Almost the Entire Room at IAEM Felt Underfunded

Floodwater surrounds a gas station on Palmer Avenue in Falmouth, Mass. Source: Falmouth Police Department

Plus, a windstorm cut power to more than 100,000 homes and businesses in western Washington.

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Major Disasters of the Last Week

Forecasted Risks to Watch for the Next Week

A winter storm brings heavy snow and damaging wind to the Sierra Nevada from Friday into Saturday. Up to 2 feet of wet snow could fall above 7,000 feet in Mono County, with gusts of 55 to 70 mph along Highway 395, and Interstate 80 and Highway 50 could see 6 to 12 inches during the Friday evening commute.

A Coastal Flood Warning covers San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara county beaches on Saturday. Breaking waves of 18 to 25 feet could flood beaches, walkways, and low-lying roads around high tide and damage piers and jetties.

Heavy rain could push Washington's Skokomish River above flood stage this weekend. A Flood Watch covers Mason County through Saturday night, with 3 to 4.5 inches of rain forecast for the south slopes of the Olympics.

An excavator works along an eroded berm in Ocean Shores, Wash., after the November 7 and 8 windstorm. Source: City of Ocean Shores

Disasters in the Headlines

"Why Disaster Preparedness Must Include Neighborhoods as Well as Households"

HSToday

"Weather disasters are taking a bigger bite out of national income in many countries"

Munich Re

"How California Childhood Memories Shape My Climate Reporting Today"

The New York Times

PRO PERSPECTIVE

Local Control Is Only As Good As the Budget Behind It

At a session during IAEM's annual conference in Long Beach, someone asked the room how many people felt underfunded. Almost every hand went up. "I wish I had a picture of everyone with their hands up," one attendee told us later at the Bright Harbor booth.

This is the first of four Pro Perspectives built from the hot takes attendees gave us on the conference floor, kept anonymous so people could speak freely. On money, they made one argument from several angles. Responsibility for disasters is moving down to states and counties faster than the funding to handle it. Before a disaster, that gap means too few staff and too little training. After one, the help that does exist is slow to reach survivors. Small and rural departments have the least room to absorb it.

More Responsibility, Same Budget

Not everyone on the floor saw the shift as bad news. "I'm encouraged that the federal government would like to put more control in the hands of state and local emergency managers," one attendee said. The appeal is easy to see. State and county emergency managers know their own hazards, roads, and people better than anyone in Washington, and decisions made closer to a disaster tend to move faster. But every new responsibility comes with a cost: staff to write the plans, equipment to respond, time to train. Control without the money to cover that cost turns into one more unfunded mandate.

That's the condition the attendee who counted the raised hands put on the whole shift: "If you're going to push things down to the states, then the states need to be able to have the funds to do the work that we need to do."

Right now, many say they don't. "There's no money," said a county emergency manager in the Los Angeles region. "That's the common thing. And there's no money nationwide. And there's more and more happening." Asked to sum up the year, they called it "like a eulogy."

That gap between rising disasters and flat budgets ran through many of the takes we heard. When more lands on an office and the budget doesn't move, the first things to go are the ones with no deadline attached: planning, training, exercises, and the staff who do that work. Those are also the things that decide how the next disaster goes.

For many counties, that staffing question comes down to one grant. The Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) helps pay emergency management salaries in most local programs, and in smaller counties it can decide whether the office has staff at all. A former county emergency manager who now works with state and local governments from the private sector hears about it from counties all the time. "Some counties rely on it to fund their employees," they said. Others use it for the special projects that make a program stronger.

Recovery Help Is Slow to Arrive

Once a disaster hits, the problem shifts from too little money to money that can't move yet. An emergency manager at a military base sees that wait up close. Under the rules for military support to civilian authorities, the base can send help right away only when lives are in danger. After that, "we have to come back because we have to wait on the federal declaration." The state has to request a major disaster declaration through FEMA, and the president has to sign it, before the base can "dispense federal assets to assist with recovery." The help is often right next door, staffed and ready, but it can't move until the declaration catches up. Survivors wait through that gap at the moment recovery should be starting.

States hit a second bottleneck: the story. "The better we can understand the impact, the better we can tell the story to our political leaders to help them flow resources down," said a member of Minnesota's state emergency management operations team. That story depends on survivors saying what they lost, and many won't. They tell responders "it's worse for somebody else."

Both delays cost survivors the same thing: time. A slow declaration and a low impact count each mean help arrives later and smaller than the damage calls for. And even a well-told impact story only helps if leaders act on it. Asked what would help survivors recover faster, a local emergency management official in Texas said: "Actually listening to what the needs are and not politicizing the disasters."

Small Departments Have the Least Room to Absorb New Costs

Rural departments feel the squeeze first, because their costs don't shrink with their budgets. "The fire service is over encumbered," said an emergency medicine student who came up through volunteer fire service. New duties keep landing on departments through legislation and plain need, and each one comes with a price tag. The student gave an example. When a small town gets its first three- or four-story building, the local fire department suddenly needs an aerial ladder truck to reach the upper floors. That truck costs $1.52 million new, or around $800,000 used. A volunteer department might run on $150,000 a year, so one new building can demand five to ten years of its entire budget.

Small jurisdictions also lean hardest on grants. Grants pay for one-time purchases, but staffing, upkeep, and replacement never end, so the departments that rely on them live from one award to the next.

And money that stops at the state level never reaches the people doing the local work. The same Texas official said the state is "taking all of the EMPG funding away from the localities" and that it has hurt the local jurisdictions. For the small departments at the end of that line, an already tight squeeze gets even tighter.

How to Close the Gap

None of this makes local control the wrong idea. Many emergency managers want more say at the state and local level, and they're often right to. That only works if the funding moves with the responsibility. The people we talked to pointed to three places to start:

- Fund staff, not just projects. Grant money often goes to one-time projects, like new equipment or a plan update. Steady funding for salaries keeps the people who write disaster plans and run practice drills on the job between disasters.

- Ask rural departments before adding duties. The student's fix was "more input from rural areas," through state task forces built to study what those departments need.

- Capture the impact story early. Resources follow the impact story. Agencies that record each household's needs in the first days give state staff the numbers they need to make the case to political leaders, before survivors talk themselves out of asking.

The attendees in Long Beach weren't asking for much. They want money that arrives before a disaster and moves quickly after one.

Next week, Part 2 follows the gap from budgets to the people doing the work. As one emergency manager put it, "there's one person that does this thing and that's it."

Active Federal Declared Disasters and Deadlines

There is usually a 60 day window to apply for help after a disaster is declared. The following disasters are actively taking applications from survivors for financial support. To apply, survivors can visit DisasterAssistance.gov or call the FEMA Helpline at 1-800‑621‑3362.

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