USA TODAY International Edition
FEMA hits a wall in 2017’s disasters
Hurricanes, wildfires push agency to its limits
George Haddow hasn’t worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in nearly two decades. So he was surprised to receive an email in September asking him to return to work on a 30-day assignment in a disaster zone.
That marked the first time Haddow, now a senior fellow with Tulane University’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy, was solicited by FEMA since leaving — a move that underscores the measures the agency has taken amid this year’s onslaught of disasters. “Does FEMA have the capacity as it is formed and funded right now to deal with this type of disaster year?” said Haddow, who worked at FEMA as a White House liaison from 1993 to 2001 and didn’t take the shortterm assignment. “This year proves that it does not.”
On many fronts, 2017 has been a record-setting year for disasters, with three major hurricanes striking U.S. shores, widespread flooding and a slew of devastating wildfires. The hurricanes alone caused an estimated $370 billion in damages and about 250 deaths on U.S. lands, making it by far the costliest U.S. hurricane season on record.
The three hurricanes affected nearly 26 million people, or 8% of the U.S. population. By mid-October, more than 4 million survivors had registered for FEMA assistance — greater than those who registered for hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Sandy combined, the agency said.
The federal disaster response and recovery agency has been stretched to its limit delivering aid to survivors and helping rebuild storm-wrecked cities. To compensate, it recruited workers from other federal agencies, reached out to retirees, and solicited state and local agencies for help. More than 22,300 members of the federal workforce have been deployed to Texas, Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
FEMA’s struggles to help affected communities have been felt from mountains in central Puerto Rico to firemauled swaths of Northern California.
“They got hammered,” said Mark Ghilarducci, director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “Between Irma, Harvey, Puerto Rico — those are all big events. They leveraged everyone they have.”
In California, FEMA set up a small team in place early on to help survivors of the wildfires that first devoured sections of the state’s wine country in October and later exploded in Southern California this month, he said. But as FEMA stretched its workers over multiple disaster zones in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, the agency asked California’s emergency management officials for help staffing FEMA centers.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I can’t remember that ever happening before,” Ghilarducci said. “Every piece of everything we have in the toolbox has been leveraged this year.”
As disasters sprouted across the USA, FEMA officials tapped into 3,800 extra workers in the Department of Homeland Security’s “Surge Capacity Force,” as well as FEMA reservists, who are on call for disasters. But when that wasn’t enough, they took the rare move of recruiting workers from other federal departments, who needed to be quickly trained and mobilized to disaster zones.
Still short-handed, FEMA sent emails to retirees and tapped into the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, a mutual aid agreement with states to share resources in times of need. In the past six years, FEMA has recruited an average of 1,700 state workers per year through EMAC. So far this year, it has requested 17,790.
Despite the lack of manpower, FEMA has been getting to disaster zones fast and helping millions of people in need, said Mike Sprayberry, president of the National Emergency Management Association. The true test will come when these spread-out disaster zones shift from response to long-term recovery, an area FEMA also oversees, he said.
“Does FEMA have the capacity as it is formed and funded right now to deal with this type of disaster year? This year proves that it does not.” George Haddow White House liaison for FEMA from 1993 to 2001