Disaster claims soar in year of calamities

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — The number of Americans registered for federal disaster aid jumped tenfold this year, costing billions of dollars in additional emergency funding as the nation nears the end of a historically calamitous year.

More than 4.7 million Americans — or about 1.4 percent of the population — have registered so far this year for disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In 2016, 480,000 sought aid, and fewer than 180,000 people registered for disaster assistance in each of the three previous years.

Three hurricanes — Harvey, Irma and Maria — collectively affected an area with about 8 percent of the U.S. population. The hurricanes were followed by wildfires that killed 43 people and destroyed more than 7,000 homes here in wine country.

The record-setting disasters — combined with other storms, floods, mudslides and blazes that struck communities across the United States this year — have taxed emergency resources and left residents struggling to rebuild their lives long after the floods have receded and the flames have stopped burning.

The fallout will cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, much of it approved by Congress in supplemental spending bills. The White House on Friday asked Congress for an extra $44 billion in disaster relief; FEMA would get the majority of that, and much of the rest would be for a community block grant program.

FEMA has enlisted private phone-bank companies and employees from other federal agencies to add 3,000 staffers to process disaster claims.

Federal emergency officials are calling on Americans to improve their disaster preparedness.

“You have to know the hazards and vulnerabilities, and how to be prepared, based on where you work and where you live and where you visit,” FEMA Administrator William B. “Brock” Long said in an interview with The Washington Post.

FEMA has been using satellite imagery and other kinds of remote sensing, along with flooding data and housing records, to help calculate the cost of the damage suffered by disaster survivors. But a dismaying development has slowed these efforts: Identity thieves are filing fraudulent claims.

Hackers have used the names of real victims to divert aid to bogus bank accounts. They struck first in California — filing thousands of fraudulent claims — and the scam spread to other disaster areas, FEMA Region IX Director Bob Fenton told The Post. He said that the agency’s inspector general is investigating the fraud and that the legitimate survivors will still get their financial assistance. But thieves already have siphoned away some of the money.

Here in wine country, a massive effort is underway to deal with the destruction of entire neighborhoods. Under California law, it is not enough to clear the slab that remains of a home. The entire foundation must be ripped up, Fenton said.

“There are moments I feel recovered. But most of the time, I still feel shaky,” said Manuel Flores, standing in front of the ruins of his home in Coffey Park several weeks after the fire.

The wineries have tried to lure tourists back for fall festivals, assuring them that most of the region was untouched by the fires.

One day recently, Dave Frost, 58, visited his home off Mark West Springs Road to look for heirloom silver that had belonged to his grandparents.

His insurance company will pay off his mortgage, he said. But there are things he will never recover. Before the fire, he had been curating family photos, digitizing them and had wisely backed them up on a second computer, but he had not saved them to the cloud, and now all the photos were gone, immolated — because hardly anyone imagines a single point of failure of this magnitude.

Everyone knows a house can catch on fire. No one expects this, though — nothing left.

“It’s just stuff. But a lot of years of stuff. You can’t go out and buy photos from 10 and 15 years ago when my kids were growing up.”

FEMA officials say the disasters of 2017 should prod everyone to improve their readiness for a bad day. But they know that many people assume that certain hazards do not apply to them.

Long, the FEMA head, has called for a “culture of preparedness” and says Americans are nowhere close to achieving that.

“We have to overcome a lot of myths,” he said, and cited the widespread belief that only structures in a flood plain are vulnerable to a flood.

Long has urged people to create their own rainy day fund, and he says “asset poverty” remains one of the greatest impediments to true preparedness.