About Plattow
Plattow is the natural-disaster risk atlas for insurance and real-estate professionals. Look up any U.S. address to see its FEMA flood zone, wildfire, earthquake, hurricane and other peril ratings, plus elevation and USDA rural-area context, drawn from official federal data through one map and one API.
Who Plattow is for
Plattow is built for the people who price, underwrite, adjust, and invest in property risk: insurance agents and brokers, claims adjusters, underwriters, risk managers, portfolio managers, real-estate investors, and builders. If your work depends on knowing a property's exposure to natural catastrophe before you commit capital, Plattow gives you that picture in seconds, from the same federal sources a careful analyst would assemble by hand.
Why Plattow is authoritative
Plattow reports only official federal data, with the source named for every value. It does not estimate, model, or invent figures. The flood zone comes from FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. The per-peril ratings come from FEMA's National Risk Index. Elevation comes from the USGS. USDA rural-area eligibility comes from USDA Rural Development. Geography comes from the U.S. Census. Because every field traces to a public, citable record, an underwriter or adjuster can defend the number it returns.
How Plattow scores peril risk
Plattow's headline score reflects a property's physical natural-catastrophe risk, not its dollar exposure. The score is driven by the property's FEMA flood zone, then lifted by genuinely location-specific perils: wildfire, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, tsunami, volcanic activity, and landslide. Severe perils can reach the top of the scale; diffuse hazards such as heat or hail are capped lower. This matters because FEMA's composite National Risk Index is weighted by expected dollar loss, so dense, high-value areas rank high regardless of a single property's physical exposure. Plattow separates the two: the headline answers "how exposed is this property to a damaging natural event," and the regional context line reports the FEMA composite for completeness.
What you can do with Plattow
You can look up a single address on the interactive map, read a server-rendered risk page for any property at plattow.com/report, or call the data directly through the Plattow API at plattow.com/api/report for integration into your own underwriting, claims, or portfolio workflows. The Natural Hazard Composite map view colors the country by physical natural-disaster risk, so you can screen regions before you screen addresses.
Data sources
U.S. Census Bureau (geocoding and geographies), FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer (flood zones), FEMA National Risk Index (per-peril ratings), U.S. Geological Survey (elevation), USDA Rural Development (rural-area eligibility), and OpenStreetMap (nearby facilities). See the sources page for the exact endpoints.
What Plattow is not
Plattow is informational. It is not a flood-zone determination, an appraisal, a catastrophe model, a binding underwriting decision, or loan approval. Treat it as the fast, sourced starting point for the official determinations and professional judgment your work requires.
Stay current and get access
Plattow publishes a professional briefing on changes to federal peril data and what they mean for property risk. To follow it, or to request API and portfolio access for your team, use the contact link below. (Subscription and API provisioning are being finalized; reach out and we will set you up.)