Monthly report · July 2026
Flash floods, a heat surge, and a tornado outbreak defined July 2026
The alerting system reached 3,758 counties across 54 states and territories in July. Flash flooding alone produced 3,488 warnings and, according to ABC News, killed at least eight people.
The system delivered 42,499 distinct warnings and orders to counties across the country, but it cannot tell us whether the people in those counties had time to act, or whether they did.
What it cost, and who reported it
These figures are not ours. Our archive records that a warning was issued, never what happened next, so every number here comes from the organization named beside it and was retrieved on August 13, 2026.
- at least 8 deaths
The July 2026 flash-flooding alerts correspond to severe flash flooding in Texas, Utah, and Arizona that killed at least eight people between July 16 and July 19, 2026.
Source: ABC News
Our archive recorded 501 flash flooding alerts covering Arizona in this period.
- 2 deaths
In Texas, flood-related deaths were reported in Uvalde County and Kerr County during the July 2026 flash flooding period.
Source: ABC News
Our archive recorded 409 flash flooding alerts covering Texas in this period.
- at least 2 deaths
The July 2026 flash-flooding alerts also correspond to flooding in south-central Texas that killed at least two people, according to Texas officials.
Source: The Guardian
Our archive recorded 409 flash flooding alerts covering Texas in this period.
- 5 deaths
In Utah, flash flooding at Sunglow Campground in Fishlake National Forest near Bicknell killed a Provo Fire and Rescue captain, his wife, and three sons.
Source: ABC News
- 1 death
In Arizona, flash flooding in Tucson led to the recovery of the body of a 29-year-old man who had been swept into the Santa Cruz River.
Source: ABC News
Our archive recorded 501 flash flooding alerts covering Arizona in this period.
The July 21-22, 2026 flooding alerts correspond to severe flooding in parts of southeast Ohio and West Virginia.
Source: National Weather Service
Our archive independently recorded 214 flash flooding alerts on 2026-07-22, one of this hazard's busiest days of the period.
- 2 deaths
The National Weather Service said two deaths occurred in Upshur County, West Virginia, as a result of the July 21-22, 2026 flash flooding.
Source: National Weather Service
Our archive independently recorded 214 flash flooding alerts on 2026-07-22, one of this hazard's busiest days of the period.
- 1 death
The July 2026 tornado alerts correspond to severe thunderstorms and tornadoes in the central and eastern United States; among the documented fatalities was a death in Monroe Township, New Jersey, from a lightning strike on July 29, 2026.
Source: The Guardian
- 1 death
The July 2026 missing-and-endangered-people alerts correspond in part to the Arizona flash-flooding search for Ernesto Ojeda, whose body was later recovered in Tucson.
Source: ABC News
Flash flooding struck the Southwest, the Hill Country, and Appalachia
Flash flooding was July's most consequential hazard. The National Weather Service issued 3,488 flash flood warnings covering 1,148 counties, and the archive's three busiest flood days fell within a single week: July 17 produced 228 warnings, July 22 produced 214, and July 21 produced 209.
The human cost of that mid-month period is documented. According to ABC News, severe flash flooding in Texas, Utah, and Arizona killed at least eight people between July 16 and July 19. In Utah, a flash flood at Sunglow Campground in Fishlake National Forest near Bicknell killed a Provo Fire and Rescue captain, his wife, and three sons, according to ABC News. In Arizona, the body of a 29-year-old man, later identified as Ernesto Ojeda, was recovered from the Santa Cruz River in Tucson after he was swept in by floodwaters, according to ABC News. In Texas, flood-related deaths were reported in Uvalde County and Kerr County, and The Guardian reported that at least two people died in south-central Texas, citing Texas officials.
A second flooding episode struck southeast Ohio and West Virginia on July 21 and 22. The National Weather Service documented that event and reported two deaths in Upshur County, West Virginia. Our archive recorded 214 flash flood warnings on July 22, one of the month's three busiest flood days, consistent with that timeline.
Arizona led all states with 501 flash flood warnings, followed by Texas with 409, New Mexico with 279, Pennsylvania with 244, and Colorado with 228.
A heat surge late in the month spread across more than 3,000 counties
Extreme heat was the month's broadest hazard by geography. Heat advisories and extreme heat warnings reached 3,003 counties, more than any other hazard in the snapshot. The system issued 2,890 heat alerts in total, including 2,036 heat advisories and 710 extreme heat warnings.
The peak came at the end of the month. July 27 produced 195 heat alerts, July 26 produced 169, and July 25 produced 164. That three-day concentration, running from Saturday through Monday, placed the heaviest heat alerting on a weekend when many people were outdoors.
Texas led with 234 heat alerts. Arkansas and California each recorded 187, Kansas recorded 186, and Minnesota recorded 154. The spread from Texas to Minnesota reflects a heat pattern that extended well north of the traditional Sun Belt.
The archive does not include outcome data for this heat event. Heat-related deaths are typically confirmed weeks after the fact by medical examiners, and no figures from the supplied research cover this period.
A tornado outbreak on July 21 produced 230 warnings in a single day
The month's tornado activity concentrated sharply on July 21. The archive recorded 230 tornado warnings that day, more than a quarter of the month's total of 888. A second smaller outbreak on July 28 produced 93 warnings, and an earlier event on July 2 produced 75.
Kentucky led all states with 85 tornado warnings, followed by Pennsylvania with 76, Texas with 68, Wisconsin with 66, and West Virginia with 61. The presence of Pennsylvania and West Virginia alongside Kentucky points to a system that moved through the central Appalachian region as well as the more typical central plains corridor.
The July 21 date aligns with the same day the archive recorded 209 flash flood warnings, suggesting the same storm system drove both hazards simultaneously across parts of the East and Midwest.
The Guardian reported one death in Monroe Township, New Jersey, on July 29, attributed to a lightning strike associated with the severe thunderstorm activity of that period. The archive does not contain tornado-specific fatality data, and no other outcome figures for this hazard are present in the supplied research.
Wildfire warnings concentrated in the Pacific Northwest and peaked in late July
Wildfire and red flag warnings reached 368 counties across 569 events. Washington led with 133 fire alerts, Oregon followed with 126, California recorded 105, Idaho recorded 70, and Wyoming recorded 65. The Pacific Northwest's dominance of this list is consistent with the region's typical late-summer fire weather pattern arriving early.
The archive recorded 163 evacuation orders across 55 counties in July, and Oregon, Washington, and California together accounted for 112 of those 163 orders. The evacuation peak on July 26 produced 16 orders, a day after the fire alert peak of 34 warnings on July 25. That sequence, fire warnings followed by evacuation orders the next day, is visible in the data but the archive cannot confirm which specific fires drove which orders.
Of the 82 events the archive classified as carrying an evacuate response type, 42 were corroborated to wildfire and 5 to flooding. Thirty-five carried an unstated hazard, meaning the alert text did not name the cause.
County agencies named fires, gas leaks, and missing people in their own words
Local agencies outside the National Weather Service issued 939 events in July. The named local records in the archive show the texture of what those agencies were managing.
Pueblo County Sheriff's Office in Colorado issued a series of escalating orders tied to a fire near Colorado City. On July 1, a pre-evacuation notice went out for the Red Creek and Aspen area. By July 3, the message read: 'Due to fire, ALL of Colo City between Burnt Mill and Huerfano Cnty under Mandatory Evac. Go Now. Get pets, meds, and go to I25 IMMEDIATELY.' That language, preserved verbatim in the archive, reflects the compressed timeline local officials face when a fire accelerates.
In Mahoning County, Ohio, on July 5, the county emergency management agency ordered the evacuation of a residential complex called The Cloisters in Canfield because of a high-pressure gas line rupture, directing displaced residents to a nearby fire station. A follow-up message asked residents to avoid North Canfield and Boardman roads.
Osage County, Missouri, opened a cooling center in the Chamois community on July 5, a local response to heat that does not appear in the weather alert totals. The Arizona Department of Public Safety activated a SAFE Alert on July 1, which the archive connects to the search for Ernesto Ojeda, whose body was later recovered in Tucson according to ABC News.
What this data cannot tell you
The archive counts warnings sent, not warnings received and acted upon. It records that 3,758 counties received at least one alert in July, but it does not record whether residents in those counties had a working phone, were awake, or had anywhere to go.
Lead time is the gap between when an alert was sent and when it takes effect. In this archive, 99 percent of events show a lead time of zero minutes, because the system collapses the onset time into the effective time for most products. That figure does not mean forecasters had no warning time; it means this archive cannot measure it.
Evacuation and shelter counts are response counts. They record what people were told to do. Where the alert text did not name a hazard, the archive marks the row as unstated. Of the 12,272 shelter events in July, 7,870 carried an unstated hazard.
Outcome figures in this report come from ABC News and the National Weather Service, retrieved in August 2026. Death tolls from heat are typically confirmed months later by medical examiners and are not yet available for this period. Damage estimates and acreage figures for the wildfires described here were not present in the supplied research and are not reported.
The alert record behind these events
What the alerting system did while the month happened. These are the figures the account above rests on, and they are downloadable below.
What was warned about
| Alert type | Warnings | Messages |
|---|---|---|
| Severe Thunderstorm Warning | 11,356 | 11,358 |
| Special Weather Statement | 9,757 | 9,777 |
| Flash Flood Warning | 3,488 | 3,488 |
| Flood Advisory | 3,204 | 3,204 |
| Special Marine Warning | 2,183 | 2,183 |
| Heat Advisory | 2,036 | 4,374 |
| Small Craft Advisory | 1,625 | 6,490 |
| Flood Warning | 1,148 | 1,499 |
Where
| State | Warnings |
|---|---|
| TX | 2,262 |
| NC | 2,034 |
| CO | 1,740 |
| FL | 1,538 |
| KY | 1,388 |
| AZ | 1,357 |
| GA | 1,285 |
| MT | 1,250 |
The busiest hour of the period was 5pm local time, with 3,921 warnings.
Counties reached most often
| County | State | Warnings |
|---|---|---|
| Elko | NV | 248 |
| Cochise | AZ | 230 |
| Pima | AZ | 228 |
| Pueblo | CO | 218 |
| Pinal | AZ | 213 |
| Coconino | AZ | 198 |
| Custer | CO | 184 |
| Maricopa | AZ | 184 |
| Wake | NC | 184 |
| Cook | IL | 183 |
A county with no alerts is not a county with no risk. It can mean a quiet period, or a hazard that this feed does not carry.
When the warnings arrived
View as a table
| Local hour | Warnings | Of which most severe |
|---|---|---|
| 12am | 1,052 | 22 |
| 1am | 958 | 21 |
| 2am | 984 | 13 |
| 3am | 842 | 13 |
| 4am | 596 | 13 |
| 5am | 561 | 13 |
| 6am | 562 | 16 |
| 7am | 540 | 18 |
| 8am | 605 | 15 |
| 9am | 810 | 17 |
| 10am | 801 | 28 |
| 11am | 1,118 | 51 |
| 12pm | 1,398 | 62 |
| 1pm | 2,048 | 72 |
| 2pm | 2,877 | 112 |
| 3pm | 3,485 | 155 |
| 4pm | 3,887 | 151 |
| 5pm | 3,921 | 175 |
| 6pm | 3,896 | 207 |
| 7pm | 3,544 | 159 |
| 8pm | 2,966 | 148 |
| 9pm | 2,216 | 59 |
| 10pm | 1,582 | 48 |
| 11pm | 1,250 | 37 |
The feed repeats itself
View as a table
| Stage | Count |
|---|---|
| Messages received | 55,201 |
| Of which updates | 24,567 |
| Of which cancels | 0 |
| Distinct warnings | 42,499 |
| Counties reached | 3,758 |
How severe they were
- Minor
- Moderate
- Severe
- Extreme
- Not classified
View as a table
| Severity | Warnings |
|---|---|
| Minor | 6,049 |
| Moderate | 12,723 |
| Severe | 21,335 |
| Extreme | 1,625 |
| Not classified | 767 |
What people were told to do
- Execute
- Avoid
- Shelter
- Everything else
Where those instructions came from
- Shelter (12,272) — 2878 corroborated as flood, 1495 corroborated as tornado, 26 corroborated as wildfire, 3 corroborated as hurricane, 7870 with no hazard stated in the alert text
- Evacuate (82) — 5 corroborated as flood, 42 corroborated as wildfire, 35 with no hazard stated in the alert text
View as a table
| Response | Warnings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Execute | 12,810 | 30.1% |
| Avoid | 12,503 | 29.4% |
| Shelter | 12,272 | 28.9% |
| Monitor | 2,797 | 6.6% |
| Prepare | 1,513 | 3.6% |
| Unstated | 494 | 1.2% |
| Evacuate | 82 | 0.2% |
| AllClear | 24 | 0.1% |
| None | 4 | 0.0% |
How these numbers were counted
The alert figures in this report — how many warnings, where, when, and how severe — come from the alerts this archive received from FEMA IPAWS and the National Weather Service between July 1, 2026 and August 1, 2026, counted once and frozen when the report was published.
Deaths, damage and acreage are not ours and are never drawn from this archive. Each is attributed to the organization that reported it, above.
What was counted
- cap_status = 'Actual' (tests, exercises and demos excluded)
- SAME test codes RWT/RMT/DMO/NPT/NAT excluded, and any event type containing "test"
- An event is the first message of a CAP identifier chain; updates and cancels are counted separately
- Alert time is cap_sent, falling back to ingest time when the feed omits it
- Counties come from the alert geocodes (SAME/FIPS); statewide codes are not counted as counties
What these numbers cannot tell you
- Lead time is the gap between when an alert was sent and when it takes effect. This archive collapses CAP onset into effective, so for many products those are the same instant by design — it is not a measure of forecast warning time.
- 266 alerts expire exactly 24 hours after they were sent because the feed omitted an expiry and the ingest substitutes a default. They are excluded from the duration distribution rather than charted as real forecasts.
- Evacuation and shelter figures are RESPONSE counts. They record what people were told to do, not what caused it; where the alert text does not name a hazard, the row is reported as unstated.
- Hour-of-day figures use each alert’s own local time, resolved from its state. Alerts spanning several states resolve to the first state in their geocodes.
- National Weather Service alerts began arriving in volume on 2026-06-12. Earlier months hold only the handful that reached this archive by other routes, so they undercount weather alerts badly and cannot be compared with later months.
- Population figures are not available for these counties, so alert counts are reported per county and never per resident.
This archive
Collection began 2026-03-27. National Weather Service alerts began arriving in volume on 2026-06-12 (a small number reached the archive by other routes from 2026-03-31). Months from 2026-07-01 onward can be compared with each other; earlier ones cannot.
Use these figures
Journalists, emergency managers and researchers are welcome to reuse anything in this report, including the underlying counts, with attribution. Version 4 of these figures is frozen: if a correction changes them, it appears above as a dated note rather than silently replacing what you cited.
BePreparedSolutions.co. "Flash floods, a heat surge, and a tornado outbreak defined July 2026." Alert Pulse, August 13, 2026. https://bepreparedsolutions.co/reports/alert-pulse/2026-07
Source: BePrepared Solutions, Alert Pulse (2026). Alert counts from FEMA IPAWS and National Weather Service feeds; casualty and damage figures as attributed in the report.
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The embed updates itself if we publish a correction, so it never goes stale the way a screenshot does.
The CSV carries the same frozen figures as this page, keyed to version 4.