Those hit hard by area’s spring floods still struggling to recover
Standing in the lobby of Tomball’s public works building on Friday, Matty Molina examined a zoning map on the wall and talked to a city official about an issue involving a local business. She then glanced to her right and saw a sign on a meeting-room door marked FEMA. “What’s that?” Molina asked. I explained that the room had been set up temporarily as a disaster recovery center for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, offering assistance to people hit hard by the storms and floods that hammered the Houston area in April and May.
That made Molina curious. She walked into the room and emerged 45 minutes later clutching a stack of documents. On her way out, she noted that her business, a coin-operated laundry in Tomball, and her home in the Waller County town of Hockley had flooded, and that her insurance didn’t cover the damage. Until she chanced upon it, she didn’t know about FEMA’s assistance program for people in her situation.
Was she hopeful of getting help? “I don’t know,” she said, hoisting the documents that the FEMA workers had given her. “I need money, not papers.”
The spring floods are a receding memory for many, but not for thousands of people in the Houston area and beyond who are still struggling to recover. Fort Bend County’s transit agency, for example, is extending its free bus service to help storm victims in Richmond and Rosenberg, some of whom are still living in hotels, according to Houston Public Media.
Molina and others recovering from flooding are banking on help from a federal agency with a questionable record of providing assistance in a fair, equitable and transparent way.
In the immediate aftermath of a disaster such as a hurricane or flood, FEMA’s role is a bit like that of a triage team in a hospital emergency room. The agency is to provide enough money for a homeowner to make a disasterdamaged home habitable — to patch it up so that the occupants can live in it until other agencies can provide longer-term help. (Those programs have their own problems, too complicated to detail here). FEMA may not du-
plicate benefits provided by insurers.
After Hurricane Ike devastated Galveston in September 2008, some homeowners told me that inspectors hired by FEMA contractors seemed to have little training, knowledge or motivation to be thorough; one woman said the man who inspected her house to determine her eligibility never budged from a chair in her backyard as he filled out his report. Many people were denied assistance because inspectors judged, based on unclear criteria, that the damage to their homes was a result of “deferred maintenance” rather than the hurricane.
FEMA required contractors to train inspectors but left the details up to the contractor. A former inspector told me that some recruits were sent into the field after just eight hours of training.
‘Just write a check’
Similar complaints have emerged in the aftermath of the spring floods in the Houston area, according to Jerome Wesevich, an attorney representing residents who sued FEMA after Hurricane Dolly struck the Rio Grande Valley a few months before Ike. The plaintiffs alleged that FEMA had discriminated against them in denying assistance claims. A federal judge has ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor but hasn’t determined what remedy to order, Wesevich said.
“FEMA does not tell people how it decides who gets relief and how much each person gets,” Wesevich said. “They just write a check with a vague explanation.”
A FEMA representative couldn’t be reached Monday to comment on changes to its procedures for evaluating claims or training inspectors since the 2008 hurricanes.
FEMA has approved more than 10,000 individual assistance claims arising from the April 18 floods and disbursed $59 million, a spokeswoman said. The figures for the Memorial Day event are 5,199 claims and $35 million. Applications for assistance from the April floods are due by Friday and for the May flood by Aug. 10.
“We’re still out here, we still want people to know they still have time if they sustained any damages,” FEMA spokesman William Lindsey told the Chronicle’s Mihir Zaveri on Monday.
Time to act
Lots of smart people are still trying to figure out why the Houston area floods so often, and so calamitously, and what might be done about it. There is little consensus on the role of development, as detailed by the newspaper’s Kim McGuire in her in-depth report on Sunday.
Important as these questions are, though, they are not what’s keeping victims of the recent floods awake at night as they struggle to get their homes and their lives back on track.
Issues like land-use policy and the appropriate release rate from detention ponds may seem a bit remote when mold is creeping up your walls. FEMA should act swiftly and give these folks one less thing to worry about.