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The Disaster Management Process Has to Change But It Starts With Us

Stephen Jordan

Overhauling FEMA is not wrong. One of the things I admire most about the FEMA folks I've worked with is that they represent one of the few government agencies that will take criticism and agree with you - they believe they can and should always do better. Many present and former FEMA folks will be the first to say that the Stafford Act has to be revised. This is a testament to them and their commitment to continuous improvement.



The issue is thinking too narrowly. The entire current disaster management system has to be re-engineered. As a country, we don't do enough about hazard mitigation, resilience, or preparedness. We don't budget well. We subsidize risk too much. We are too short-sighted. There are failures, pain points, weaknesses, inadequacies up and down the line —spanning local, state, and federal levels. We have chronic stresses and ongoing threats and vulnerabilities that we know about, but don't fix. Case in point, the American Society of Civil Engineers currently gives the nation's infrastructure a C-minus. There are moral hazard problems all over the place. This isn't FEMA's fault. It's much bigger than that.


Because this is the irony of the President's remarks - emergency management is probably the highest functioning element of the current disaster management process. A hundred years ago, equivalent hurricanes to Helene or Milton would have killed thousands of people.The relatively few casualties from the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, considering the region's population density, could be seen as a remarkable achievement.

In contrast, there is a "doughnut hole" between the winding down of emergency services and the ramp up of recovery support systems which is currently frustrating residents in western North Carolina deeply. Temporary to permanent shelter, business grants and loans, infrastructure repairs are needed now. HUD in particular, has been egregious in terms of getting things going, often taking two years or more to get the community development block grant program for disaster recovery (CDBG-DR) fully functioning. In fact, there are billions of dollars sitting in HUD accounts dating back almost two decades, but rather than leaning in, the agency has the gall to call the states "slow spenders."


The states can distort things too. More than a quarter million households across the country have repeated claims for federal flood insurance. This wouldn't be possible if they weren't enabled by their states and localities. As of January, California had the ninth lowest average homeowners insurance cost despite being the second riskiest place for homeowners. Hurricane Ian cost Florida $109 billion last year and Governor DeSantis warned that the state's insurer of last resort was "not solvent." These are not the only problematic state policies by any means.


President Trump is not wrong in his instinct not to subsidize these choices. They are not fair to the people of other states. That being said, it is in the national interest to create a federal system that manages the country's risks more effectively and efficiently and accelerates the timeline for recovery.

The small towns and rural communities of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and elsewhere did not develop overnight. They are the product of centuries of people putting down roots, building homes, schools, churches, bridges, hospitals and other infrastructure - all of which were damaged or destroyed in less than a week's fury. Many of the counties throughout the Helene Impact Zone have fewer than 20,000 residents and less than 1% of the residents had flood insurance because they had not experienced flooding like this in their lifetimes. These towns don't have the tax base or the wherewithal to rebuild everything all at once. The same person in some of these towns may be the emergency manager, building inspector, and volunteer firefighter. The mayor may be a six month volunteer. The police station might have been carried away by the flood.

Yes, it's important to push responsibility and agency as close as possible to the person or community bearing the risks, but some things are just too cumulative and overwhelming. There has been talk of a "Whole of Government" approach to disaster response for a long time. Maybe it's time to see what this could really look like in terms of speeding up cooperation between the local, state, and federal levels.


Unfortunately, there's not a lot that most of us can do about government performance. What we, every day citizens, can do, is develop better "Whole of Society" approaches while the gears of government reform grind forward. What does this look like?


  1. We need to keep doing what we've been doing in terms of stepping up. No other country has the same culture of generosity and service as the United States. We crowd source solutions from all over the place. FEMA has maybe 20,000 staff to cope with all of the disasters spread out across the country. Meanwhile, the National Volunteer Organizations Active in Disasters (NVOAD) like the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and many others, mobilize 10 million volunteers on an annual basis. The true amount of disaster philanthropy is impossible to know because so many people will round up some cash from their neighbors, load up their pickup trucks and just go. What we do know, is that it runs into the billions. This is awesome and has been a Godsend for so many people in need.

  2. We need to get more organized. The government has identified 15 emergency support functions and 6 recovery support functions - in typical fashion, the two stages don't hand off to each other neatly, but civil society does not even have any real counterpart to this. In both North Carolina and Los Angeles, ISD experts and field office team members have had to help local collection centers coordinate how to actually clear out unwanted donations to make way for essential needs. Typically in disasters, some high visibility places get an overwhelming amount of assistance while others languish. One of the reasons the small business recovery support function has worked so well in response to the wildfires in California is that the city and the county of Los Angeles and regional business organizations have come together to create a public-private partnership called Together for LA supported by ISD. This has been in place for almost five years. It would be good if every major metro area and state had similar community resilience and recovery networks in place, not just for small business, but for nonprofit and philanthropic response too.

  3. We need more transparency, visibility and analytics. One of the biggest issues after any disaster is to pinpoint the real problem areas. Where are the clusters of broken housing that are not being addressed? Do we know if the houses that are being rebuilt have good roads and clean water around them? Why hasn't debris been picked up four months after Hurricane Helene in some places? Should flood loss prevention in the future require elevations, buy-outs, higher levees, or all of the above? Having better analytical tools will help drive more efficiency and effectiveness because donations and volunteers should not be taken for granted either.

  4. We need a better permission process. This cannot be done without the public sector, but it doesn't have to be decided on an ad hoc basis after a disaster either. Vulnerable communities should have a playbook about how to handle temporary to permanent housing, temporary infrastructure needs, and flexibility to handle alternative work-arounds and new solutions. It's impossible to crowd source solutions otherwise. In western NC, there are cases where private sector financing is lined up, temporary housing solutions are lined up, architects and lawyers have offered to donate their services pro bono, contractors are willing to offer significant discounts for their labor, and volunteers are willing to fill in the rest, but there is still no movement because of permission paralysis. This is where the public sector should take a page from the private sector. Speed is a huge customer satisfaction indicator.

  5. We need to do a better job supporting the disaster management process holistically. Right now for any given disaster, up to 90% of philanthropy goes to emergency response and relief, while at most, less than 20% goes to recovery and reducing threats and vulnerabilities for the future. Ideally, this should reverse so that we don't have such terrible impacts, casualties, costs, or dislocations in the future.


As we have seen repeatedly in his first term in office, it is important to take President Trump seriously, but not literally. From a business perspective, he is staking out an extreme bargaining position in order to get to a desired result - more expedited response and shorter duration of recovery periods which is admirable, but he is picking on the wrong target, which is problematic. Because of this opening gambit, many fear that his approach will lead to worse government performance in the short-term (and maybe longer), before a new strategy and working relationship between the states and the federal government is set.


Most of us can't do anything about that, but we can work together to develop better civil society arrangements that reflect our culture to help out. While the politicians sort things out, let's do what we can to strengthen the civil society side of the equation.

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