Craig Fugate, who led the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Obama administration, has witnessed many natural disasters. He knows the difference between destruction and total devastation, and he puts the country’s truly catastrophic events, events that wipe out entire communities in the blink of an eye, into a category of their own.
The wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles in recent days fit into that group, he said.
“This is your Hurricane Katrina,” Fugate said in an interview with the Times. “It’s going to change the community forever. It’s going to be a touchpoint that everyone remembers for years to come. And for Los Angeles, it’s going to be one of the defining moments in the history of the community, the city, the county. .”
Many people in Los Angeles and across California already know what happened before. This means that there will be no rain and it will be a dry month. Deadly Santa Ana has hurricane strength winds. A suburban residential area bumps into blazing dry forest and scrubland in one of the most densely populated areas in the United States.
It is the still unclear aftermath that stirs anxiety and fear.
There are immediate issues like where those who lost their homes will stay tonight, tomorrow, and the rest of this week, and long-term issues like whether Los Angeles should rebuild in an area vulnerable to an increasingly harsh climate. There are also some problems. change.
Another big question is: Will politics stand in the way as the region tries to move forward?
From the Altadena to the Palisades to the Pacific Coast Highway, the sites of extensive destruction in Los Angeles have been met with condemnation and derision at the highest levels of government.
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate meets with President Obama in the Oval Office in 2016.
(Manuel Balce Senator/Associated Press)
Could President-elect Donald Trump’s spat with Gov. Gavin Newsom over the state’s fire and water management derail the economic recovery? Is it possible that President Trump, who takes office in just over a week, will unilaterally cut federal aid that President Biden has already promised?
Mr. Biden and current FEMA Administrator Dean Criswell stopped short of guaranteeing on Friday that funding would continue under the Trump administration, but Mr. Biden said he expected it. Criswell said Biden had declared a disaster in accordance with the law and that “the declaration should not be rescinded.”
Both Mr. Fugate and Peter T. Gainer, FEMA administrator during the first Trump administration, seemed confident that aid would continue.
“That first aid is locked and loaded. It’s coming,” Fugate said.
“President Trump has been in office and been through some terrible situations. He’s been through disasters. So he knows how complicated these things are. I’m not used to it,” Gaynor said. “He will continue to support victims no matter what state they are in, including California, and no matter who they voted for.”
But Gaynor said, “To say the road ahead is going to be tough is an understatement.”
Fugate agreed. He also noted that much of the path forward does not depend on FEMA or the federal government.
“There are going to be some big challenges that even the federal government is not equipped to handle,” he said. “Many of these decisions will be made at the local level.”
The extent of the destruction is immeasurable. The numbers have increased over the past week and now at least 16 people have been killed and more than 10,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
Cost estimates also continue to rise. JPMorgan on Thursday doubled its estimate to about $50 billion from a day earlier, but the final total won’t be known until the true scale of damage and rebuilding costs is known.
By comparison, Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, killed more than 1,800 people and caused about $200 billion in damage, according to federal estimates.
Fugate and Gaynor say it won’t be long before the full extent of the devastating fires is known, but the marching orders are clear.
“Climate change is real,” Biden said Thursday, pledging that the federal government would cover the full cost of disaster relief to California for the next 180 days.
For FEMA, that means time passes, they said.
“The floodgates for federal aid are now open and there are ways to request and receive these resources and pay for them all. So that’s the positive thing about what’s happening right now,” Gaynor said. said.
Every type of disaster has its own footprint. In a hurricane or flood, everything gets wet and much is ruined or destroyed, but your belongings can still be found or recovered. After the fire, the landscape was desolate and “all that’s left is the barbecue, the engine block and the propane tank,” Gaynor said.
“In wildfires, all that’s left is ash. It’s almost like erasing their history completely. So for a lot of people, it’s going to exacerbate the trauma,” Fugate said. “They not only lost their homes, but their memories.”
For FEMA, that could mean less physical debris to remove, but there’s still a lot of physical debris. However, very little infrastructure remains. “All that’s left is the road,” Fugate said.
One of the immediate challenges for FEMA and state and local officials is securing and cleaning up dangerous and degraded sites.
President Trump and FEMA Administrator Peter Gainer attend a coronavirus task force briefing at the White House in 2020.
(Patrick Semanski/Associated Press)
Biden’s proclamation would make federal funds available to state, local and tribal governments for debris removal, hazard mitigation and other emergency measures.
Another immediate challenge involving FEMA is getting all the people evacuated by the fire to shelters, Fugate and Gaynor said.
The federal funds approved by Biden can be applied to temporary housing and home repairs, as well as loans to cover uninsured losses. Also part of FEMA’s plan is to coordinate temporary housing assistance to disaster victims through hotel and motel vouchers.
FEMA can implement temporary housing assistance programs for up to 18 months, and state and local officials can request extensions from the president if the need remains.
The need for housing assistance in Los Angeles will likely remain an issue for a long time, Fugate and Gaynor said. Especially considering how much the area was already struggling with affordable housing and homelessness issues before the fires.
Sudden housing demand from fire survivors has also affected the broader affordable housing and rental market, and “even if there were challenges to affordable housing before the fire, the situation has not improved. ” Fugate said.
hurdle is high
In the coming months and years, Los Angeles and the surrounding region will receive housing and urban development funding for new affordable housing, Department of Transportation funding for rail and road projects, and small and medium-sized businesses for business loans and recovery projects. Administrators said they were likely to request funding from the Enterprise Agency.
There are many examples of the federal government swooping in to rebuild American communities destroyed by disasters. For example, after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, billions of dollars in federal aid poured into the region to repair infrastructure. After a transport ship struck and destroyed Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge last year, the federal government announced it would pay billions of dollars to fully replace the bridge.
But while much of the funding may come from the federal government, local and state officials will face a massive burden to coordinate recovery and rebuilding, Fugate and Gaynor said.
The big hurdle is home insurance. Even before the fires, California was already facing a home insurance crisis. Insurers are already shedding customers across the state due to increased wildfire-related losses, and the fires will exacerbate that problem.
There are also questions about how many of the homeowners who lost everything in the recent fires had insurance policies, or whether their insurance had recently been terminated but may currently have insurance policies. Yes, Fugate said.
Many people could be left in the lurch, he said, and the state may have to start considering launching a new program to insure the state’s fire-ravaged homes.
Then there’s the issue of physically rebuilding communities that have disappeared across large swaths of urban and semi-urban areas, Fugate said. With nothing left but roads, huge amounts of clearing will be required, as well as the installation of new public facilities and environmental impact assessments.
When Los Angeles finally enters the construction phase, a new set of issues related to labor and supplies could emerge.
“Just the simple construction work to rebuild enough housing to evacuate people from shelters is going to be a very difficult undertaking,” Fugate said. “Even if people had insurance to rebuild, construction workers, supplies, materials, all of those things are going to be a big challenge.”
And that’s if rebuilding is the goal.
Some are already questioning whether some affected areas should be rebuilt, especially in the Santa Ana wind path, given the growing threat of global warming.
Fugate said the L.A. area is too precious to imagine such vast tracts of land remaining vacant forever. “They’re going to rebuild,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean reconstructing exactly what existed before, he says.
State and local officials should already be considering the future communities they want to build and the building standards they want to put in place to ensure those communities are more resilient.
“The question is how do we rebuild these communities to make them not fireproof, but more resilient and more resistant to these types of fires,” Fugate said. Ta.
“Political element”
On the campaign trail, President Trump said he would withhold firefighting funding from California unless Newsom complied with demands on the state’s water management.
On Wednesday, he reignited the spat with a confusing and inaccurate post on the Truth social platform in which he once again hinted that there was a demand for Newsom (a Newsom he called “Newscam”) that many Californians made me even more irritated.
Both Fugate and Gaynor said it was no surprise that the fire sparked political debate.
“Every disaster has a political component. That’s just the nature of the beast,” Gaynor said. “Whether it’s a local official, the governor, the president, there’s always someone who has some sort of grievance and wants to vent or take advantage of it.”
Gaynor said such statements are “unhelpful,” but there is no cause for alarm, at least when it comes to immediate federal aid to Los Angeles.
Gaynor said he worked with both Trump and Newsom on emergency response efforts during President Trump’s last term, including with the governor’s response to the past California fires, adding: “In the immediate future, as we respond and recover, , again, from my first-hand experience, I think everyone can help.” trying to do the right thing. ”
And regardless of politicians’ stance, FEMA officials have a “pretty clear” mandate to “help people before, during and after a disaster,” he said.
Fugate agreed. He said President Trump has often made alarming statements about disasters in the past, but they have rarely been translated into action.
“He communicates in this bombastic way to at least get people to pay attention to what he’s trying to say, but he doesn’t necessarily follow through with it. It’s just a communication style.” said Fugate.
More important politically is the upcoming debate in Congress about the type and scope of aid funneled to LA, both former administration officials said.
Will a major infrastructure project be funded in preparation for Los Angeles’ upcoming 2028 Summer Olympics? Will HUD funds be allocated to building new affordable housing, or will only mansions be rebuilt? How many businesses will be destroyed and how much will the government spend to get them back on their feet? Are you planning to invest money?
There will always be significant environmental impacts, and mitigation will be costly. How will the government fund those projects?
Fugate said all of these questions will come before Congress, and it will be up to California’s large delegation, particularly Republicans, to advocate for as much funding as possible.
There have been similar discussions in the past, leading to “tough discussions,” Fugate said. But he predicted the funds would eventually be lost and lost again.
“At the end of the day, Americans come to the aid of other Americans in times of need,” he said.
Los Angeles Times reporter Faith E. Pinho contributed to this article.
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