One week after a catastrophic flooding swept through Texas' Hill Country, survivors and residents are looking for ways to put their lives back on track. And for many of them, that means help from the federal government and FEMA.
Scripps News spoke with former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell on Friday, to learn more about how FEMA typically responds to natural disasters such as the floods in Texas.
After a disaster like this, what kind of funding will be made or has been made available to her county and the city of Kerrville and to individual citizens first for rebuilding, but also for making massive changes for flood prevention in the future?
"There's a few different types of funding that can become available," Criswell said. "First, for those families and those individuals that have been impacted and they can register for assistance and they can get funding and financial assistance for things like repairs to their homes, temporary lodging items that they may have lost, some of the immediate needs that they have."
"And so they have a resource to help jumpstart that recovery process. But that works in conjunction with their insurance and with some of the other nonprofit agencies that might be out there from the public infrastructure side of things, then we would reimburse or FEMA will reimburse that community for the rebuilding of the damaged infrastructure, whether that's roads or bridges, whether that's water treatment facilities or public buildings."
They also have an opportunity to rebuild old into a higher standard and so they can spend additional funding with the 75% federal cost share, 25% state and local to actually build it up to a higher standard," Criswell said. "So it doesn't so they don't have the same impact perhaps in the future."
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We've come to learn in the past few days that Kerr County did apply to the state of Texas for some of the FEMA funds that had come in for previous storms but then were denied. Could you shed some light on what goes into making those decisions and how much does the federal government have any influence over what the state then decides on how to distribute those funds?
"Based on these disaster declarations, the state is given basically a grant of money that they can use for different projects, and then the state will go out to their counties and their local jurisdictions to submit requests for that money to do different mitigation projects," Criswell said. "It's completely up to the state to determine which ones fit within their priorities and how to allocate that funding."
"FEMA's involvement just comes in to make sure they're eligible, along with an appropriate federal guidelines like procurement and environmental reviews and so forth, to be able to use that funding. But the state makes the final determination on how they want to invest that mitigation dollars."
Watch the full interview in the video above.
The devastating floods in central Texas have left families and communities in urgent need of support. Scripps News and the Scripps Howard Fund are partnering to provide critical relief to those impacted. Every dollar donated here will go directly to helping victims recover.
