Hurricane Helene disaster response: Is FEMA messing up?

Millions of Americans are still struggling to find their bearings after Hurricane Helene made landfall last week, killing at least 230 people across six states, washing away homes, and leaving thousands without clean water or electricity for days across the southeastern United States.

For the survivors, the aftermath has been agonizing, and if past hurricanes are any indication, it will take years to fully recover. Many of the residents in afflicted communities have never experienced a disaster like this before and are now navigating layers of government bureaucracy to get supplies, relief money, and to begin rebuilding. It’s creating frustration and confusion, leaving the door open to misinformation and scams around the relief effort.

Helene is also creating a political problem as politicians look to blame each other for hiccups in the response and residents try to figure out who to hold accountable. A lot of attention has focused on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its role in the disaster recovery. This week, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper met with FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell and military officials to discuss the recovery work underway.

These dynamics are already creating a lot of pressure, and it’s poised to get even more chaotic as Hurricane Milton, which spooled up to category 5 strength this week, heads toward the Florida coast.

It’s not just a matter of finger-pointing; knowing whether to press local, state, or federal officials is essential to getting help to the people who need it now, and learning from past disasters can soften the devastation from future catastrophes.

Collectively, governments around the world are actually getting better at disaster response. We’ve seen over the past century that, in general, natural disasters are killing fewer people. However, the destructive potential of something like a hurricane is growing now that more people are living in their paths. Asheville, North Carolina, which experienced extensive flooding after Helene, experienced a big population spike in the past decade.

And as average temperatures continue to rise due to climate change, extreme events like hurricanes spool up faster into monstrous storms and dish out more rainfall and drive more storm surge into coastal areas than they would otherwise.

Given that there are so many variables in natural disasters and the communities they afflict, how do you gauge whether your government is doing a good job against a force of nature? And when things go sideways, when should you blame your mayor, your governor, or your president? I posed these questions to Claire Connolly Knox, who founded the Emergency and Crisis Management program at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. She spoke to me from her home in Florida where she was making preparations for Milton’s arrival.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Given how different every disaster is, it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison between them. It also seems like expectations are all over the place of who should be responding to what after a disaster. What do you make of the responses to some of the recent disasters we’ve seen? I’m thinking specifically about North Carolina after Helene. What do you think is worth highlighting?

There are a number of things. This is going to be one for the record books. One is that it highlights that so much of the conversation focuses on disasters, hurricanes specifically, and the immediately impacted area. Everyone was really concerned about Florida and the Big Bend and Tallahassee, and rightly so, because everyone primarily looks at where the eye of the storm is going and then looking at those initial brunt forces and the impacts.

I think what this hurricane is teaching us is that there’s so much more to hurricanes that we sometimes forget: That’s the rain. That’s the storm surge. That is the spin-off tornadoes. Those cascading impacts we frequently do not focus on. With the Helene system going into North Carolina, the amount of rain that fell is very reminiscent of Hurricane Harvey with the amount of devastation and the flooding that took place.

North Carolina is a place that’s infrequently hit by hurricanes. I would expect Florida to have a lot of resources ready but maybe it’s excusable that North Carolina was caught a little bit off guard.

How would you evaluate their response? Are they graded on a curve when it comes to a disaster like this? And should FEMA have seen this coming and done more?

Every disaster starts and ends locally, so every disaster response starts at the local level, and it ends at the local level. A lot of people don’t realize that. They think immediately of FEMA. FEMA has the purse strings, they help pay for a lot of this.

But the response is local. It goes to the state if locals can’t handle it. The state then does an emergency declaration to release additional funds. If it’s going to be more than they can handle, they go to their FEMA region. That then goes up to FEMA national, and then to the president for an emergency declaration or disaster declaration depending on which is needed.

Every state adheres to the same standards set forth by FEMA to have a comprehensive emergency management plan to train their local emergency managers to have the capacity to respond to a disaster.

So you start local, and then if you need more resources, you go to the state, and then you go to your local FEMA administrator, then you go to the federal government for an emergency declaration. Is that typically how you escalate?

Yes, that is in the statute of the Stafford Act, the process that disaster assistance goes through. In addition to that more formal setup, you also have mutual aid agreements between local governments, between states. For example, when Hurricane Katrina happened, you had emergency management staff and first responders from other states poised and ready to enter the impacted area. You’ve seen that happening [in North Carolina], not only amongst the public sector, but also the private and nonprofit sectors. Emergency management is all about facilitating and being able to bring together everyone who can help.

Is this process necessarily reactive, or is there a way that you can be proactive?

Both. However, you’re seeing more proactive responses. That’s really a big lesson learned from Hurricane Katrina. You saw Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator during Superstorm Sandy, preemptively set up stuff, and he actually got criticized for that, but that has now become more of the norm, trying to be as prepared and to preemptively set up resources so that they could quickly enter and reduce the amount of lives lost.

What was the criticism for being preemptive there?

The idea was they were setting up resources in advance, and some people said that was not the role of the federal government. Some said it was a waste of resources. However, on the flip side, you also had former FEMA administrator Michael Brown who was heavily criticized during Hurricane Katrina for not being responsive. There are critics on both sides of the fence.

If the federal government is already getting involved at the front end, then is it in charge of the disaster response at that point? Or how does the hierarchy of responsibility work?

It’s all local. So it’s your city, county, and your state who are the leaders when it comes to a major disaster. FEMA has to be invited in. They’re not siloed though. If you look at a local city or county, their emergency operations center has seats for all of the different sectors: communications, transportation, utilities, law enforcement, fire, health. You’re going to have someone, a representative from the federal government, either virtually or someone in the room, as well. Each of FEMA’s regions has staff that could be deployed to assist those local governments.

When a disaster strikes, how do you evaluate the response? Is there a metric? How do I know what was reasonable for emergency managers to do? How do I know if they dropped the ball?

That’s where my research comes in. I study after-action reports, or things that went well and things that did not go well during a disaster. They frequently include an implementation plan, so taking those lessons learned, who is the lead to implement this lesson, if there’s any funding needed, and a timeline of when to expect that particular lesson to be implemented.

Unfortunately, an after-action report is not required after every disaster. What I have found is that in areas that tend to be heavily destroyed — looking at Asheville, North Carolina — I would not anticipate an after-action report coming from them.

It tends to be. For example, after Hurricane Charlie, I reached out to local governments over in Tampa and Florida’s Gulf Coast. Their immediate response was “I’m not going to sit down and write a report. I need to be helping people.”

When you have a major disaster like this, FEMA does an after-action report, your state government does an after-action report. A lot of the lessons learned will be captured in those reports and those documents after the fact. That tends to be one of the ways in which you measure the effectiveness of response.

We’ve seen over time where a lot of those lessons learned that have been documented make their way into local, state, and federal policy. After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, there was the Lewis report with 94 recommendations that changed our building codes, how we do land use planning, emergency management. We’ve seen that happen after Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, after Harvey, Irma, Maria, etc. After all these major disasters, about a year or two later major policy changes come out.

How are we doing in disaster response in general in the US? Is it improving over time? Are we seeing any patterns? Are there places we still keep getting tripped up over and over?

I really love that you asked this question. We’re really good at identifying the lessons learned. We’re really good at saying what went well and what did not go well.

However, we’re not really good at implementing those lessons learned, and we’re really not good at evaluating whether we’ve actually implemented them. And usually the test is the next disaster. It tests whether we’ve actually done what we’ve said we’re going to do.

Who then is to blame, or who gets credit, during a disaster response? Is there somebody that we can hold accountable in general?

It’s a very, very hard question to answer. I say it depends. I think a lot of people don’t realize emergency management touches on every aspect of our life and our society, and so it makes it really hard to answer that question.

Making decisions during a crisis is not easy. You have incomplete information. You are trying your best to be able to make decisions very quickly, very rapidly, while dealing with misinformation or incomplete information. I think you’re asking a very important question, but it’s very hard to answer.

We’re also in an era where average temperatures are rising, and then many types of disasters are reaching greater extremes, and that more people are experiencing hazards that they may not have experienced before. People have pointed out that North Carolina did flood like this back in 1916, but it’s a completely different world now. How do you prepare for the future when that risk profile just looks so drastically different?

There are lots of free resources and data and models available through FEMA, through NOAA, through the National Hurricane Center to help with planning.

To cope with future disasters, we have to think more holistically. In emergency management, we teach and we practice “all hazards, whole community.” It is a networked approach to responding to a disaster, not just the public sector. You have the private sector and nonprofit sector that are engaged in the response efforts.

Part of it is to be aware there are so many local jurisdictions that can only think about emergency management and disasters when it’s on their doorstep. For a mayor, I would have them find out if they know who their emergency manager is. Is it someone who is a police chief or fire chief who happens to wear the emergency management hat only when there’s a disaster? Unfortunately, in a lot of our small rural communities, there is not a single dedicated emergency manager. It’s someone who was also wearing two or three other hats. It would help to have a dedicated person networking, setting up mutual aid agreements, doing all those things that get activated when there’s an actual disaster.

Are there any interesting case studies here worth highlighting, or aspects of a disaster response we tend to overlook?

I would look at Florida’s response to Hurricane Maria. A lot of communities may prepare for a disaster themselves, but they don’t prepare a response for their neighbors getting a disaster. Being able to be a receiving community for evacuees, being able to deploy resources to your neighboring community is critical. When you look at the individuals evacuated from Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria in 2017 here in central Florida, you had these resource centers that are now known as the national standard of how do you take care of that neighboring community.

It’s very important because, especially with climate change, we’re already seeing a shift of the population. Central Florida is the receiving community for all these coastal communities. As our coastlines change, as sea level rise increases and our vulnerability increases in these coastal zones, the interior communities need to be ready to receive them, and if they don’t do it well, that could potentially be a disaster within a disaster.