Report rips FEMA as flat-footed in wake of Hurricane Maria

Puerto Rico warehouses empty after contents sent to U.S. Virgin Islands

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency’s plans for a crisis in Puerto Rico were based on a focused disaster such as a tsunami, not a major hurricane devastating the whole island.

The agency vastly underestimated how much food and fresh water it would need, and how hard it would be to get additional supplies to the island.

And when the killer storm did come, FEMA’s warehouse in Puerto Rico was nearly empty, its contents rushed to aid the U.S. Virgin Islands, which were hammered by another storm two weeks before. There was not a single tarpaulin or cot left in stock.

Those and other shortcomings are detailed in a draft FEMA report assessing the agency’s response to the 2017 storm season, when three major hurricanes slammed the United States in quick succession, leaving FEMA struggling to deliver food and water quickly to victims in Puerto Rico.

The after-action report describes an initially chaotic and disorganized relief effort on the island that was plagued with logistical problems and stretched into the longest feeding mission in the agency’s history.

The report confirms many of the criticisms that have been levelled at the agency, especially in Puerto Rico, which U.S. President Donald Trump vis- ited a few weeks after Hurricane Maria and complained that the disaster “threw our budget a little out of whack.” At the time, the island’s hospitals were struggling to function, shortages of diesel fuel were keeping supermarkets closed and generators idle, and the death rate on the island was soaring.

The 2017 hurricane season in the United States was the most destructive on record. According to the report, nearly 5 million people registered for FEMA assistance that year, exceeding the combined total from four previous major hurricanes — Rita, Wilma, Katrina and Sandy.

The 2017 storms caused a total of $265 billion in damage and badly stretched FEMA’s capacity to respond. The report says FEMA had thousands fewer workers than it needed, and many of those it had were not qualified to handle such major catastrophes. FEMA had to borrow many workers from other agencies to help it manage the immense demand for essentials, from hotel rooms to drinking water, in the aftermath of the storms.

Although FEMA distributed 130 million meals, 35 million of them in Puerto Rico, the report says the agency took longer than expected to secure supplies and lost track of much of the aid it delivered and who needed it.

Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, said in a statement that the report “provides a transformative roadmap for how we respond to future catastrophic incidents.”