FEMA Now Requires Disaster Victims to Have an Email Address
The changes to the registration of survivors were made in the program that the agency uses to manage requests for disaster assistance and pay survivors, known as the National Information System on Emergency Management (NEMIS). The current and former employees of FEMA told Wired that, although they have significant concerns about the requirement of an email address to register for help, they believe that the system needs a technical overhaul. (“It is absolutely an obsolete system that crashes daily,” said a former FEMA worker who worked with Némis in Wired.)
Agency officials have also publicly expressed the need to modernize how disaster aid reaches survivors. The former acting director Cameron Hamilton described some of the agency’s objectives during a testimony to the chamber’s supervisory committee in May.
“The idea [is] That when you order a pizza at Domino, you know when it has been ordered, when it enters the oven, when it comes out of the oven, when it is ready to pick up and decide and in a box. However, we do not have the same level of approach to guide and supervise the process of requesting public aid or individual aid, “he said.” We have individual survivors who are waiting for weeks to obtain answers, sometimes months before obtaining payments, which are in significant financial straits. (Hamilton was dismissed from the agency one day after this testimony.) Twelve days after the testimony of Hamilton, the new acting administrator of the agency, David Richardson, met with members of Doge to discuss a new system of information portal on disasters, according to information from the calendar seen by Wired.
According to the update document, FEMA introduced a new “Status Tracker” in June on a survivor portal on a federal disaster assistance website, which includes advice on the types of documents necessary to meet the verification requirements as well as “visual representation of progress in the FEMA process”.
Although the agency’s technical systems need an update, the current and ancient employees of FEMA told Wired that they feared that the exclusion of people without the wholesale email address of the request process could leave aside those who may need the most help. In exclusively, providing information and payment via an online portal, could be confused even for people with emails, in particular, says a worker from FEMA, to the elderly.
“Email is already a major obstacle for many survivors, especially the elderly,” they say. “They must use the e-mail to create a profile on Disasterassise.gov, and this is where their correspondence is. They receive an e-mail informing them that they have a new letter, but the real letter is in their online profile. They must do all these checks to access them, and it is too much for many people.
The changes are involved in the middle of a wider thrust of the agency to change assistance to the federal government disasters. As Wired reported in May, the agency deleted the survivor of the survivors of survivors this summer. FEMA workers are concerned that even more obstacles to help could mean for those who need it.
“The end of door-to-door solicitude and the requirement of emails to register are certainly trends in a disturbing model of Trump administration changes, which abandon the most vulnerable members of the communities after a disaster,” FEMA employee told Wired.
