Five months ago FEMA head Brock Long sneeringly dismissed calls for help from San Juan, Puerto Rico Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who pleaded for a better response from the government agency.
The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Sunday said FEMA has "filtered out" ongoing criticism about the agency's response to hurricane relief in Puerto Rico from San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, calling it "political noise."
“We filtered out the mayor a long time ago. We don’t have time for the political noise,” FEMA administrator Brock Long told ABC News when asked about early morning tweets by Cruz.
Political noise?
FEMA’s failures in handling the ongoing crisis on the island have been excused, shoved under the rug, and blamed on lazy Puerto Ricans by Donald Trump. Hell, there should be marches across the U.S. making more noise about what is being done to—and not done for—Puerto Rico.
We are now heading into month seven after hurricanes Irma and Maria, and there are still far too many people on the island who have no power, or intermittent power. While agency heads were filtering out Mayor Cruz, people in Puerto Rico were not getting potable water and filters from FEMA. Too many people are still frustrated and waiting for help from FEMA for needed repairs, and there are too many people who FEMA has denied. Puerto Ricans who headed to the mainland are also suffering due to FEMA’s lack of sustained support.
Politico just posted an investigative article titled “How Trump favored Texas over Puerto Rico,” examining the differences between the relief efforts in both places.
That piece has gotten traction and has been picked up by other news outlets, including here at Daily Kos, which is good news. However, even the numbers they report don’t tell the whole story. More than six months later no one can go back and correct the damage done to Puerto Rico by Trump and the agencies he heads.
And no one is correcting the damage that continues.
From Politico:
As hurricane victims look to start rebuilding their lives in the aftermath of a storm, many first turn to FEMA to apply for federal assistance. Applicants can receive a quick infusion of cash — up to $34,000, depending on their needs and the severity of the damage — to start fixing their homes, money that also helps jump-start the local economy. But that money was slow to arrive in Puerto Rico.
According to FEMA data on its individual assistance program, the agency processed applications more slowly for victims of Hurricane Maria than victims of Hurricane Harvey. Nine days after Harvey, FEMA had already approved more than $141.8 million in federal assistance, compared with just $6 million during the same period after Maria. In fact, from Oct. 2 to Oct. 9, FEMA approved just $6,008 in individual assistance for Puerto Rico.
I thought I was looking at a typo. By October 9, only $6,008 in individual assistance. WTF?
This comment is buried in the article:
“People are grateful for what FEMA has done. Mayors won’t openly say we hate FEMA,” said Sen. Eduardo Bhatia, the minority leader of the Puerto Rico Senate. “But if you talk to them enough, they will say it was totally frustrating. It was an absolute mess. No communication, no coordination, no chain of command and certainly no reasonable plans given the magnitude of the problem.”
Those mayors have seen what happens if you openly criticize FEMA. They aren’t stupid.
Donald Trump is the honcho in chief of Homeland Security, which is the boss of FEMA, and the priorities of the Orange Disaster in the White House are building walls to keep out brown people and kicking out and under-counting those who are here. I get it.
Trump has of course applauded FEMA for what they have done for Puerto Rico and patted himself on the back while lobbing paper towels at a hand-picked audience. His underlings declared Puerto Rico a “good news story” and meanwhile, the island continues to be faced with disaster on multiple fronts as the next hurricane season approaches.
That does not excuse Brock Long or his agency. That does not excuse a Republican Congress which have oversight and has allowed this to continue, despite constructive criticism and solutions that have been proposed by groups and citizens who have disaster relief experience.
After observing FEMA failures, people from REBUILDPR sent a letter to Homeland Security:
An Open Letter to DHS, FEMA, and OMB
To: Kirstjen Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security
Cc: William Long, Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency; John Kelly, Acting Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security; Dustin Brown, Acting Deputy Director of Management, Office of Management and Budget
Date: December 7, 2017
Dear Secretary Nielsen:
On November 17, 2017, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued RFI #70FA301BR00000008 soliciting public comment on a proposal to hire a single vendor to handle all of the shipping, transportation, logistics, and delivery of disaster relief to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for the next 12 months. The contract represents a vital link in the delivery of over $1 billion in disaster aid and will have an immense impact on the speed of recovery.
We believe the draft Performance Work Statement and the overall mega-contracting strategy for disaster aid delivery will result in the continuation of a pattern of delay and waste. Therefore, we recommend that FEMA alter the draft Performance Work Statement (PWS) to better serve the people of Puerto Rico and the USVI, as well as this nation’s taxpayers, with an emphasis on local business and hiring, collaborative partnership approaches, iterative requirements development with public engagement in quality assurance, and open data. Of immediate concern are FEMA’s joining of sea based shipping with local transportation requirements and the lack of independent verification and validation (IVV) for contractor performance.
Our recommendations are based on the voice of industry and the general public, as well as our experience as leaders in the Federal government and within Puerto Rico. Among the many respondents to the RFI, thirty gave permission to “publish quotes from [their] response as part of our efforts to improve the quality of disaster aid delivery in Puerto Rico and USVI.” Their responses to the RFI send a clear message that there is a better way for FEMA to ensure the efficient and cost effective delivery of life sustaining resources to the people of Puerto Rico and the USVI. (We have consolidated their comments as Nine Points for RebuildPR Contracting)
They point out:
The dangers of issuing a big contract to a single vendor are already evident in Puerto Rico. In late November 2017, The Associated Press reported that an unproven, Florida-based company had been awarded $30 million in contracts from FEMA to deliver tarps for repairs to damaged homes. But the contract was terminated after the awardee, Bronze Star LLC, failed to deliver any of the supplies to the island. This would be the first of many unfulfilled and partially filled awards.
Local knowledge has been shown to be critical for rebuilding efforts. The challenge of rebuilding after a disaster is too great for a single Federal agency—or a single company—to handle alone. What we have learned from other hurricane rebuild efforts is hard to miss—that local input isn’t a “nice to have,” but a “need to have.” After Hurricane Sandy, the New Jersey recovery was spearheaded by 30 local businesses with Federal contracts. Similarly, in post-Katrina New Orleans, repopulation picked up steam when Federal and local teams came together to share information about individual neighborhood blocks and collectively address the challenges of rebuilding.
Some of the most effective efforts in Puerto Rico over the past two months have been led by coalitions of innovators and activists on the ground. A partnership led by Chef José Andrés has served over 3 million meals. Lin Manuel Miranda has created a $2.5 million hurricane relief fund. These local contributions have been leading the recovery fight and picking up the slack where the Federal government and contractors have fallen behind.
They point to Chef José Andrés, and the operation he spearheaded. Which reminds me that the numbers being mentioned in the Politico piece about how many meals FEMA delivered in Puerto Rico don’t reflect what those meals consisted of.
Chefs for Puerto Rico was ensuring that people got at least one hot, healthy meal per day. FEMA was criticized for delivering food packages that consisted of snacks and junk food.
In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Chef Andrés talked about what kind of food was needed:
Anderson Cooper: Most agencies, if they're giving out food, they're giving out MRE's, or snacks -- not hot meals.
José Andrés: Americans should be receiving one plate a day of hot food. That's not too much to ask in America. An MRE is very expensive for the American taxpayer. A hot meal is more affordable, it's cheaper. It's what people really need, it's what people really want. They feel all of a sudden that you are caring for them, that America is caring for them.
Andrés was openly critical of FEMA’s red tape and bureaucracy:
FEMA slapped back at Andrés, the same way they did to Mayor Cruz. It was detailed in this article titled “After José Andrés Distributed 2.2M Meals in Puerto Rico, FEMA Questioned His Motives.”
They implied that he wanted more money from them. Whatever. People on the ground in Puerto Rico and folks following the chef on the mainland paid FEMA no mind.
The New Republic posted that “José Andrés was right about FEMA.”
Andrés criticism of FEMA has been validated by a New York Times report on Tuesday that the agency awarded a massive contract—30 million meals for $156 million—to Tiffany Brown, “an Atlanta entrepreneur with no experience in large-scale disaster relief and at least five canceled government contracts in her past.” Predictably, her one-woman company, Tribute Contracting LLC, didn’t deliver: “By the time 18.5 million meals were due, Tribute had delivered only 50,000. And FEMA inspectors discovered a problem: The food had been packaged separately from the pouches used to heat them. FEMA’s solicitation required ‘self-heating meals.’” FEMA then terminated the contract.
FEMA claims that, to quote the Times, “no Puerto Ricans missed a meal as a result of the failed agreement with Tribute. FEMA relied on other suppliers that provided ‘ample’ food and water for distribution, said William Booher, an agency spokesman.” One of those unnamed suppliers surely was Andrés’s World Central Kitchen, which has delivered at least three million hot meals on the island for a fraction of the cost of Tribute’s contract
Other voices have not gotten the attention they deserve, like that of Barack Obama’s former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, who had a lot to say back in October 2017:
“Our policies are always based in the past. One of our standards for determining what you should build to is the 100-year risk, or the last hundred years of data… The problem is that if you’re only looking backwards, yet you’ve had three hurricanes that each individually exceeded any known past record of impacts, and you build back to the last 100 years, you build to failure,” Fugate told a policy crowd at an event at the Center for American Progress. (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent project of CAP.)
“You’re talking billions of rebuilding, and the current plan will be: Rebuild it back the way it was. Rebuild it back to the past. Rebuild it back to fail again,” Fugate said. “Let’s be blunt: This is your taxpayer dollars at work. I don’t know why anyone talks about FEMA money, it ain’t FEMA’s money.”
But whether Congress will accept that taxpayer money should be spent on infrastructure that can last past the next big storm remains to be seen.
We should also be paying attention to this very recent news: FEMA's response to Hurricane Maria won't get initial review under watchdog agency's new approach.
The decision by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General to no longer issue preliminary reports comes as the watchdog took the extraordinary step last week of pulling a dozen largely positive assessments of the Obama administration's initial response to several disasters.
Acting DHS Inspector General John V. Kelly said the reports, pulled last week from the IG's web site, didn't meet proper standards for a government audit.
FEMA clearly needs a watchdog—and in the age of Trump the Grifter, the situation with who gets FEMA contracts, how, and why should be raising more alarm bells.
We’ve already seen the fallout and consequences of the Whitefish debacle (here’s an eye roll-worthy read titled “A top FEMA official says Whitefish Energy ‘did a good job’ in Puerto Rico”). And then there was the tarp contract:
After Hurricane Maria damaged tens of thousands of homes in Puerto Rico, a newly created Florida company with an unproven record won more than $30m in contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide emergency tarps and plastic sheeting for repairs.Bronze Star LLC never delivered those urgently needed supplies, which even months later remain in demand by hurricane victims on the island.
According to an exclusive Associated Press report, Fema eventually terminated the contracts, without paying any money, and re-started the process this month to supply more tarps for the island. The earlier effort took nearly four weeks from the day Fema awarded the contracts to Bronze Star and the day it canceled them. Thousands of Puerto Ricans remain homeless, and many complain that the federal government is taking too long to install tarps. The US territory has been hit by severe rainstorms in recent weeks that have caused widespread flooding.
It is not clear how thoroughly Fema investigated Bronze Star or its ability to fulfill the contracts. Formed by two brothers in August, Bronze Star had never before won a government contract or delivered tarps or plastic sheeting. The address listed for the business is a single-family home in a residential subdivision in St Cloud, Florida.
Next up on the list of eyebrow raisers is Adjusters International.
They are not suspended, and Tu Hogar Renace is the subject of a recent inquiry by one of the island’s top news personalities. The story in Spanish, titled “Por las nubes los precios de Tu Hogar Renace,” questions exorbitant prices being charged and shoddy repair work. (See the graphic on Facebook.)
There hasn’t been any reporting about this in the mainland English press.
Back in 2009 NPR raised this question: “Should FEMA Remain Part Of Homeland Security?”
FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is widely considered the agency's low point. Andrew Sachs, who worked at FEMA before it became part of Homeland Security and is now a consultant, says among the agency's many failings in New Orleans was its inability to make quick decisions.
For instance, Sachs says, churches and other organizations that became last-resort shelters for evacuees had to exhaust their own resources while waiting for FEMA to make up its mind about whether to help.
"The agency has to have the flexibility to make decisions on the fly on the ground within the broad authorities that it has," Sachs says. "Now, there is no decision that can't be made without it having to go back to Washington, D.C., and that causes problems when you're dealing with a disaster time frame and a disaster context."
Moving forward, this is a question that should be raised again.
However, no matter where it is housed in the government bureaucracy, the awarding of contracts clearly needs oversight, and the agency itself should never have been able to fall prey to treating the massive disaster in Puerto Rico as second-class.
We clearly learned next to nothing after Hurricane Katrina. (Well, we did—but the Obama-led corrections are being erased and supplanted by Trumpism).
The racism in play (which I discussed last Sunday) and on display from the White House on down to the Republicans in Congress—and, yes, from certain FEMA officials—is obvious in Puerto Rico.
The solutions are going to have to come from us. This critique of FEMA is in no way meant to diminish the efforts and work of FEMA employees on the ground in Puerto Rico. They are doing the best they can with what they have been given. In conversations with some of them, I’ve found that they are just as frustrated by crazy rules and red tape, which are preventing them getting people the aid they need.
They cuss—a lot. And then head back to work.