Trump’s FEMA Is an Unnatural Disaster
If the White House wins its case, Fenton, a FEMA official with about 30 years of experience at the agency, will be replaced by a former NAVY Seal who lost a congressional primary. Meanwhile, the associate administrator for FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery has made headlines in recent months for claiming to have teleported to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia. CNN reported earlier this year that Gregg Phillips had repeated teleportation allegations on several right-wing podcasts and had touted a series of far-right conspiracy theories: that Biden’s DHS conspired to assassinate Donald Trump, that Biden was elected following widespread voter fraud, and that a “Chinese army” would invade the United States. The news outlet NOTUS reported last week that one of FEMA’s most experienced leaders, Deputy Associate Administrator Keith Turi, would leave when the Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1.
At lower levels, FEMA remains dangerously understaffed. Sabotaging Our Safety, or SOS — a group of emergency management experts and former FEMA leaders — gave the agency an “F” in preparedness in a recent report. Three out of four management positions remain vacant, notes the group. The regions covering Texas and Louisiana have no regional or deputy administrators. As a result of layoffs early in the Trump administration, FEMA has its lowest available field staff levels on record. “Management positions are vacant. One tenth of the core disaster response workforce has been eliminated,” writes SOS. “There is no multi-year strategic plan. The training exercises that have taken place every year for half a decade simply have not happened.” These problems came to a head last July. Despite the agency’s claims that during deadly flooding in the Texas Hill Country a “majority” of calls to FEMA’s toll-free hotline were answered, the Government Accountability Office found that 58 percent of those calls were actually not answered.
The timing of FEMA’s dispossession is far from ideal. Below-average snowfall, followed by above-average early temperatures, is expected to increase the risk of wildfires in the western United States; Dry conditions in the Southeast – currently in the grip of a historic drought – also threaten additional dangers. Two large wildfires in Georgia have already destroyed 120 homes and burned 50,000 acres. Smaller fires in Florida have burned 120,000 acres. As THE New York Times As the researcher notes, timber plantations in the region’s “timber basket” are less likely to initiate prescribed burns that can mitigate wildfire risk by burning brush that can serve as kindling. Hurricanes can also knock down trees, allowing fires to spread more quickly.
