Home Hazards by the Numbers: What Is Near the Homes You Buy

A real estate listing is a sales document. It shows you the kitchen, not the freight line two blocks over or the closed gas station that left something in the soil. So we counted. Across the 8 states ReconNest covers, here is what actually sits near the homes people are buying, drawn straight from the public record.

The contamination you cannot see from the curb

Most buyers picture a Superfund site when they think about contaminated land. Those exist, but they are the rare, headline end of a much larger set. The everyday version is a leaking underground fuel tank behind a corner store, a dry cleaner that used solvents for forty years, or an industrial parcel now growing houses. Here is what the 8 states hold, by category.

The underground tanks dominate that total, and that is the honest surprise. A fuel tank is not a disaster by itself, but a leaking one puts benzene and other solvents into the soil and groundwater, and there are more than two hundred thousand of them registered across these states. Most sit quietly. The point of a count like this is not to alarm you. It is to show how much is out there that a listing will never mention, and how ordinary it is for a home to have something on the record within a few blocks.

Superfund sites, state by state

Superfund is the federal government's list of the most seriously contaminated places in the country, the National Priorities List. It is the cleanest dataset to compare across states, because it is one national program with one standard. Here is how the eight break down.

The order surprises people. Washington, Oregon, and New York lead, ahead of much larger states like Texas and California. That is legacy, not size: a century of mining, timber processing, shipbuilding, and heavy industry left the Pacific Northwest and the old industrial Northeast with more designated sites. A raw count favors nothing about a specific neighborhood, and being near one is not a verdict. Cleanup status and distance decide whether a listed site actually matters for a home, which is the whole argument of our guide on buying near a Superfund site.

And that is before you count the noise

ReconNest exists because a friend bought a house next to an active freight line and lost tens of thousands in equity when he sold. Infrastructure is the other half of what a listing leaves out, and it is everywhere.

• 70,836 miles of railroad line, freight and passenger.
• 68,244 miles of major road corridor loud enough to model for noise.
• 5,903 airports and aviation facilities.
• 60,647 communication towers.
• 18,857 electric transmission line segments, plus 5,028 power plants.
• 34,443 wind turbines and 653 data centers.

The natural hazards on record

Then there is what the land and weather do. The FEMA flood map alone runs to more than 1.3 million polygons across the eight states, and the rest of the picture is substantial.

• 1,300,101 FEMA flood-zone map polygons.
• 59,627 past wildfire perimeters and 49,153 wildfire-hazard areas.
• 19,393 recorded storm episodes.
• 13,044 federal disaster declarations.

A flood zone is the one hazard here that is genuinely address-specific and cheap to check, and it changes your insurance and your lender's requirements. Our flood-zone guide walks through how.

Why a count is only the start

None of these numbers tell you about one house. A map with three hundred thousand dots is not a warning, it is a reason to look at your dot. Distance decides whether a site can reach a home, a pathway (soil, groundwater, air, or noise) decides how, and status decides whether it is an active problem or a closed file. A capped landfill a mile away is a different thing than a leaking tank next door, and a raw count cannot tell them apart. That translation, from a pile of government records into what it means for a specific address, is the work.

How we counted (methodology)

Every figure here is a point-in-time snapshot of ReconNest's own loaded data as of July 2026, counted inside each state's boundary. The sources are federal and state open records: the EPA, FEMA, the Department of Transportation and FAA, NOAA, state environmental agencies, and OpenStreetMap for physical features. Two honest caveats. Counts favor larger and more populous states, so they are a measure of what exists, not of risk per home. And coverage of some sources still varies by state (Idaho's underground storage tanks, for example, are not yet included), so treat the totals as a floor, not a ceiling. The data refreshes on a schedule, so the live figure for any single source may differ from the snapshot above.

Common questions

How many environmental hazards are near the average home?

There is no single number for one home, and that is the point. Across the 8 states ReconNest covers, the public record holds more than 350,000 contamination, cleanup, tank, and industrial sites, plus roughly 70,000 miles of railroad and the full FEMA flood map. Whether any of it sits near a specific home depends entirely on the address, which is exactly what a report checks.

Where does this data come from?

Federal and state open records: the EPA (Superfund, brownfields, the Toxics Release Inventory), FEMA (flood zones and disaster declarations), the Department of Transportation and FAA (rail, roads, airports), NOAA (storms), state environmental agencies (cleanup sites and storage tanks), and OpenStreetMap for physical features. ReconNest loads them, keeps them current on a schedule, and reads them for one address at a time.

Does a hazard nearby mean a home is unsafe?

No. Distance and pathway decide whether something nearby actually reaches a home, and many sites are closed, capped, or already cleaned up. A count on a map is a reason to check, not a verdict. A report shows the distance, the current status, and what it means in plain English.

Can I find all of this myself?

Yes, one source at a time. The reason most buyers do not is that it means visiting a dozen separate government databases, each with its own codes and quirks, then stitching the results together for a single address. ReconNest does that in one place and decodes it into plain English, which is the whole reason it exists.

Which states does this cover?

The 8 states ReconNest serves today: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, New York, California, Florida, Texas, and Illinois. The list grows as new states come online.