The first big hit of the hurricane season came in Texas. Hurricane Harvey made landfall in August of 2017 and flooded much of the Texas coastline, not to mention some of the surrounding states as well. Then, Hurricane Irma landed, ravaging parts of the Caribbean as well as Florida. Finally, the devastating season was rounded out by Hurricane María, which wiped out many Caribbean islands, most notably Puerto Rico. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), responsible for supporting citizens and first responders affected by emergency situations, as well as other agencies of national and local government, have been reasonably prompt with their responses, though their efforts have not been uniformly effective. Texas and Florida are now successfully back on the road to recovery. However, governmental agencies have been far less successful in addressing the devastation in Puerto Rico. Four weeks after Hurricanehurricane María made landfall, only about 20% of the island had electricity, according to the New York Times. In 2005, Katrina struck New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast, resulting in one of the highest costs of destruction from any hurricane in U.S.US history; FEMA was widely criticised at the time for its slow response and inefficient workings. Sound familiar? After more than ten10 years, what has changed in America’s preeminent emergency management agency?
Analyzing the government response to natural disasters requires knowledge of the damage caused by the major hurricanes of these past two decades. Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana the hardest, severely impacting important cities like New Orleans and Baton Rouge. According to Business Insider, Katrina ranks as the most costly hurricane of all time, destroying $108 billion worth of property and output from workers who were unable to perform their jobs due to factors like inability to commute and lack of power to communicate. In 2011, Hurricane Sandy caused a significantly less but still devastating $65 billion worth of damages to the New Jersey-New York Atlantic region. The three most recent hurricanes have caused an estimated $252.5 billion dollars in total losses: $97 billion from Harvey, $70.5 billion from Irma, and up to $85 billion from María, according to Moody’s Analytics. The figures for Harvey and Irma include $11 billion and $14 billion worth of lost output, respectively.
FEMA has certainly not responded to these hurricanes in a perfect manner, but their response has been a big improvement over their handling of Katrina. FEMA managed to pay out $1.4 billion in relief expenditures by February 2006, six months after Katrina made landfall. While $1.4 billion is a large amount of money, the total damage caused by Katrina was an enormous $108 billion!. The $1.4 billion payout seems all the more disappointing since it took six months for this money and aid to be delivered. What caused this? As many know, FEMA faced a good deal of criticism over its handling of the payouts. In the few weeks after the hurricane, aid took a while to arrive because of a bloated and disorganized bureaucracy. A PBS NewsHour report, broadcast in September 2005, said that “Reports of FEMA turning down personnel and supplies offered by police forces and emergency crews further drew fire from Congress and others who said the agency failed to respond adequately.” That same day, the director of FEMA quit his post amidst charges of mishandling the federal response. The reputation of FEMA was further tarnished when it was discovered that the agencies falling under the Department of Homeland Security, including FEMA, that the agencies, including FEMA, that fell under the Department of Homeland Security had received significantly more training in counter-terrorism than in emergency management. While counter-terrorism training is not by any means a bad thing, it should not be taking up 75% of the Homeland Security grant, as was reported by PBS. Thirty-one out of thirty-nine emergency response departments reported that their natural disaster training was not sufficient for the jobs that they would need to do to clean up after Katrina. Then, disaster victims began to discover that they were getting less money than they were entitled to receive, and 20% of the payouts were lost to fraud. It seemed for a while that the nightmare was over, until FEMA a few years later sent out letters demanding money back from the victims of the hurricane. This obviously enraged many people. After claiming that they had given payouts to those who were “ineligible” for them, FEMA asked for $385 million back from the victims, averaging out to about $4,622 per recipient, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
This time around, thankfully, FEMA has done a better job so far. A $1.5 billion payout arrived to Texans affected by Hurricane Harvey within thirty30 days of landfall. And according to Business Insider, onlyOnly 2-6% of payouts were lost to fraud after Hurricane Sandy, according to Business Insider. However, it is still unclear whether FEMA will demand money back after people have moved on from the hurricane reconstruction. Also, it is yet to be seen whether FEMA will be able to send more relief aid to areas like Puerto Rico, where victims have been forced to drink water from contaminated sources, and the island’s electric power has still not been fully restored. Finally, it is unclear what the fraud rate will be after everything blows over. One could say that FEMA did a good job this year, but people’s expectations were very low to start with. The agency is definitely on the right track, but there is still a lot to be done to get FEMA to be as useful as it should be.
The response so far to Harvey, Irma, and María should be a baseline, not a final achievement. For a country billed as the most powerful in the world, we should be able to respond more efficiently than have a better response than third-world countries like India, which was able to bring in 4,000 relief workers from areas surrounding the disaster zone in less than twelve hours before the landfall of Cyclone Vardah, a storm that which ended up causing $5.1 billion in damages. Did the relief workers save a potential tens of billions of dollars worth of damage from the cyclone? Probably not, but they certainly helped reduce the storm’s ultimate impact. Instead of plowing ahead on its robotic course of steady, but slow, improvement, FEMA needs to start preparing now, so that it will not have to make frantic, haphazard decisions the next time disaster strikes later on. FEMA needs to have a system that vets who they send out aid to so that they don’t repeat the errors made in the wake of Katrina. FEMA also needs to find a solution to cut down its response time, like using state-of-the-art technological innovations. It needs to figure out a way to deploy workers to a region before a hurricane, earthquake, or some other natural disaster strikes, so any potential hazards can be dealt with as they arise. By fixing all these issues, FEMA can help people recover faster and get them back into their normal lives. It will then live up to its mission of managing emergencies, not struggling with them.
Sources
https://www.moodysanalytics.com/webinars-on-demand/2017/the-economic-impact-of-hurricane-irma
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-destructive-hurricanes-in-us-history-2017-8
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/government_programs-july-dec05-fema_09-09
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-hurricane-harvey-will-be-a-big-test-for-fema-2017-9
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/25/health/puerto-rico-death-toll/index.html
http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2011/12/hurricane_katrina_victims_figh.html