Officials begin coordinating start of yearslong rebuilding effort

WASHINGTON – Federal emergency officials, along with truckloads of supplies, streamed into Texas on Monday, the beginning of what is expected to be a yearslong rebuilding effort up and down the Gulf Coast after Harvey is done inflicting damage.

A day ahead of President Donald Trump’s visit to Texas on Air Force One, FEMA Administrator Brock Long flew into Corpus Christi to meet with state and local officials, presenting a unified front in what is likely to be a daunting logistical test for the new administration.

During a news conference in Washington on Monday, Trump reassured the state, “we are 100 percent with you. We’re pray-

ing for you.”

“Every asset at my disposal is available to local officials,” he said. “It’s the biggest ever. They’re saying it’s the biggest ever. It’s historic. It’s like Texas. It’s really like Texas, if you think about it.”

Three days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast, the federal government was just beginning a complex and costly rehabilitation effort. Gulf Coast lawmakers who conferred with state and federal officials over the weekend said that damage from the storm could easily exceed $20 billion, rivaling the damage of Hurricane Ike in 2008, which left a tab of more than $29 billion.

While other storms caused bigger initial wallops, Harvey’s meander along the coast left a trail of flooding and destruction more than 200 miles wide.

“It’s going to take a long time to dig out of this thing,” said Rep. Brian Babin, a Republican representing counties east of Houston. “It’s going to take months and months, if not years to rebuild a lot of our infrastructure, especially in the Houston area.”

So far, FEMA remains focused on assisting local authorities in rescue efforts and distributing emergency supplies. Almost 8,500 federal workers have been assigned to assist authorities in Texas and Louisiana, Long said. Officials estimated Monday they had already shipped more than 2 million meals and 2 million liters of bottled water — along with truckloads of cots, blankets and generators.

For an agency that many still remember for its struggles to manage Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the bigger test will come in managing the rebuilding efforts, experts say. But so far, the agency is winning early praise.

Gov. Greg Abbott, echoing comments by local officials and Texas congressmen and women, commended FEMA’s efforts Monday in “one of the largest disasters America has ever faced.”

“We know we’re still early in the process. We need to maintain this,” he said.

Washington budget deal

From wide-scale flooding in Houston to houses knocked from their foundations in Rockport, Harvey is likely to strain FEMA’s resources. The agency had an emergency response fund balance of $3.8 billion as of July 31, meaning that Congress is almost certain to have to allocate more money for the region’s long-term recovery.

“I think $3.8 billion is a pretty good down payment, but it’s still early,” said Houston U.S. Rep. Gene Green, a Democrat whose district includes the Houston Ship Channel. “We don’t know what the cost will be.”

Already Texas politicians were gearing up for getting back to Washington next month to get legislation moving for disaster relief. The hurricane comes as pressure is building on President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress to work out a budget deal to avoid a government shutdown at the end of next month.

But politicians of both parties, including Trump, expressed confidence Monday that would not interfere with getting emergency funding to Texas.

“This is going to be a very expensive effort,” said Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville. “I’m sure members of Congress are going to agree this is a situation that deserves federal help.”

Hanging over the cleanup efforts will be the financial distress of the National Flood Insurance Program, the FEMA-run organization backing virtually every home flood insurance policy in the country.

After covering the losses from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, FEMA is now more than $20 billion in debt.

That is unlikely to slow down insurance payouts for Harvey, said Larry Filer, an economics professor at Old Dominion University. But the additional losses are likely to increase pressure for increasing premiums for flood insurance.

“They have to go up because they have to reflect the reality of the associated risk,” Filer said. “The unfortunate part about this is it’s been easy to kick the can since Sandy because we haven’t had a big issue.”

Even with Harvey still lingering over the Gulf, Texas politicians were thinking ahead to preparations for the next big storm.

‘Water from the sky?’

A number of congressmen interviewed Monday said the storm was further evidence of the necessity of building a sea wall protecting Galveston and the Houston Ship Channel.

The project, sometimes called the “Ike Dike” for the destructive storm surge of Hurricane Ike, comes with a $15 billion price tag. U.S. Rep. Randy Weber, a Republican from Friendswood, argues that hurricane protection is worth it, given the staggering costs of storm recoveries. Still, he acknowledges that it would have made little difference with Harvey, where the bulk of the flooding has come from torrential rain, not storm surge.

“Water from the sky?” he said. “You can’t make an umbrella that big.”

Other infrastructure projects that might get another look in Congress include the aging Barker and Addicks dams, which were forced to spill water Monday into the Buffalo Bayou, increasing the flood risk in Houston.

“We should be appropriating money to shore them up, and hopefully this will be a push for that,” Green said.

Harvey poses a test for Trump not just by virtue of the fact it’s his first major natural disaster as president but by the fact he currently has nobody at the helm of the Department of Homeland Security. The department’s past secretary, retired Marine General John Kelly, is now Trump’s chief of staff.

Among those thought to be in line for the post is Texas U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, whose district runs between Houston and Austin.

Weber, however, said he hasn’t felt a leadership vacuum in the response to Harvey. “We’ve got a lot of good people at the state and local level,” he said.

Even as people around the country and word expressed their solidarity with those along the Texas coast, that same good feeling did not necessarily extend to their politicians.

Following Sandy, many Texas Republicans voted against legislation providing financial relief to residents in New York and New Jersey. On Monday New Jersery Governor Chris Christie, a Trump ally, told reporters, “Congressional members in Texas are hypocrites and I said back in 2012 they’d be proven to be hypocrites.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who voted against the Sandy bill, defended that vote Monday as an attempt to stop efforts by Democrats to add “pork” and “pet projects” into the legislation.

“Every Republican, including Texas Republicans, agreed hurricane funding was critical,” Cruz told CNN.