---
title: "Heat, floods, and fire hit tens of millions in July 2026"
url: "https://bepreparedsolutions.co/reports/alert-pulse/2026-07"
description: "Every emergency alert sent across the United States in July 2026, and what happened behind them. Figures for the month, with the data behind them."
source: "BePrepared Solutions"
---

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Alert Pulse · Monthly report · July 2026

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

A heat wave covered more than 100 million people. Flash floods killed people in West Virginia and Texas. Wildfires pushed families out of homes across the Pacific Northwest.

Distinct warnings

42,499carried by 55,201 messages

Counties reached

3,755across 54 states and territories

Overnight

7,820sent between 10pm and 6am local

Effective on arrival

99%take effect the moment they are sent

Flash flooding3,4881,148 countiesExtreme heat2,8903,009 countiesTornadoes888400 countiesWildfire569364 countiesEvacuation orders16355 countiesMissing and endangered people4152 counties

Pause the hazard ticker

Emergency warnings reached 3,755 counties this July, telling people to leave, shelter, or stay off roads — but warnings can only reach people who are there to receive them, and they cannot stop the water or the heat.

[Read the month](#what-it-cost)

The human record

## 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 15, 2026.

-   Severe flooding and storms in southeastern Pennsylvania were summarized by the National Weather Service as occurring July 9-11, 2026.

    Source: [National Weather Service](https://www.weather.gov/pah/July9-11_2026_Flooding_Severe)

    ArchiveOur archive recorded 244 flash flooding alerts covering Pennsylvania in this period.

-   2deaths

    Severe flooding in southeast Ohio and West Virginia occurred July 21-22, 2026; the National Weather Service said two deaths occurred in Upshur County, West Virginia, as a result of flash flooding.

    Source: [National Weather Service](https://www.weather.gov/index.php/rlx/July-21-22-2026-Severe-Flooding)

    ArchiveOur archive independently recorded 214 flash flooding alerts on 2026-07-22, one of this hazard's busiest days of the period.

-   The National Weather Service said the July 21-22, 2026 flooding produced four to nearly eight inches of rain across portions of Lewis, Upshur, and Randolph counties in West Virginia.

    Source: [National Weather Service](https://www.weather.gov/index.php/rlx/July-21-22-2026-Severe-Flooding)

    ArchiveOur archive independently recorded 214 flash flooding alerts on 2026-07-22, one of this hazard's busiest days of the period.

-   Back-to-back heavy rainfall events affected southeast Minnesota and northeast Iowa on July 2 and July 8, 2026, with water impacts also noted in western Wisconsin, according to the National Weather Service.

    Source: [National Weather Service](https://www.weather.gov/arx/july2026heavyrain)

-   2deaths

    Texas flooding in mid-July 2026 caused at least two deaths, according to reporting that cited Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

    Source: [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/16/texas-flooding-emergency-latest)

    ArchiveOur archive recorded 409 flash flooding alerts covering Texas in this period.

## A heat wave that grew until it covered more than 100 million people

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 floods from Arizona to West Virginia, with deaths in two states

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.

## July 21 brought the month's sharpest tornado outbreak

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.

## Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest drove most of the month's evacuation orders

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.

## County agencies named fires, gas leaks, and missing people

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.

## What the archive records and what it does not

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.

## How BePrepared monitors this, all year

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.

BePrepared

## 42,499 warnings across the country in July 2026. See which reach your street.

We read the emergency alerts going out across all fifty states, around the clock. That is where this report comes from. Enter your ZIP and get the version that matters to you: the flood, fire and storm history around your address, what sits nearby, and a plan built for your household.

[Start your free 7-day trial](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/trial?source=alert-pulse&utm_source=alert-pulse&utm_medium=report&utm_campaign=2026-07&utm_content=card&returnTo=%2Freports%2Falert-pulse%2F2026-07)

No card. It ends on its own.

[Or just look up your ZIP](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/zip)

The evidence

## The alert record behind these events

The warnings that went out while the month happened. These are the figures the account above rests on, and they are downloadable below.

Distinct warnings

42,499

carried by 55,201 messages (1.3× echo)

Counties reached

3,755

across 54 states and territories

Overnight

7,820

10pm–6am local · 178 of the most severe

Effective on arrival

99%

take effect the moment they are sent

### 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 | 2,010 | 4,374 |
| Small Craft Advisory | 1,610 | 6,490 |
| Flood Warning | 1,148 | 1,499 |

### Where

| State | Warnings |
| --- | --- |
| TX | 2,268 |
| NC | 2,028 |
| CO | 1,741 |
| FL | 1,546 |
| KY | 1,394 |
| AZ | 1,358 |
| GA | 1,284 |
| MT | 1,249 |

The busiest hour of the period was 5pm local time, with 3,922 warnings.

### Counties reached most often

| County | State | Warnings |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Elko | NV | 247 |
| Cochise | AZ | 229 |
| Pima | AZ | 228 |
| Pinal | AZ | 212 |
| Pueblo | CO | 211 |
| Coconino | AZ | 201 |
| Cook | IL | 185 |
| Wake | NC | 182 |
| Maricopa | AZ | 181 |
| Custer | CO | 176 |

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.

Figure 01[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### Where the warnings landed

Every county in the country. The counties that received warnings are colored and scaled by how many; the faint dots received none.3,119 of the country's counties received at least one warning; the faint dots are the counties that received none, and a quiet county is not a safe county. Each county wears its MOST frequent kind of warning and its dot scales with how many it received; the month's three biggest kinds carry color and every other kind wears gray, with the panels below giving each kind its own map. The full per-county mix is in the CSV. 636 warned areas — marine zones and territories — have no county position on this map, about 11% of county-level warning volume. They are still counted in every figure and table. Too few counties to panel: winter (4), geologic (1).

-   Extreme heat
-   Severe storms
-   Flooding
-   Everything else

Extreme heat38,203 warnings · 2,941 counties

Severe storms35,431 warnings · 2,685 counties

Flooding24,676 warnings · 2,276 counties

Fire3,737 warnings · 329 counties

Tornadoes1,898 warnings · 533 counties

Hurricane & tropical1,470 warnings · 112 counties

Safety & civil1,038 warnings · 423 counties

View as a table

| County | State | Warnings | Most frequent kind |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Elko | NV | 247 | Everything else |
| Cochise | AZ | 229 | Flooding |
| Pima | AZ | 228 | Flooding |
| Pinal | AZ | 212 | Everything else |
| Pueblo | CO | 211 | Everything else |
| Coconino | AZ | 201 | Flooding |
| Cook | IL | 185 | Severe storms |
| Wake | NC | 182 | Severe storms |
| Maricopa | AZ | 181 | Everything else |
| Custer | CO | 176 | Everything else |
| Fergus | MT | 175 | Severe storms |
| Gallatin | MT | 171 | Everything else |
| Weld | CO | 170 | Everything else |
| Meade | SD | 170 | Severe storms |
| Adams | CO | 169 | Everything else |
| Johnston | NC | 166 | Severe storms |
| Fremont | CO | 165 | Everything else |
| Pennington | SD | 163 | Severe storms |
| Mohave | AZ | 163 | Flooding |
| Gila | AZ | 161 | Flooding |

Figure 02[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### When the warnings arrived

Hour-of-day distribution of all warnings in July 2026, in local time, showing the afternoon and evening concentration of severe weather alerts.Local time in the place each alert was sent to. 7,820 arrived between 10pm and 6am, 178 of them at the highest severity.

View as a table

| Local hour | Warnings | Of which most severe |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 12am | 1,046 | 22 |
| 1am | 957 | 20 |
| 2am | 982 | 12 |
| 3am | 838 | 12 |
| 4am | 598 | 13 |
| 5am | 561 | 13 |
| 6am | 564 | 16 |
| 7am | 540 | 18 |
| 8am | 602 | 15 |
| 9am | 814 | 17 |
| 10am | 805 | 28 |
| 11am | 1,113 | 51 |
| 12pm | 1,403 | 62 |
| 1pm | 2,047 | 71 |
| 2pm | 2,875 | 112 |
| 3pm | 3,487 | 155 |
| 4pm | 3,884 | 152 |
| 5pm | 3,922 | 175 |
| 6pm | 3,894 | 209 |
| 7pm | 3,548 | 158 |
| 8pm | 2,962 | 144 |
| 9pm | 2,219 | 59 |
| 10pm | 1,582 | 49 |
| 11pm | 1,256 | 37 |

Figure 03[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### The feed repeats itself

The relationship between raw messages sent and distinct warning events in July 2026, showing how updates and repeats inflate the message count above the event count.An echo rate of 1.3× — for every warning issued, 1.3 messages carried it. Reporting messages as warnings would overstate this month by 12,702.

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 | 3,755 |

Figure 04[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### How severe they were

Distinct warnings by the severity the issuing agency assigned.

-   Minor
-   Moderate
-   Severe
-   Extreme
-   Not classified

View as a table

| Severity | Warnings |
| --- | --- |
| Minor | 6,039 |
| Moderate | 12,705 |
| Severe | 21,368 |
| Extreme | 1,620 |
| Not classified | 767 |

Figure 05[Embed this chart](#use-these-figures)

### What people were told to do

What July 2026 warnings told people to do, broken down by response type, with shelter, avoid, and execute accounting for the largest shares.These are response counts. They record the instruction an alert carried, not the hazard behind it.

-   Follow instructions
-   Avoid
-   Shelter
-   Everything else

Where those instructions came from

-   Shelter (12,272) — 2,878 corroborated as flood, 1,496 corroborated as tornado, 26 corroborated as wildfire, 3 corroborated as hurricane, 7,869 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 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Follow instructions | 12,799 | 30.1% |
| Avoid | 12,497 | 29.4% |
| Shelter | 12,272 | 28.9% |
| Monitor | 2,797 | 6.6% |
| Prepare | 1,525 | 3.6% |
| Unstated | 494 | 1.2% |
| Evacuate | 82 | 0.2% |
| All clear | 29 | 0.1% |
| No action | 4 | 0.0% |

## How these numbers were counted

Counted JUL 1, 2026 – AUG 1, 2026 · Frozen at publish

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.
-   269 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.

## Corrections and updates

-   v5August 13, 2026

    reworded prompts

-   v6August 15, 2026

    rebui,d

-   v7August 15, 2026

    get audio to work

-   v8August 15, 2026

    humanize the toll

For newsrooms and researchers

## Use these figures

Figures v8 · Frozen

Journalists, emergency managers and researchers are welcome to reuse anything in this report, including the underlying counts, with attribution. Version 8 of these figures is frozen: if a correction changes them, it appears above as a dated note rather than silently replacing what you cited.

[Download the figures (CSV)](https://bepreparedsolutions.co/reports/alert-pulse/2026-07/data.csv?v=8)[Ask about the data](mailto:hello@bepreparedsolutions.co?subject=Alert%20Pulse%20data%20question)

Cite this report

BePreparedSolutions.co. "Heat, floods, and fire hit tens of millions in July 2026." Alert Pulse, August 15, 2026. https://bepreparedsolutions.co/reports/alert-pulse/2026-07

Attribution line for a chart or table

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.

Embed a chartWhere the warnings landedWhen the warnings arrivedMessages, warnings, countiesHow severe they wereWhat people were told to do

Paste this where the chart should appear

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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 8.

---

_Guidance here is general and cannot account for your circumstances. In an active emergency, official instructions from local authorities take precedence over anything published by BePrepared Solutions._