Critical Facilities Aggregates for US Coastal Geographies

Aggregated totals of law enforcement, fire stations, EMS, medical facilities, and schools within US coastal footprints. The data is derived from the USGS Structures Inventory Database as of June 2016. It covers multiple coastal geographies including Coastal Shoreline Counties, Coastal Watershed Counties, Coastal States, the Coastal Zone, and FEMA Flood Zones.

Use Cases

• Analyze the distribution of law enforcement facilities and fire stations across Coastal Shoreline Counties to assess emergency service coverage.
• Compare aggregated totals of hospital and other medical facilities within FEMA Flood Zones for hazard mitigation planning.
• Map the density of schools in Coastal Watershed Counties relative to demographic and economic data for community resilience studies.
• Evaluate the concentration of EMS facilities across Coastal States to identify potential gaps in emergency medical response infrastructure.

Strengths

• Data covers multiple defined coastal geographies including Coastal States, the Coastal Zone, and FEMA Flood Zones.
• Derived from the authoritative USGS Structures Inventory Database.
• Includes aggregated totals for five distinct facility types critical for emergency planning.

Limitations

• The underlying source data is from June 2016, making it potentially outdated for current analysis.
• Data is aggregated by geography, preventing analysis of individual facility locations or attributes.
• Available file formats (PDF, HTML) are not machine-readable, complicating direct data extraction and analysis.

Provenance

Source

USGS Structures Inventory Database (June 2016), processed by NOAA National Ocean Service.

Collection Method

Derived and aggregated from the source database for specified coastal footprints.

Time Range

Source data snapshot from June 2016.

Freshness

The dataset record was last updated on 2025-01-21, but the source data is from June 2016.

Geography

United States coastal geographies: Coastal Shoreline Counties, Coastal Watershed Counties, Coastal States, the Coastal Zone, and FEMA Flood Zones.