Robert Willett/The News & Observer via AP
FEMA employee Jirau Alvaro works with Daniel Mancini, making a report on the damage to his property, October 6, 2024, in rural Buncombe County, near Black Mountain, North Carolina.
After Tropical Storm Helene hit North Carolina, Craig Fugate got a text from a relative in one of the zones ravaged by torrential rains: “I know this isn’t true but can you help me out here?” the relative asked him. “I got everybody telling me that FEMA stopped the generators from coming in or they seized this and all this other stuff.” The former Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator under President Obama advised that none of it was true.
Craig Fugate during his tenure as FEMA administrator
What is true is that the question of ensuring that the country’s lead agency for disaster response is well funded and staffed is more fraught than it should be. In this new era of frequent and rapidly intensifying hurricanes and other natural disasters, the care and feeding of FEMA has been a responsibility that Capitol Hill has shirked. At a Monday FEMA press conference, after being peppered with questions about the budget and the resistance to calling Congress back into session to deal with it, agency spokespeople maintained that there is sufficient funding to handle the immediate-response needs of residents in the Southeastern states after Helene and with Hurricane Milton, which made landfall overnight. But longer-term funding for recovery issues is another matter entirely.
Forecasters expect to see Milton’s impacts across the Florida peninsula. On the Gulf Coast, residents have braced themselves for unprecedented destruction. “Further south these are areas that are still recovering from Ian,” says Fugate, who lives in the central Florida city of Gainesville. “Further north are the areas that are still dealing with flooding and damages that they got from Helene.”
Fugate served two terms under Obama, leading the agency set up by Jimmy Carter in 1979. Before that, he headed Florida’s emergency management division for nearly a decade. He’s met with survivors of natural disasters, debunked rumors, listened to political posturing, and confronted budget questions. Fugate and I discussed the hurricane crisis, from funding to misinformation. This interview, conducted before Hurricane Milton touched down in Florida, has been edited and condensed.
Gabrielle Gurley: How do you view the resistance to calling Congress back into session to handle FEMA funding needs?
Craig Fugate: I’ve dealt with this in previous storms like Superstorm Sandy. There were calls for immediate supplemental [funding in 2012]. But in reality, FEMA had enough money that allowed that response to happen and then when the supplemental came out, it was really about rebuilding costs.
I would imagine that the bigger problem that FEMA will face is, depending upon how much they end up spending on Milton, that they may have to go back to immediate-needs funding, which stops work on permanent repairs from older disasters. When they got a CR [continuing resolution], they got basically a quarter of their annual allocation from last year. So that’s given them the cushion to really focus on—they have the funds to respond, they’re able to start doing some work on older disasters. But they may reach the point where they have to go back to immediate funds. Now that doesn’t really affect the initial response or any of the assistance they provide to families and heads of household. It just really affects the long-term rebuilding.
I’ve seen the posturing on both sides. The short answer is, and they did this in the Baton Rouge floods in 2016, there was a call for supplementals [funding]. But the administration, we looked at this and we’ve got enough money to respond to this. You’re going to need money for HUD and a lot of other federal agencies. So what they did, rather than doing a supplemental, they just put it into the regular order of the budget, they just added it.
Since Congress has got to come back and pass a budget or another CR, you can basically do a stand-alone or you can just build it into the next continuing resolution or a budget approval.
Have you seen this before?
Superstorm Sandy! Half the people that are getting [federal disaster] declarations voted against the Sandy supplemental.
So this is nothing new?
I would say with the advent of the Tea Party, we started seeing a fracturing of the tradition that we all come together to help out our neighbors. There were some people that were pretty consistent in being anti–disaster funding, but on different principles. Ron Paul was always against that, his son Rand, he basically takes the position [that FEMA] is already budgeted, so I’ll take it. But his dad was pretty adamant that he didn’t believe in disaster funding.
There were other people that had opposed the routine disaster declarations, thought the thresholds were too low, thought it was not good to be declaring all these disasters. But they also believed there was a role for the catastrophic disasters. Then there’s the reality that the supplementals also become a train that people try to put a lot of other things into to get funding moving.
But I have yet to see Congress say no.
What are your concerns about Tampa if the storm maintains its present course?
Storm surge. When people say Tampa in Florida, we know that means Tampa Bay all the way down to Fort Myers. Some of the counties just south of Tampa—Manatee, and Sarasota County—are extremely vulnerable to storm surge just like Tampa Bay. Once that water starts pushing in against the coast, it can only go in. We don’t have very high ground. You have to get to I-75 [the north-south highway in the metro Tampa area] before you have any real, true elevation. We had more deaths in Pinellas County than we had in other parts of the state from storm surge and they didn’t even get hurricane-force winds.
It’s relatively shallow off the west coast of Florida, unlike the east coast where it’s very deep water as soon as you get out a little ways. And when that water gets pushed in [on the west coast] it can only go sideways or up. It will take every stream, creek, inlet, canal, and bay and push water up in there.
People don’t grasp that it’s not like a bathtub full of water and it’s rising up. This is rushing water with waves on top. It’s powerful and it sweeps things away. It’s much worse than high tide. It’s much worse than any of the things that people try to associate it with. This is water coming in as fast as people can run. It is a battering ram.
Half of the deaths or more that were occurring in Hurricane Ian were more than just drowning. A lot of people were killed because of blunt trauma crush injuries as the homes and businesses were coming apart and boats were being swept away.
What are your concerns about the Helene-related misinformation that has affected most of the coastal Southeast?
We started seeing social media [misinformation] get going during Superstorm Sandy. The difference that I’m seeing in this one is that there are a lot more folks [who think] that this is all about them. They’re trying to make themselves the hero of the narrative. They want to take on the big bad federal government and make themselves the hero.
I’m seeing this trend with the concept of influencers moving into the disaster space. You read most of those tweets, it’s actually about them and how they’re saving the world in spite of all the obstacles that FEMA is throwing in their way. There will still be rumors.
When I was at FEMA, we would get criticized. We wouldn’t do rumor control trying to tell everybody that we were great. That’s the last thing that I wanted to communicate. Somebody’s lost their home, lost family, lost their business—they don’t want to hear how great your response is. So, we just took that as that’s the cost of doing business.
Part of what I wanted to do at FEMA was bring the public back in as a team and acknowledge that I need to empower you to take steps to do stuff right now. You can’t wait in these types of disasters. [Rescue workers] can’t even get to you. What we were concerned about was when there was information that was harming the response. So, FEMA seizing goods so people were afraid to send stuff in because FEMA was going to seize it?!
Well, FEMA doesn’t any seize any goods.
This post has been updated.
