Terms of use

For information and planning only

• In an emergency, call 911 or your local emergency authorities. DCRA is not a dispatch system, an alerting service, or a source of live incident information.
• DCRA is not engineering, legal, regulatory, medical, financial, or emergency-management advice. Decisions about a facility, a permit, or an emergency plan should rest on the underlying records and on qualified professionals, not on this site alone.
• DCRA does not determine whether any facility complies with a law, regulation, or code, and nothing on the site should be read as such a determination.

Scenarios are illustrative, not predictions

Planning scenarios, downwind areas, and other modeled views are labeled as modeled or illustrative. They show the kind of situation a planner might prepare for. They do not predict that any event will happen, and they do not estimate chemical concentrations, exposure, evacuation boundaries, injuries, or damage. Historical incidents are shown as reference cases only; an event at one site does not mean the same will happen at another.

Accuracy and completeness

• Records are compiled from public sources such as agency filings, permits, utility and company announcements, and news reporting. Each value carries an evidence label, a confidence level, and its source. Values the public record does not support are shown as UNKNOWN.
• Proposed projects change quickly. A record may be incomplete, out of date, or wrong despite reasonable care. Check the source and the date it was last verified before relying on a value.
• Naming a company or facility does not suggest wrongdoing, and DCRA is not affiliated with or endorsed by any company, utility, or agency it names. Company names and trademarks belong to their owners and are used only to identify the facilities.
• Absence of public information is not evidence of absence. A gap in the public record does not mean a gap in a facility's or a community's preparation.

Corrections

Anyone can ask for a value to be checked, with a source. A person reviews each request against that source before anything changes, and accepted corrections and status changes are listed publicly, with dates and the previous value, in the corrections ledger. Use the "Verify or dispute" links on a record, or open an issue on the project's GitHub page.

Reusing DCRA's records

DCRA is free to read and use for residents, public officials, planners, reporters, and researchers. What it does not allow, without a separate agreement, is taking the records and selling them.

Unless noted otherwise, the facility records, summaries, and other text and data that DCRA publishes are © 2026 Data Center Risk Atlas and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0). You may copy, share, and adapt them for noncommercial purposes, as long as you give credit, link to the license, and say if you made changes. A suggested credit line:

Source: Data Center Risk Atlas (datacenterriskatlas.org), licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Please also keep the evidence labels and source dates with any value you reuse, and do not present a modeled or estimated value as verified. Reuse does not imply that DCRA endorses you or your work.

Additional permissions

In addition to the license, and on the same conditions (credit, a link, and noting changes), DCRA also permits these uses even where they are paid or commercial:

• News and commentary. Reporting, analysis, and commentary by news organizations, newsletters, broadcasters, and independent journalists, including quoting records and showing maps or charts made from them.
• Public agencies. Use by federal, state, tribal, and local governments, regulators, school and special districts, and their elected and appointed officials, and by contractors and consultants doing work for them, such as a planning study, staff report, or hazard-mitigation plan.
• Research and teaching. Academic research, teaching, and publication, including in commercially published journals and books.
• Public participation. Using the records in public comments, testimony, filings, and presentations in a permitting, zoning, or regulatory proceeding, whoever the participant is.

These permissions cover using the records in that work. They do not cover passing the records on as a dataset, described below.

Commercial licensing

A separate written license from DCRA is required to:

• sell, license, rent, or otherwise redistribute the records, or a substantial part of them, as a dataset, feed, API, download, or subscription;
• build the records into a commercial product or service, such as a site-selection, real-estate, market-intelligence, risk-scoring, or investment tool;
• use the records to train, fine-tune, or supply a commercial AI model or data product; or
• copy the records in bulk or by automated means (scraping, crawling, or repeated downloads of the feeds) for any of the uses above.

To ask about a license, email licensing@datacenterriskatlas.org. Licensing fees support the weekly upkeep of the public record; the public site stays free.

Earlier license

Until 4 November 2026, DCRA's records were published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). Copies obtained before that date remain available under that license. Records added or updated after it are covered by the license above.

Not covered by DCRA's license

• Material from the sources DCRA cites (documents, filings, quotations, images, and datasets) remains under its owners' terms. The source register lists each source.
• Facts themselves, such as a facility's location or the date of a hearing, are not owned by anyone. The license covers DCRA's selection, arrangement, writing, and presentation of them.
• Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License; basemap tiles are served by OpenFreeMap. Other reference datasets keep the terms their publishers set.
• Company names, logos, and trademarks.
• The software that runs the site, which is not covered by this content license.

Use of the site

You may not use automated tools to copy the site's records in bulk, through its pages, feeds, or /api endpoints, for any use that needs a commercial license unless you have one. Reasonable automated access for the permitted uses above, such as a newsroom or agency checking the change feed for updates, is fine. Do not place a load on the site that interferes with other people's use of it.

Submissions

When you send a correction, source, or suggested data center, you confirm that you are free to share it and that it contains no one's private personal information. Summaries and source links appear publicly for review. You give DCRA permission to use, edit, and publish what you send as part of its records, under the licenses described above, including commercial licenses. What is stored, and how to have it removed, is described in the privacy notice.

No warranty

The site and its records are provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. The site may be changed, interrupted, or taken offline at any time.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, DCRA and the people who build and maintain it are not liable for any loss or damage of any kind, whether direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or special, arising from use of or reliance on the site, its records, or its scenarios, even if advised of the possibility of such damage. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions or limits, so some of the above may not apply to you; where that is the case, liability is limited to the smallest amount the law allows.

Links to other sites

DCRA links to the sources behind its records and to services such as GitHub and Stripe. Those sites have their own terms and privacy practices, and DCRA is not responsible for their content.

Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated. The date at the top shows the latest version, and continued use of the site after a change means you accept the updated terms. Earlier versions are kept in the project's public history on GitHub.