. There is no rotation on radar, no wall of water. The 2,010 heat advisories and 727 extreme heat warnings issued in July carried instructions to find cooling, check on neighbors, and stay indoors during peak hours. Osage County, Missouri, opened the Chamois Community building as a cooling center on July 5, one of dozens of local responses that appeared in the alert record. The archive does not show how many people used those centers, or how many did not.

Flash flooding was July's most geographically widespread hazard. The archive recorded 3,488 flash flood warnings covering 1,148 counties. Arizona led all states with 501 warnings, followed by Texas with 409, New Mexico with 279, Pennsylvania with 244, and Colorado with 228. The three busiest days were July 17 with 228 warnings, July 22 with 214, and July 21 with 209.

The human cost was documented in several places. In mid-July, Texas flooding caused at least two deaths, according to reporting that cited Texas Governor Greg Abbott, as reported by The Guardian. Our archive recorded 409 flash flooding alerts covering Texas across the month. A separate event reported by USA Today said at least eight people died in a late-July flash flooding event across the United States.

The worst single documented event in the archive was the flooding that struck southeast Ohio and West Virginia on July 21 and 22. The National Weather Service reported that four to nearly eight inches of rain fell across portions of Lewis, Upshur, and Randolph counties in West Virginia, and that two people died in Upshur County as a result of the flash flooding. The archive recorded 214 flash flood warnings on July 22 alone, one of the month's highest single-day totals for any hazard.

In southeastern Pennsylvania, the National Weather Service documented severe flooding and storms from July 9 through 11. The archive recorded 244 flash flooding alerts covering Pennsylvania across the month, consistent with that timeline. Back-to-back heavy rainfall events also struck southeast Minnesota and northeast Iowa on July 2 and July 8, with water impacts noted in western Wisconsin, according to the National Weather Service.

Tornado warnings reached 400 counties across the month, with 888 warnings issued in total. The single busiest day was July 21, when 230 tornado warnings went out — more than a quarter of the month's entire tornado warning count in one day. That same day was also the second-busiest day overall in the archive, with 2,171 total emergency messages of all kinds, and it coincided with the peak of the West Virginia flooding. The two hazards arrived together.

Kentucky recorded the most tornado warnings of any state with 85, followed by Pennsylvania with 76, Texas with 68, Wisconsin with 66, and West Virginia with 61. A second notable day came on July 28, when 93 tornado warnings went out, and an earlier cluster appeared on July 2 with 75 warnings. The archive does not document injuries or damage from these tornado events; those figures are not in the supplied research.

Wildfire warnings and red flag conditions produced 569 alerts across 364 counties in July. Washington led with 133 fire alerts, Oregon with 131, California with 105, Idaho with 70, and Wyoming with 61. The fire warnings peaked on July 25 with 34 alerts, July 24 with 32, and July 12 with 31 — a pattern that tracked closely with the heat wave building across the same region in the same week.

The 163 evacuation orders issued this month came almost entirely from the same geography. Oregon issued 43, Washington 35, California 34, and Colorado 30, with Utah adding 8. Evacuation orders peaked on July 26 with 16 orders, July 12 with 15, and July 16 with 14. These are response counts: they record what people were told to do, not the size of the fire that prompted each order.

In Colorado, Pueblo County's sheriff's office issued a series of escalating orders in the first days of the month. On July 1, a mandatory evacuation covered Colorado City north of Highway 165. By July 3, the order had expanded to all of Colorado City between Burnt Mill and Huerfano County, with the message reading: "Go Now. Get pets, meds, and go to I-25 IMMEDIATELY." The Red Creek area received its own mandatory evacuation order on July 2. Oregon's Frontier Regional 911 center was among the most active local senders in the archive, issuing 55 alerts across the month.

Behind the weather service totals, local agencies issued 939 alerts of their own in July. The named local events in the archive show the texture of those decisions. In Mahoning County, Ohio, on July 5, emergency managers ordered the evacuation of a residential building called The Cloisters in Canfield after a high-pressure gas line ruptured, directing residents to shelter at a nearby fire station. A second message asked people to avoid the surrounding streets.

The archive recorded 41 alerts for missing and endangered people across 52 counties. Wisconsin led with 7, followed by New Mexico and Minnesota with 6 each, and Massachusetts with 5. The busiest single day for these alerts was July 3, with 6 messages. Arizona's Department of Public Safety issued a SAFE Alert on July 1. These alerts name individuals and ask the public to act; the archive records that they went out, not whether the people were found.

Texas DOT in Austin issued 72 alerts during the month, the second-highest total among local senders, most of them road-condition warnings tied to flooding. Chelan County, Washington, and Jackson County, Oregon, each issued 28 alerts, consistent with the fire and evacuation activity in the Pacific Northwest.

The archive captured 42,499 distinct warning events covering 3,755 counties across 54 states and territories in July. That is a measure of reach, not of protection. A warning that goes out to a county of 400,000 people and a warning that goes out to a county of 4,000 people count the same in this record. Population figures are not available for these counties, so no per-resident comparison is possible.

The archive also cannot measure whether people received a warning on their phones, whether they acted on it, or whether they were in a position to act. The 7,820 overnight alerts issued between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. local time reached people who may have been asleep. The 12,272 shelter-in-place instructions included 7,869 where the hazard was not stated in the alert text itself.

Death tolls, acreage burned, and damage figures in this report come from the National Weather Service, The Guardian, ABC News, and USA Today, as noted in each case. The archive itself measures delivery. Where the supplied research documents no outcome for an event, this report makes no outcome claim. Several of July's largest warning clusters — including the July 21 tornado outbreak and the Arizona flooding — have no documented toll in the research available at publication time.

This report exists because we already monitor the whole country. Every couple of minutes, around the clock, we read the emergency alerts going out across all fifty states and territories, and we keep them. A month of that record is what you have just read.

The national picture is the part most people never see. What matters to you is much smaller: which of these warnings would have reached your street, and what the risks around you look like on an ordinary day.

That is what BePrepared is for. Put in your ZIP code and you get the picture for where you live — the flood, fire and storm history around you, the dams and facilities nearby, and a plan for your household rather than a general one. With a free account you can keep a watchlist of the places you care about, like your home, your parents' address, and your kids' school, and set what you want to hear about.