Brookings calls for FEMA reforms to make disaster declaration, response easier for rural areas

   

Courtesy of the Library of Congress (Unsplash)

A recent analysis by the Brookings institution examines the challenges faced by rural communities after a disaster and makes recommendations for improvements in federal assistance. Rural counties were subject to a majority of major disaster declarations, the report said, while being home to just 14% of Americans.

The situation is complicated by a significant shortage of the same resources available to metropolitan areas. Small communities not only are financially strapped but lack the level of emergency preparedness and response necessary to recover. Often, responders serve in multiple roles in the community, like police, fire and ambulance services. Administrations have small staffs and lack experience dealing with complicated federal programs.

The report’s authors, Anthony F. Pipa and Julia Davatzes, point to other notable challenges. “The larger geographic areas of rural communities and lower population densities, for example, translate into longer evacuation times and longer distances for emergency personnel to travel to reach affected individuals. There are rural places that rely on a single egress or ingress route; if damaged, all transit to and from the community is interrupted.” Also, there are generally larger groups of the elderly and the disabled, along with a higher percentage of low-income residents.

In response to these needs, the report calls for reformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Pipa and Davatzes note that in the years between 2016 and 2025, “rural counties made up almost two-thirds” of those included in major U.S. disaster declarations. They make the following recommendations:

• Ensure new policies are implemented and will improve rural communities' ability to respond and recover from disasters;

• Update the disaster declaration process in consideration of rural assets;

• Adjust cost-share and reimbursement systems with rural capacities in mind;

• Provide additional technical assistance;

• Streamline grant and reporting requirements;

• Make sure rural areas have easy access to FEMA staff;

• Increase research and data transparency.

Hurricane-torn residents in western North Carolina try to guide recovery despite feeling voiceless at times

Debris removal in western North Carolina is messy business.
(FEMA photo)

After Hurricane Helene pummeled western North Carolina in September 2024, it left a trail of wrecked buildings, broken plumbing, downed electrical lines, flooded homes, rancid water, and mud everywhere. For area residents still working to restore their lives and land, their post-disaster experience can be summed up in a word: Messy.

"Helene brought extreme flooding and landslides to southern Appalachia, killing 108 people and causing $60 billion in damage in western North Carolina alone," report Katie Meyers and Izzy Ross of Grist. "It also reshaped rivers and landscapes, littering them with everything from garbage and trees to cars and homes."

Residents working to restore their neighborhoods sometimes land in the crosshairs of "contractors and subcontractors, officials at every level of government, and an alphabet soup of agencies," Meyers and Ross write. Crews and public authorities can show up unannounced, leaving community members unsure of who is in charge of what.

Debris removal has posed multiple challenges for residents trying to protect the land and its wildlife. Meyers and Ross explain, "Because contractors are paid by the weight of waste removed or by the linear foot of ground covered, there can be a struggle to balance expediency and ecological care," Grist reports. The massive amount of trees and limbs that needed removal from the region's waterways "sparked arguments about what constitutes debris, what ought to be cleared, and what might be better left alone."

Transylvania County may have avoided a direct assault from Hurricane Helene, but the Army Corps "earmarked some $66 million for debris removal there," Meyers and Ross add. County officials have been frustrated by the lack of collaboration. Transylvania County Manager Jamie Laughter told Grist, "The county has not had a role in directing the contractors’ work, assessing regulatory compliance or how they go about their work because that falls to [the Army Corps]."

Scientists who live in the community have also felt ignored. "When Hans Lohmeyer, a biologist with Conserving Carolina, tried to help [the Corps], he was rebuffed," Grist reports. "He showed Grist photographs of riverbanks littered with crushed elktoe mussels, which are endangered, and stumps of what he said were healthy trees."

With FEMA grants canceled, local governments search for new funds -- and rural communities have few options

Graph by Connie Hanzhang Jin, from FEMA data compiled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Sewage back-ups, wildfire threats or repeated flooding in residential areas are just a few of the complicated problems rural towns planned to fix with Federal Emergency Management Agency funds, but that was before the Trump administration withdrew the support.

"Rural communities were awarded FEMA grants to fix long-standing infrastructure problems, and they expected funding to be delivered this year," report Lauren Sommer and Rebecca Hersher of NPR. "But last month, the Trump administration canceled their grants and hundreds of others, including ones that had already been promised but not yet paid out.

FEMA began the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC program, in 2020, during President Trump's first term. Since then, it has expanded to award about "$4.6 billion to communities across the U.S.," Sommer and Hersher explain. "The goal was to help local, state and tribal governments protect residents from future disasters. . . . Research shows that improving buildings and infrastructure before disasters happen can reduce the overall damage and cost when they hit."

The Trump administration said it cut BRIC to address wasteful, fraudulent spending, but rural towns that were relying on FEMA dollars don't see their grant money as unwise spending. Daniel Hoffert, village president for DePue, Illinois, which lost a grant to stop chronic flooding problems, told NPR, "I don't think they know what waste is. I don't think they know what fraud is. None of this, to me, is waste and fraud."

For many rural places, federal money is the "only source large enough to update the aging infrastructure that's vulnerable to increasingly intense disasters," Sommer and Hersher write. 

"In Kamiah, Idaho, deputy city clerk Mike Tornatore says he'd already told residents that the grant was on its way. With Kamiah having seen destructive wildfires in the past, its BRIC grant focused on fire protection," NPR reports. "He's also hoping to get a meeting with Trump about the impact of what the administration has canceled." 

FEMA moves to close its popular Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program

BRIC grants helped communities of all sizes prepare
for natural disasters. (Adobe Stock photo)

Despite the ongoing reality of extreme weather hitting communities around the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to end its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program.

"In an internal FEMA memorandum, the Trump administration announced its plans to dismantle that program — the biggest climate adaptation initiative the federal government has ever funded — even as disasters incur hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damages across the United States," report Zoya Teirstein and Jake Bittle of Grist. The billions of dollars BRIC grants provided were used to help cities, counties and states prepare for natural disasters before they strike.

BRIC was created in 2018, during Donald Trump's first term and its first round of funding was "launched in 2020, when Trump was still in office, and in 2023, the program awarded close to a billion dollars to scores of communities, states, and tribal nations across the country," Grist reports. "In January, before Trump began his second term, the agency opened its fiscal year 2024 notice of funding, with $750 million in matching grants made available to applicants from areas that received a major disaster declaration within the past seven years."

Commenting on BRIC's failure to meet the program's objectives, a FEMA spokesperson told Grist, "BRIC was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.”

BRIC's focus "on equity is what may have marked it for demolition — the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling Biden-era efforts to infuse equity into governmental programs and direct more climate spending toward underrepresented groups," Teirstein and Bittle explain.

From building culverts to protecting substations from flooding, the popular program helped communities complete practical but often expensive disaster preparation projects. Teirstein and Bittle write, "In fiscal year 2023, FEMA received more than 1,200 subapplications across all 50 states, 35 tribes, five territories, and Washington, D.C., totaling more than $5.6 billion in requests. It was able to provide less than a fifth of the money requested."

It's uncertain if current grants can be lawfully terminated. "A looming question is whether FEMA can yank grants that are being funded with money appropriated by Congress," Grist reports. "The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the bipartisan infrastructure law, allocated approximately $6.8 billion to FEMA for community-wide mitigation efforts, with a portion of this funding directed to the BRIC program."

Six months after Hurricane Helene, North Carolina is still trying to measure the loss while pushing recovery efforts

Flooding from Hurricane Helene wiped out homes and roads.
 (Adobe Stock photo)

North Carolina lawmakers are pushing Hurricane Helene recovery efforts forward despite not knowing the extent of Helene's damage or how much and when federal aid will be available. Brady Dennis of The Washington Post reports, "Officials seem determined to move quicker after Helene and avoid the mistakes of the past, even as North Carolina faces the most massive disaster recovery in its history."

Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina six months ago, leaving a swath of decimation caused by extreme rain, flooding and mudslides. More than 100 people died and thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed. Flooding "wiped out bridges, roads, businesses and farms," Dennis reports. The storm left "an estimated $60 billion of economic ruin in its wake."

State officials still don't know how much federal aid will "ultimately arrive and in what quantity, even amid President Trump’s promises to speed help to the region," Dennis adds. "FEMA has helped more than 157,000 families and distributed $402.5 million to storm victims in North Carolina. . . . But the larger sums of funding meant to fuel long-term rebuilding that often follow large-scale disasters, historically takes months, if not years, to be fully implemented." 

The storm's scope of catastrophic damage explains why recovery has been slow. "Disaster recovery is almost always frustrating, tedious and too costly for most states and localities to bear without a significant assist from the federal government," Dennis explains. "Lawmakers continue to hash out the final details of the state’s most recent — though almost certainly not its last — Helene aid package. If passed, it will include more than $500 million to help struggling farmers, jump-start a home building program and repair private roads and bridges."

Even with that progress, the state will need billions to get back on its feet. Gov. Josh Stein’s deputies admit "that serious hurdles remain," Dennis reports. "Among them: the staggering damage Helene inflicted, the lack of data in some counties about the actual number of damaged and destroyed homes and the difficulties posed by rebuilding amid mountainous terrain."

FEMA maps didn't prepare N.C. homeowners for Helene; some think flood insurance model needs an overhaul

Some homes became part of mudslides and slid into Helene's
racing, torrential waters. (WHAS ABC photo via youtube)

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's flood maps don't include heavy rain and other water sources that put certain areas at risk. In regions of North Carolina, the agency's omissions left many homebuyers unaware and uninsured against the ravages of Hurricane Helene, report Kevin Crowe, Shannon Osaka and John Muyskens of The Washington Post.

The Post used an "analysis of flood risk data from First Street, a climate modeling group, and found that just 2% of properties in the mountainous counties of western North Carolina fall inside areas marked as having a special risk of flooding. . . . (a) designation, which compels homeowners to buy flood insurance if they want to get a federally backed mortgage."

Experts have long warned that FEMA's maps are lagging behind science and current weather trends, but communities often balk at mapping changes. "Local officials often resist changes that show their areas more at risk, because the designation comes with extra costs," the Post reports. "Once an area is designated in the special flood zone, buildings have to follow more stringent federal guidelines." Some experts are pushing to have the entire federal flood insurance model overhauled.

FEMA's maps underestimate flood risk because the agency fails "to take into account flooding from heavy rain, small streams and tributaries, or climate change’s future impact — and can fall short when assessing current risks in a wetter, hotter world," the Post reports. When a region's topography and current climate threats are not figured into risk equations, homebuyers are left unknowingly vulnerable to flooding.

"In Buncombe County, where rising waters swamped areas like Asheville and Swannanoa, First Street’s maps show a much larger area of flood risk than the FEMA maps do," the Post article explains. "About 2,100 properties out of about 125,000 in the county are in FEMA’s flood zone, compared with 19,500 under First Street’s model."

Flooding, broken dams and Hurricane Beryl damage prompt discussions on how rural places can protect themselves

Tornadoes can rip across farmland and homes
in rural places. (Photo by N. Noonan Unsplash)

Extreme weather is often associated with flooded, wind-flattened or burned-to-the-ground homes and businesses. Rural areas have an added exposure to big losses that other areas don't have -- crops, animals and farm equipment can be damaged or annihilated during weather events.

Given those significant exposures, rural areas need to work on building or replacing support mechanisms and buckle down on wild weather preparedness, reports Chris Clayton of Progressive Farmer. "Rural America is learning the hard way that more investment is needed to protect rural infrastructure from catastrophic storms. . . . That includes Iowa, which is now coping with catastrophic damage in the northwestern part of the state following two April tornadoes that also ripped through communities." More recently, Vermont's Winooski River flooded roads, train tracks and homes after Hurricane Beryl's extreme rains filled it to bursting.

Kevin Paap, a commissioner for Blue Earth County, Minnesota, "testified at last week's U.S. Senate hearing for the National Association of Counties. Paap's county was on the national news during last month's flooding as the 100-year-old Rapidan Dam failed," Clayton explains. "Recovery is harder for small towns that don't have the funds for cost-share or even to write grants to help receive aid dollars, said Ted Brady, executive director of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. Most towns simply don't have the professional staff to help recover quickly."

In Iowa, flooding completely submerged some crops, and other farms were ravaged by tornadoes. Government officials "rolled out a series of new disaster programs -- including a low-interest loan program for farmers -- as communities grapple with at least 2,000 destroyed homes and another 3,000 damaged," Clayton explains. "In some towns, nearly every single downtown business was wiped out, along with an estimated $130 million in damaged public infrastructure to the state."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is changing some of its requirements to prevent extreme weather damage. "FEMA announced that public infrastructure rebuilt with FEMA money will have to be built to be more resilient from flooding," Clayton reports. "In the Senate hearing, Paap and others called for a more rapid response to help rural areas." Town mayors are calling for more financial flexibility "to ensure communities can spend disaster money in ways that will help mitigate long-term flood risks."

Opinion: Keeping meat plants running can hurt small towns' failing water systems; residents end up paying unfair share

Art Cullen

Meat processing plants use tremendous amounts of water, and in rural towns where water systems need an overhaul, that's a problem. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency doesn't have the funding to intervene, residents have to cover an unfair share of the water bill, Iowa editor Art Cullen writes in his Storm Lake Times Pilot opinion, "Storm Lake gets sucked dry so the world gets cheap meat."

"For the second time in two years, the city's application to the FEMA to rescue our failing water system was rejected," Cullen writes. "That means Storm Lakers are likely to pay a disproportionate share of more than $80 million in improvements — including a $15 million water line that runs to Tyson Foods' pork plant.

"Tyson just signed a water service agreement with Storm Lake under which it will pay for a new water tower. Other capital improvements, like that water main, will be shared by everyone. Residential users already pay a higher rate than industrial consumers. The city is hiking rates 7% on all classes, but the compounding effect is greater on the higher rate payers — the folks who take a shower after work.

"Storm Lake has huge water needs for a town its size. That's because it's a protein center for the world. The pork plant is one of the Top 10 in America. The turkey plant draws from three states. Our little town is expected to float the boat so the world gets cheap pork and abundant deli meat. . . . This summer, when RAGBRAI (Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) rolled through with 40,000 thirsty bikers, two of our wells failed.

"FEMA says it's out of cash from mounting climate casualties. Storm Lake is out in the cold. That's what it boils down to. FEMA is strapped — Maui is expensive. So is Florida. We get that. You would think that one of the helpful folks at the regional office in Kansas City could hook us up with someone friendly at the Department of Agriculture, where there might be some of that climate-smart ag money that could be routed through Tyson. We already are routing millions of climate-smart ag funds through Tyson so it can address the water needs of the beef industry. How about Storm Lake gets a little piece of that pie?

"All the money flows out of Storm Lake while we local yokels are expected to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and not drink so much water. We will pay higher and higher rates . . . to feed the agri-industry. Could we get a thank-you, at least?"

As flood risk changes and homeowner's flood insurance premiums are recalculated, sticker shock is a sticking point

More accurate flood data has changed insurance rates.
(Photo by Kellly Sikkema, Unsplash)

As the Federal Emergency Management Agency recalculates national flood insurance premiums to include more accurate data, insuring property in places like Valley City, Illinois, which was recently underwater because of another flood from the Illinois River, may not be financially possible for some residents," reports Kery Murakami of Route Fifty. "After FEMA made changes to how it sets premiums for the 5 million policyholders in its National Flood Insurance Program, homeowners in Valley City, an area that's hit a major flood stage seven times since 2002, will be seeing a major jump in their premium to cover their damages. . . . Over roughly the next ten years, the 91 single-family homeowners in Pike County, where Valley City is located, will see their premiums rise six-fold from $699 to $4,933."

FEMA's new way of setting flood insurance premiums will "more accurately reflect how much flood risk properties are facing. But in many areas around the country, homeowners will see their premium payments multiply several times," Murakami writes. "Up until now, the premiums had not considered how often an area was expected to flood in the future and didn't consider many types of flooding, like that from heavy rainfall. That's led to an unfair situation in which many owners of properties at risk of flooding have been paying 'peanuts,' said Chad Berginnis, executive director for the Association of State Floodplain Managers. And indeed, Pike County's single-family homeowners had been paying among the lowest rates of any county in the country, according to FEMA data examined by Route Fifty."

Lawmakers say flood insurance only helps if homeowners can afford to buy it. "Some members of Congress from areas where premiums will jump are balking at the prospect of NFIP policyholders paying thousands more for federal flood insurance. Raising premiums so sharply, they say, could discourage people from buying insurance and leave them vulnerable if a flood damages their home," Murakami reports. Federal law caps premium increases at 18%. "Those who are not paying as much as FEMA's new risk assessment says they should be paying will be on what the agency calls a 'glide path' until they reach their new premium level. . . . The agency estimates that the percentage of people paying the amount FEMA believes they should be paying will rise from about a third to 90% over the next decade."

Using a more accurate picture of where flooding has or is likely to occur to set premium costs has supporters. "Some changes should be made, said Berginnis. . . . The new premiums, for example, will not take into account steps property owners take to reduce the threat of flood damage," Murakami writes. "Still, he said, the new flood insurance rates will 'send people the correct signals about flood risk.'

Maui fires point up special needs of rural areas; governor says catastrophe will change the way the world looks at fire

UPDATE, Aug. 15: The Los Angeles Times has a visual representation of the fire's spread.

Several fires struck Maui, but the worst was in Lahaina, on its
northwest coast. (San Francisco Chronicle image; click to enlarge)

The wildfires on Maui, America's deadliest in the last 150 years, will change the way the world looks at fire, and point up the special needs of rural areas, officials in Hawaii said over the weekend.

"This is rural America. Rural America is getting hit by these types of climate-change chaoses; every single day, it's a disaster," U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda, D-Hawai'i, said on CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday. Asked about the Federal Emergency Management Agency's need for more billions of dollars, she said, "Rural America, which is what Hawaii is, faces a crisis of also being able to get those first responders and support as fast as they need to, to be able to respond in those situations, so we have to make sure FEMA has the tools and the resources to execute support back home at Hawai'i, but quite frankly, this is goiong to be happening across the country and they need the money to be able to respond wherever disaster strikes."

Gov. Josh Green told reporters, "This is the first time we've ever experienced a wildfire in the context of these dry conditions, global warming and and with a hurricane that's just passing us. There's no question this catastrophe is gonna change the way everyone look at fire across the globe."

Local officials said Tuesday, Aug. 8, that a fire in and around Lahaina, pop. 12,000, was “100% contained,” but it flared up that afternoon, the Los Angeles Times reports: "The threat of wildfires had been well known for days, with the National Weather Service warning Aug. 4 of 'high fire danger,' given the dry weather and 'strong and gusty trade winds'."

The Washington Post has a "tick-tock" of the fire through survivors' experienes, with this description of how teh fire resurged: "Overhead, dry air — the result of a high-pressure system — was jetting over and down the slopes of the volcano, sending ferocious winds into his town, spraying gravel and ripping shingles off the rooftops. It was a worst-case scenario that some emergency planners had long warned about."

"Hawaii has a network of outdoor sirens, but neither the state nor the county activated them Tuesday, said a spokesman for the state’s Emergency Management Agency," the Times reports. "Officials instead issued alerts through three methods — cellular phones, a local notification system, and alerts on radio and television — but power and telecommunications outages appeared to have limited their reach."

Tokuda said, "We had no cell coverage or electricity in some of these areas . . . with how fast this burn was ... you would not know what the crisis was" if you heard a siren, and islanders' first instinct is that it is a tsunami: "You would run towards land, which in this case would be towards fire."  The Post notes, "Two residents filed a lawsuit seeking class action Saturday against the state’s electric utility, which faces scrutiny for not shutting down power when dangerous winds were predicted. . . . Hawaii’s attorney general announced Friday that her office would examine the policies and key decisions that influenced the response to the deadly inferno." UPDATE, Aug. 16: The Washington Post reports, "Power lines likely caused Maui’s first reported fire, video and data show."

The Maui News says in an editorial, "Make no mistake, Lahaina will rise from the ashes on the shoulders of its people. Those proud Lunas will not be alone, for this island, state and country are ready to help. Stay strong, Lahaina. We are with you." Former Maui Times editor Anthony Pignataro has a tribute to Lahaina.

Double floods and no help from FEMA or their rich state have left these Appalachian residents feeling abandoned

Buchanan County is closer to eight other state capitals
than Richmond. (OpenStreet map by The Washington Post)

Saved by trees and one another, citizens in Buchanan County, Virginia, were hit with violent flash floods about a year apart, leaving homes and lives in rubble. Residents were denied Federal Emergency Management Agency aid, based on "a complicated formula that makes it harder for people in poor communities to qualify for help than those in wealthier ones," reports Laura Vozzella of The Washington Post. "An issue nationwide that the agency's own advisory council criticized as part of a broader study in 2020."

The denial from FEMA, and lack of help from the state, left some people with nothing, Vozzella reports: "Renter Tim Stiltner, who barely escaped the second flood in July 2022, with his wife and two sons, one of them in a wheelchair, was denied government aid even though his family lost everything." Stiltner said, "All we got out with was what we had on."

Residents feel abandoned by systems that are supposed to help all but disfavor the poor. "FEMA partly based its decision on a dollars-and-cents calculation. . . . The agency figures that states have the wherewithal to help individuals unless the total value of properties lost is enormous," Vozzella explains. "To residents of Buchanan, though, FEMA's math does not add up: Why would the feds rather bail out the owners of posh beach homes lost to hurricanes, they wonder, than poor mountain people wiped out by floods?" Sen. Travis Hackworth (R), who grew up in Buchanan and represents the area in Richmond, told Vozzella,"The person with the $3 million home probably has the resources to go somewhere and get additional lodging more than someone with a $30,000 or $50,000 home—and that's literally all they have."

Remains of homes sit after they were destroyed by flooding
in August 2021. (Photo by Justin Ide, The Washington Post)

The Commonwealth of Virginia has the money to help Buchanan County. Ranked among the nation's 10 richest states, "it happens to be awash in black ink, wrapping up the last fiscal year with revenue that exceeded estimates by $5 billion," Vozella reports. But the state is gridlocked in a budget dispute. "Whenever it's approved, that money will be for homeowners only. State funding for flood-prevention programs is wrapped up in divisive climate politics. . . . Sen. Tim Kaine (D) secured $1.5 million in the draft Senate appropriations bill for the Appalachian Service Project, a nonprofit that has been helping renters as well as homeowners rebuild in Buchanan. But the final bill has yet to pass. Unless or until that money comes through, most renters will be left to their own frayed bootstraps."

For a county with back-to-back floods, there is a thin silver lining of disaster preparedness. The county "set up a long-range rebuilding committee after the first flood and was able to quickly expand its mission to cover the second, said Butch Meredith, construction manager for the Baptist General Association of Virginia, which is coordinating repairs to homes that can be salvaged." Meredith said: "When Hurley happened, it took two months before any repairs started. When Whitewood happened, it took less than seven days."

E. Ky. was in a housing crisis before last year's record flood; slow recovery shows how disasters hit poor areas hardest

Shirley Howard's household is one of more than 100
still in temporary housing. (Associated Press photo)

More than 10 months after the most devastating flood many Eastern Kentucky communities have seen, many families "still haven't returned home," reports Dylan Lovan of The Associated Press. At least 100 families "are living in trailers and hundreds more remain displaced, living with relatives or in damaged homes while they rebuild."

Nearly 9,000 homes in 13 Eastern Kentucky counties "were severely damaged or destroyed by the intense four-day storm that dumped up to 16 inches of rain" last July, "ravaging one of the poorest places in the country. Homeowners in the mountainous region . . . live in flood-prone valleys that offer the only flat land for building homes, an area already suffering a housing crisis before the flood hit. . . . One study estimates it could cost nearly $1 billion to recover the region's housing losses."

Lovan points out, "The challenges in Kentucky are replicated in disasters that strike poor areas nationwide. Low-income families can't qualify for disaster loans, and conflicting rules and separate thresholds for an array of federal aid can slow and complicate recovery, according to national experts." Sally Ray, director of domestic funds for the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, told him, “There’s food insecurity, there's lack of affordable housing, there's lack of access to resources ... and those things are just exacerbated after a disaster.”

"Only about 5% of affected homeowners carried flood insurance, according to a report by the Ohio River Valley Institute and the Appalachian Citizens Law Center," Lovan reports. "Traditional homeowner’s insurance does not cover damage caused by flooding. The report said 60% of the households damaged had annual incomes of $30,000 or less. . . . A single inch of water inside a house can cause more than $26,000 in damage, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. . . . FEMA has doled out about $106 million to victims of the Kentucky flood for repairs, cleanup, storage, moving costs and other short-term needs. The maximum FEMA payout is $39,700, but the average grant was closer to $20,000, said Scott McReynolds, executive director of the Housing Development Alliance, a nonprofit that provides housing and repairs for needy residents in southeastern Kentucky. The group was working with 400 families even before the flood."

A $298 million grant is coming from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for long-term infrastructure and housing needs in the region, but it "could be slow to arrive, and it is unclear how much of it will go to housing, said Rebecca Shelton with the Appalachian Citizens Law Center, who co-authored the Kentucky flooding study." She told Lovan, “The big concern is really the timeline. It will be many months before these (federal) funds are implemented and I don’t know how much longer folks who are still inadequately housed can hang on.”

A fundamental problem in the region is the lack of land suitable for housing. Coal companies still haven't provided any from former surafce-mine sites, but some other private owners have given 125 acres for two sites, and the state has hired engineering firms to design and manage developments.

Feds slow to find suitable housing for hundreds displaced by planned Forest Service burn that got out of control

The Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire was easily visible from space. (NASA photo)

After two runaway fires set by the U.S. Forest Service destroyed 430 homes in rural New Mexico a year ago, the federal government acted so slowly that only a few people have been able to move into temporary housing, leaving others to dig into their own meager savings or stay on friends’ couches, reports Patrick Lohmann of Source New Mexico in partnership with ProPublica.

The Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire "rode 74-mph wind gusts, engulfing dozens of homes in a single day as it tore through canyons and over mountains," Lohmann recounts. "The blaze became the biggest wildfire in the continental United States in 2022 and the biggest in New Mexico history. And it was the federal government’s fault: An ill-prepared and understaffed crew didn’t properly account for dry conditions and high winds when it ignited prescribed burns meant to limit the fuel for a potential wildfire."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency found temporary housing to 140 households, but "The federal government has acted so slowly and maintained such strict rules that only about a tenth of them have moved in," Lohmann reports. "EMA says most of the 140 households it deemed eligible for travel trailers or mobile homes — essentially, people whose uninsured primary residences sustained severe damage — have found 'another housing resource.' What the agency doesn’t say: For some, that resource is a vehicle, a tent or a rickety camper. It’s a friend or relative’s couch, sometimes far from home. It’s a mobile home paid for with retirement funds or meager savings."

Lohmann tells several stories of residents suffering from the lack of permanent housing, writing, "The fire upended a constellation of largely Hispanic, rural communities that have cultivated their land and culture in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains for hundreds of years. Many residents can find their family names on land grants issued by Mexican governors in the 1830s. Now they’re dispersed across the region, even out of state."

FEMA's flawed hazard maps are unable to predict pluvial flooding driven by climate change, Washington Post reports

Water reached the tops of cars in South Dallas,
Texas, in August. (Photo by Dkamreen Jones)

Destructive flooding ambushed sections of the U.S. throughout 2022, leaving areas waterlogged and people homeless. The Washington Post has completed an "analysis of videos taken by people who endured destruction from flooding pinpoints how federal maps are failing to reflect the growing peril that Americans face," Samuel Oakford, John Muyskens, Sarah Cahlan, and Joyce Sohyun Lee report. "Government flood-insurance maps often left residents unprepared for the threat."

In July 2022, "Brandon Jones’s St. Louis home was hit by major flooding for the second time since 2008. Cars were barely visible under several feet of turgid storm water, as record rainfall fell on the city. . . . Two days later, the area flooded all over again."

The flooding took Jones by surprise: "Jones’s Penrose neighborhood isn’t designated as a high-risk location on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood maps," the Post reports. "These high-risk zones, which lie in what’s called the Special Flood Hazard Area, cover properties that the agency considers to have at least a 1 percent annual chance of flooding. This 100-year flood plain designation requires property owners with federally backed mortgages to buy flood insurance, and it influences how communities regulate development."

The Post reports that part of the reason Jones was not prepared is that FEMA's maps need an overhaul: "They capture river and coastal flooding, not inundation caused by intense bursts of rainfall, known as pluvial flooding — a particularly dangerous problem in cities, where many porous surfaces have been paved over. This makes FEMA’s designated flood hazard zones a bad match for the intense weather events that scientists say U.S. communities will face."

Daniel Swain, climate scientist at UCLA, told the Post, “It is precisely that type of flooding, urban flooding and flash flooding from shortish duration but very high-intensity downpours, that is expected to increase the most in a warming climate."

Two new reports show how rural communities can get federal funding for building resiliency to climate change

Two new reports from the liberal Center for American Progress "show rural how decision-makers can design and implement resilience funding programs under the new bipartisan infrastructure law to better help rural communities adapt to, and recover from, the effects of climate change," Kristi Eaton reports for The Daily Yonder.

Center fellow Mark Haggery told Eaton, “There’s a tremendous amount of money and resources that are available through the infrastructure law," as well as the legislation dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act]. "We want to make sure that it’s reaching the places that need it most, and where it can do the most good."

Haggery noted that most of the country is rural land: “That’s where the infrastructure for renewable energy is going to be built and cited and where transmission lines are going to cross. It’s where forests are going to be thinned. And restoration work is going to happen. It’s where watersheds are going to need to be improved to slow runoff to capture more water in the headwaters. So there’s a tremendous amount of work that needs to happen in rural communities.”

The infrastructure law created the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program. The center's report, How To Improve Community Wildfire Defense Grants To Build Rural Resilience, is a case study that reinspects the wildfire season in New Mexico, "in which 900,000 acres of public and private land burned throughout the state from April to June 2022. That’s almost four times the annual average from 1995 to 2015," Eaton writes.

U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore says in the report that climate change is leading to conditions on the ground never seen before: "Drought, extreme weather, wind conditions and unpredictable weather changes are challenging our ability to use prescribed fire as a tool to combat destructive fires,” he said. “Fires are outpacing our models and … we need to better understand how megadrought and climate change are affecting our actions on the ground."

The other report, How FEMA Can Build Rural Resilience Through Disaster Preparedness, examines the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. The Federal Emergency Management Agency spent $1.5 billion through the program in the last two years to increase the resilience of communities to natural disasters before those disasters occur.

The report notes the disparities and ineffectiveness of the program: "BRIC's ability to reach BRIC’s focus on pre-disaster resilience is a paradigm shift. Yet the results of the program’s first two years raise concerns about its ability to deliver assistance to communities most susceptible to natural disasters and least able to prepare for and respond to them. In the past two years, fewer than 10 percent of nationally competitive BRIC grant proposals received funding, and communities in relatively populous and wealthy states won more than 80 percent of those dollars."

How do rural communities recover from disaster? Recovery is often bumpy, and that can lead to loss of population

A fire truck in Hindman, Ky., after historic flooding
in the area in late July. (Brynn Anderson/AP photo)

When a major disaster strikes a rural area, the rebuilding process is often bumpy. If there's not much temporary housing for displaced families or a lack of community cohesion then a community can often end up "smaller than they were before the event," said Susan L. Cutter, a professor and director of the Hazards Vulnerability & Resilience Institute at the University of South Carolina. In the wake of devastating flooding in some Eastern Kentucky counties and an active hurricane season, Daily Yonder Editor Tim Marema interviewed Cutter about rural disaster recovery. 

"What happens is, there’s a lot of out-migration," Cutter said. "People leave, and they seek opportunities elsewhere. You know, they’re given some resources from FEMA to assist, and they simply move out of the area. Others stay in the area and are very much focused on rebuilding, but that rebuilding is — you’re talking years to rebuild and reconstruct communities. In those instances people may start out wanting to reconstruct but ultimately end up leaving."

There have been some exceptions to the trend, Cutter said, pointing to Princeville, N.C., and Valmeyer, Ill., as examples. Princeville, a historically African American community that faced multiple hurricane-related floods, has been able to bounce back because of the high level of interest in preserving the community, leading to an influx of external resources to help rebuild. Valmeyer, a Mississippi River town that periodically flooded, is the "classic example" of post-disaster resilience, Cutter said. The tight-knit community all agreed to "physically relocate the town on a bluff instead of down in the flood plain. So they reconstructed the community with most people’s buy-in, in another location." A strong sense of place, good local leadership and often outside help can all go a long way in helping a  community keep from deteriorating after disaster, Cutter said. 

FEMA director says agency's flood maps underestimate risk from extreme weather triggered by climate change

Another estimate: Counties ranked in ranges of percentages of property at risk for flood damage
First Street Foundation map; click the image to enlarge it or click here for the interactive version.

Flood maps used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency are outdated and understate the risks from flooding and extreme rain triggered by climate change, FEMA Director Deanne Criswell said" on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

Criswell cited flooding in Jackson, Miss., that overwhelmed the city's main water plant and rendered city water unsafe to use. "We have to start thinking about what the threats are going to be in the future as a result of climate change," Criswell said. Victoria Cavaliere of Bloomberg has a report.

This summer's flash flooding in Eastern Kentucky is another example. Nicolas Zegre, an associate professor of forest hydrology at the University of West Virginia, recently called Appalachia 'climate zero,' saying it is among the first to face the climate consequences of decades of coal mining.

"A 2020 evaluation of flood risk by nonprofit group First Street Foundation that analyzed every property in the 48 contiguous U.S. states found that federal maps underestimate the number of homes and businesses in significant danger by 67%, Cavaliere reports.

Flood roundup: Eastern Kentuckians still dealing with the devastation of recent flooding as school year begins

Angela Cornett has been living in a tent next to her home, which is uninhabitable after the floods. She can't find a place to live nearby, and said she will probably have to go to another county. (Lexington Herald-Leader photo by Ryan C. Hermens)

More than a month after the flash flooding that devastated parts of Eastern Kentucky, residents are still dealing with the fallout. Here's some of the latest:

A Courier Journal story chronicles the struggle one teenager and his grandmother face as they still work to get the mud out of their home and their church. Though the teen said he worries about another flood, he sees them as just a fact of life. "This is what you do in Kentucky – pick up after floods," he told Matt Stone.

Two stories, one from The Daily Yonder and one from The New York Times, look at how schools in Eastern Kentucky are trying to carry on with damaged or destroyed buildings and buses, washed-out roads, poor or no internet, and many families still homeless.

In another CJ story, Christians in Eastern Kentucky talk about how they're leaning on their faith as they continue cleaning and salvaging what they can from damaged churches and homes. Read it here.

A month after the flooding, many residents are still living in tents, sheds, or even their cars. Some are trying to repair their homes, and others are trying to find another permanent residence. But the housing market in Eastern Kentucky was tight even before the flood; now, many people say they may have to leave their beloved communities and live elsewhere. One county leader told the Lexington Herald-Leader that, without public or private relief funding, the county will lose residents. Read more here.

FEMA uses text messaging to communicate with Ky. flood survivors; exact number of homeless is still unknown

"Three weeks after a catastrophic flood hit Eastern Kentucky, local state and federal officials say they are still unable to determine exactly how many people are homeless or how many homes and businesses have been damaged or destroyed," Sam Adams reports for The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg. "At least 700 people are in shelters provided by the state, but there is still an untold number of people who are staying in shelters provided by the Red Cross or other relief agencies, and still more who are not in shelters all."

Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear has echoed complaints that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is denying too many claims, but the vast majority of refusals are because they're missing documents and can't reach claimants to get them, FEMA coordinator Brett Howard told Adams. He said the agency has approved 73 percent of overall relief applications and 63% of emergency housing applications. Part of the problem is poor cell-phone reception and demolished roads and bridges.

In a press conference Monday, Beshear said many people aren't answering when FEMA agents call them, perhaps because they don't want to answer calls from an unfamiliar number, Josh James reports for WUKY. "Thus far, FEMA has tried to call 4,006 applicants. 1,508 have picked up," Beshear said. "We are talking to them about the numbers of times that they call, but please pick up your phone." Beshear said that for the first time, FEMA is using text messaging to communicate with claimants

Howard advised people whose claims have been denied to appeal. Since most denials are due to missing documents, "the state has placed employees from Cabinets that can help in the Disaster Assistance Centers with FEMA to streamline the process of appeals," Adams reports. Those state employees can probably print needed documents for claimants to submit to FEMA, Howard said.

Federal funds can help relocate those increasingly in danger of repeated disasters, but help can be hard to come by

"More than 13 million Americans may need to move by the end of the century because of sea-level rise. Add the effects of hurricanes, riverine flooding and wildfires, and millions more will need to seek out safer parts of the country — or remain trapped in damaged, dangerous conditions," Alex Lubben, Julia Shipley, Zak Cassel, and Olga Loginova report for the Center for Public Integrity, Columbia Journalism Investigations, and Type Investigations. But "communities across the country in the greatest need of government assistance receive less of it — if they get anything at all." Most are small, rural, and have disproportionately high populations of racial minorities.

"For decades the federal government has known that climate change will force people in the U.S. to relocate. And the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, recommended in 2020 that the government form a 'climate migration pilot program' to help people who want to relocate due to climate change — a recommendation it reiterated in March. But in the absence of such a program, communities across the country must try to cobble together funding from across federal agencies through programs that weren’t designed for the climate crisis," Lubben, Shipley, Cassel, and Loginova report. The reporting project "spent a year digging into the growing need for climate relocation across the United States. Little organized government assistance exists for preventing the loss of homes and lives before a disaster, the investigation revealed — and there is no comprehensive focus on helping people escape untenable situations."

The analysis showed dozens of communities nationwide that have suffered repeated disasters. See how your county stacks up in the searchable database here.