Can FEMA Really Handle Hurricanes Helene and Milton?

The Gulf of Mexico, more prone than ever to rapidly intensifying hurricanes thanks to climate change, is punishing the Florida coast this season. Weeks after Helene battered the state’s Big Bend region and caused horrific damage in extremely non-coastal regions of Appalachia, a new storm, Milton, is barreling toward the Tampa Bay–St. Petersburg area. When it makes landfall on Wednesday, it could cause a deadly storm surge of up to 15 feet in Florida’s second-largest metropolitan area. “I can say this without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die,” said Tampa mayor Jane Castor.

With the death toll from Helene at 230 and counting and Milton on its way, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is facing its greatest crisis in years. On Monday, there was a crisis of confidence as well following a FEMA daily briefing in which the agency stated it had only 9 percent of its 1,217 personnel unassigned and available to respond to new problems like Milton. Back in October 2017 — the year of Maria, Harvey, and Irma — the New York Times noted that number was 19 percent.

That 9 percent figure sounded pretty bad, leading to questions about FEMA’s ability to manage these emergencies. Later on Monday, former Biden-administration figure Jen Psaki posed the very question to current Biden-administration Cabinet member Alejandro Mayorkas, who said that “everybody should rest confident that FEMA has the resources” to handle the double crisis in the southeast. He also cited the 900 personnel already deployed in Florida responding to storms earlier in the year. “We are there,” he added. “We have search-and-rescue teams; the Army Corps of Engineers are there. We are ready.”

Mayorkas’s confidence did not necessarily move the numbers. In FEMA’s daily operations briefing for Tuesday, the figure of available personnel was stuck at 9 percent. As for what those people actually do, Columbia Climate School disaster-prep expert Jeffrey Schlegelmilch said they include a reserve core kept on standby for bad storms as well as some jack-of-all-trades staffers: “FEMA is really good about cross-training folks so that if you’re working on grant management, you have capabilities where you can deploy in an emergency situation.”

FEMA can always contract out to aid in a relief effort, but Schlegelmilch said it’s not always a smooth transition. “If you’re pulling people from other agencies, then let’s just say at best there’s a learning curve,” he said. At the management level, the situation also looks dicey. The Times reports that FEMA has 50 staffers working as federal coordinating officers, a role that directs ground operations during a disaster. Only one was available as of Monday. (FEMA did not respond to requests for comment, which is probably for the best.)

There’s also a question of whether FEMA can pay for what it needs. In a worst-case scenario, Wall Street analysts calculated that damage from Milton could cost $175 billion in the Tampa area alone. Helene’s total damage could be north of $200 billion. Keith Turi, FEMA’s acting administrator for response and recovery, said Monday the agency has “the resources we need to respond to both Helene and Milton,” while FEMA officials on the ground in North Carolina say they aren’t going anywhere. But federal funding for FEMA’s disaster budget — and two other federal insurance programs that can aid in recovery — may be close to running out. Mayorkas stated last week that FEMA “does not have the funds to make it through the season”; he means the hurricane season, which runs through November 30. A stop-gap disaster-aid bill may not be an option. House Speaker Mike Johnson has vowed not to provide any supplemental funding until after the election. (Some Democrats have been keen to point out that several Republicans who serve districts in Milton’s path did not vote to expand FEMA’s funding.)

The agency is also facing another problem that has dogged it at least since Hurricane Katrina — misinformation in the confusing days following landfall. FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell has had to push back against the bogus conspiracy that the Feds are withholding aid to Republican areas of Appalachia. “That type of rhetoric is demoralizing to our staff that have left their families to come here and help the people of North Carolina,” she said Monday. But the theories appear to be gaining momentum — to the point that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been going off about how “they” can control the weather. Donald Trump has been getting in on this baseless thought experiment too — claiming wrongly that the Biden administration is withholding aid to Republicans, that there are “no helicopters” to rescue people in North Carolina, and that $1 billion was “stolen” from FEMA to handle immigration. This, by the way, is the same former president who reportedly did not want to send disaster aid to California after a terrible fire season in 2018. He did so only after his aides showed him how many Republicans actually lived in the affected areas.