Vow to streamline Harvey aid backfires
— After Hurricane Harvey hammered Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott pledged that the country’s largest conservative state would lead its own recovery, streamlining federal aid to storm victims while avoiding the staggering inefficiencies of earlier Washington-controlled disaster responses.
“A Texas-sized storm requires a Texas-sized response, and that is exactly what the state will provide,” declared Abbott, who has made bashing the feds a centerpiece of his career.
But rather than becoming a new model for disaster recovery, Texas’ efforts almost six months in often have been the opposite, slow to unfold and tangled with bureaucracy.
Harvey made landfall in late August, with 130-plus mph winds and torrential rainfall that forced nearly 780,000 Texans to evacuate.
About 900,000 later applied for government recovery assistance.
Since then, efforts to provide short-term housing for victims and emergency repairs to get people back in their damaged houses have lagged well behind earlier postdisaster efforts, an analysis by The Associated Press shows.
Federal records reveal that it took nearly four times as long to house people in trailers after Harvey as it did following Hurricane Katrina, whose chaotic aftermath became a national scandal. Repairs to houses also are running months behind the pace following 2012’s Super Storm Sandy and lower-profile disasters like Baton Rouge flooding in 2016.
Only 3,500 homes have been repaired in one Texas quick-fix program. A Government Accountability Office report showed nearly 19,000 repaired in New York during a shorter period after Sandy.
“A lot of the small communities have been left to their own devices. They don’t even know who to call,” said Shannon Van Zandt, a Texas A&M University professor who specializes in hazard reduction and recovery. “I think we’ll see a pretty substantial backlash over time from these residents.”
Texas officials attribute the delays to complex procedures used by the federal government — which had provided around $13 billion for recovery efforts through mid-February — and the state’s attempts to avoid earlier problems, such as shoddy construction.
“Bureaucratic redtape at the federal level slows and hampers the recovery process,” said Ciara Matthews, Abbott’s spokeswoman.
Kevin Hannes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s coordinating officer for Harvey, has praised the state’s efforts.
“All in all, the temporary housing program is moving along smartly,” Hannes said. “Is it moving as fast as any of us would like? No it’s not.”