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How can this be?
9 min ago
FEMA has burned through about $9 billion of its disaster funding in a little over a week
From CNN's Ella Nilsen
FEMA is down to $11 billion in its Disaster Relief Fund after spending about $9 billion of its recently appropriated money in a little over a week, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters Wednesday.
The rapid spend reflects how many mounting disasters the agency is responding to as major Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida.
Congress recently gave FEMA about $20 billion worth of funding to tap into as it responds to major Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Criswell said about $9 billion of that has already been spent since the agency came out of immediate needs funding on Tuesday, Oct. 1.
“In August, we had paused obligations for recovery projects for all of those other open disasters,” Criswell said. “Once I was given the authority to spend against the budget, we began to reimburse communities for their recovery projects, in addition to the spending that we are doing for Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.”
Criswell said that about $7-8 billion has been spent reimbursing other states for those earlier disasters, and the remaining balance has been spent on Helene and Milton recovery and response.
“This is the most open disasters that I have seen with FEMA, and it’s because we’re seeing an increase in the number of events,” Criswell said. “We had an incredibly busy tornado season earlier this year. We had catastrophic and historic levels of flooding across many states this spring as well. We’ve had wildfires across much of the West.”
She added FEMA is constantly assessing the balance of its disaster recovery fund and could have to ask Congress for more money sooner than it anticipated – although Criswell didn’t say exactly when that might be.
More than 100 separate disasters each costing at least $1 billion dollars have impacted all parts of the United States over the last 5 years, NOAA climatologist Adam Smith told CNN.
“In the 1980’s there were about 3 months between billion-dollar disaster events, but over the last decade we are experiencing them every 3 weeks,” Smith told CNN in an email.
https://www.cnn.com/weather/live-news/hurricane-milton-florida-10-09-24/index.html