Over four years after Hurricane Florence's drenching assault on the North Carolina coast, John is still trying to move on. Weaving through studs, he described the former layout of his house.
“This is my son's room. This is our formal dining room. This is our breakfast nook in our kitchen […] it took at least three or four weeks for the floodwaters to subside,” he said. “And now we're looking at the skeleton of our American Dream.”
John was approved in 2019 for the FEMA hazard mitigation grant program, or HMGP. Homeowners can apply to have their properties either elevated, or demolished and returned to a natural, undeveloped state.
John chose the latter; he knew his destroyed house was in a flooding spot that would only grow worse. In return for acquiring his property, the county would give him the amount for his house at pre-storm market value.
John and his family need that money to move into a new house. So for the past four years, they’ve moved from place to place, renting as they wait. It’s taken a toll, he said.
“My wife literally just recovered from triple negative breast cancer at 40 years old…and she's an immigrant. She moved here when she was 10 or 12 from Italy," he said. "So this is our American Dream [that] you're looking at, and it's gone. She built this, this was her house and she was devastated. This is our life. This is where we were going to raise our kids and our grandkids."
He’s not the only one: 92 properties were approved for acquisition in the non-expedited program in Pender, Brunswick, and New Hanover counties. As of publication, none have been completed.
There is a faster program called, naturally, the ‘expedited program.’ All 41 homes in the county-run expedited program for those three counties were acquired and demolished in the summer of 2021.
But for the rest, it can be easy to feel forgotten.
Expedited vs. non-expedited
The funding for the HMGP grant is 75% from FEMA and 25% the state. FEMA gave $21.6 million to North Carolina for the expedited program and the state contributed $7.2 million.
Including state funds, Pender got $21 million for both the expedited and non-expedited programs. Brunswick got $3 million, and New Hanover received $3.6 million.
For the expedited program, counties submitted applications on a faster timeline and managed the acquisition of those houses and properties.
The non-expedited program is a little different. After a disaster, the homeowner applies for the grant. The county sends all the applications to the state, which prioritizes the applications and tells the county which ones are eligible.
The county fleshes out each eligible application with things like homeowner documentation and pictures. The state then develops a statewide application that includes a budget and cost effectiveness for FEMA to review. The state and FEMA go back and forth gathering information until FEMA awards a project to the state.
From there, the state finds contractors to complete the work. Some local communities opt to go through this process independently, meaning they pay for the contracting work and get reimbursed through the state.
A FEMA spokesperson said in an email that while most projects are “reviewed and approved quickly,” some do need more analysis. However, the agency has developed new support materials for local and state governments to get resident information more rapidly. The spokesperson said it takes an average of four years for a project to be completed.
A slow process, by design
HMGP is a complicated process, and it was designed to have a lot of checks and balances to be cost effective. That means these grants aren’t meant to be quick; they’re meant to be mitigating future hazards, hence the name.
But for some people, the grant is effectively acting like a recovery program — helping people like John deal with a storm that’s already devastated his property, not get out of the way of a future storm. For John, getting his buyout money through the grant is essential to moving on, so the lengthy timeline can feel discouraging.
Leah Campbell, a communication specialist with the National Drought Mitigation Center, said this makes it difficult for some people to access the grant.
“If it’s people, especially in lower income communities, you don't have the time to wait. You're just gonna fix up your house to make it livable, or you're just going to leave, you're not going to sit around and wait for your house to be elevated or to be reconstructed to higher standards," she said. "So from that perspective, it's a huge — I don't want to say failure, but it's a big problem.”
As a doctoral student, Campbell researched the HMGP after Hurricane Matthew in North Carolina. She said the tension between what the program is designed to do and how it’s seen by residents causes frustration on all sides.
“There's disconnected priorities. So local government and people on the ground, they might have one sense of: here's who we need to protect, here's who we need to get out of harm's way, here's who we need to get back into their homes as fast as possible," she said. "Whereas the state and FEMA in particular, they might have different perspective of: here's where it makes most sense to buy people out to reduce future losses, here's what's most cost effective.”
Campbell’s research looked at the challenges local government officials faced when trying to administer the program. Many local governments don’t have a lot of resources or staff for disaster recovery alone, much less future prevention, she said.
Between the non-expedited and expedited HMGPs, FEMA public assistance funding, and disaster recovery aid programs, there’s a lot of confusion out there, even for local officials.
There’s also programs out of the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency — more on that, later.
Campbell said the confusion can be compounded as guidelines shift over time.
“It's a really bureaucratic program. And so [local officials] are sort of struggling to make sense of this in this really critical role; they're kind of making everything happen to some extent," she said.
To help combat this, North Carolina began a state-centric model for administering some grants like the HMGP. Many communities opted into it during Hurricane Florence, meaning the state has most of the authority to carry out the projects. That can streamline the process.
Campbell said this strategy can also help even the playing field for communities with fewer resources.
But even with that model in place, John and others are still waiting for work to begin on their homes.
Burnout and turnover
Will Ray is the director of NC Emergency Management, the department running HMGP. He said that while the state-centric program needs to improve, it still has a positive impact.
“We're talking about a jurisdiction that otherwise would not have the ability to execute this program, not through any fault of their own," he said. "So to be able to say we're going to assume some of the administrative burden to help get you where you want to be and where your community needs to be — I think it's still worth it.”
Ray said one of the biggest challenges the department faces with HMGP is balancing cost-effectiveness with timeliness.
The state-centric model was also supposed to help address turnover in understaffed local communities. Campbell said staffing shortages and budget shortages were big challenges named by local officials she talked to.
Gavin Smith, a professor at NC State University, led the hazard mitigation grant program in North Carolina during Hurricanes Fran and Floyd. He said the department needs more staff to prevent burnout and turnover from what can be a tough job.
“It is an incredibly difficult, emotional process to do that it will wear you out. Yeah. And it wears out staff…we knew that staff, almost everyone was going to have a breaking point," he said.
Smith said the process was faster in his time, partly because he had a larger staff.
Director Ray said turnover and staffing can be an issue at the state level, too. Some other issues he named were supply chain issues and labor shortages. As for finding contractors, it can be difficult to make attractive deals that are still low-budget.
Ray said his staff and the FEMA officials they work with are well aware the program needs to be faster.
“We will continue to vocally advocate to FEMA on behalf of North Carolinians...At the end of the day, I can't make them move slower or faster," he said. "But I think how we can improve is the customer service, the transparency and the communication to those individuals and those communities that have been impacted.”
More proactive approaches
Smith and Campbell both said in-depth planning for disaster mitigation grants ahead of time would speed up the process. But the reactive nature of HMGP makes it hard to prepare before a disaster, said Campbell.
“If it's baked into the system, that money is available, and activity and incentive, and action all happens after a disaster. That's really hard — no matter how well intentioned you are — to break," she said.
Communities are required by FEMA to have hazard mitigation plans, but Campbell said those are often just “checking a box.”
Some newer programs are taking steps to address this. FEMA’s new Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program aims to help solve the issue of reactive disaster spending.
The program funds grant projects separate from disasters, such as local research into mitigation efforts and strengthening plans.
According to a FEMA spokesperson, the agency is also evaluating the benefit cost analysis requirement in applications to find potential changes that would speed up the process.
And at the state level, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency is operating a new buyout program for specific flood-prone areas in the southeastern part of the state. The funding for the Strategic Buyout program comes from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.
If counties agree to take part in the program, NCORR goes to low-to-moderate-income homeowners in flood-prone areas and offers to buy out their homes. Then they return the area to a natural, undeveloped state.
But an older, separate program, NCORR’s RebuildNC Homeowner Recovery program, intended to help low-income families rebuild their homes after Hurricanes Matthew and Florence, has come under fire from the General Assembly for the program’s lengthy and complicated process.
And residents who spoke to WHQR don't always distinguish between separate buyout programs, so a shortcoming in one can lead to distrust in relief and recovery programs in general.Public trust
John recounted going to town halls to learn more about the HMGP after Florence, and seeing people there who were still waiting on their grants from Hurricane Matthew.
Because of all the delays with buyout programs in North Carolina, John and many other homeowners have lost a lot of trust in the success.
“It's been four years now; the money's just sitting there. That's my ultimate fear from reading the horror stories about all these funds getting mismanaged," he said. "I'm not saying they are. But what's the holdup? What's the problem?”
John said he still believes in the program’s goals of removing developments from flood-prone areas, but above all, he wants his family to be able to move on from the disaster.
“The psychological damage to my kids and my wife, my daughter; it's been a big deal," he said. "My daughter is still a wreck over this whole deal. And it's been pretty traumatic for her specifically. She's very sensitive to her home that she was a baby in, you know."
