The Washington Post’s five-part series, “FEMA’s Disasters,” exposed holes in the safety net for disaster survivors at a time when that support is more needed than ever, with aid especially out of reach for poor families and people of color.
FEMA’s disasters
The Post spent a year chronicling how the Federal Emergency Management Agency is struggling in its increasingly urgent mission to help America’s disaster survivors in the age of climate change and stark inequality
By Washington Post staff
Updated March 28, 2022 at 11:58 p.m. EDT|Published March 28, 2022 at 11:57 p.m. EDT
Life in a last-gasp FEMA camp for wildfire survivors
By Hannah Dreier
When survivors have nowhere to go, the government sends FEMA to provide housing. But now, with disasters and the needs that follow them increasing, the government finds itself trying to decide what it owes the displaced. How long is long enough to shelter the most vulnerable? And should an emergency management agency really be playing landlord in the first place?
For Mike Erickson, the looming question was more urgent: What would happen in 12 days when the FEMA trailer park that had been his home closed down?
Aid denied to Black families that have lived for generations in the Deep South
By Hannah Dreier and Andrew Ba Tran
Many Black families live on land informally passed down between generations. It’s a custom that dates to the Jim Crow era, when Black people were systematically excluded from the Southern legal system. Families believed informal ownership protected their land, but it has in fact become the leading cause of Black land loss in the United States. Without formal deeds, families are cut off from federal loans and grants, including from FEMA.
A Post analysis showed for the first time that disaster survivors in Black-majority communities are denied FEMA aid twice as often as other Americans because of the agency’s formal deed requirements.
“Please stop playing games with me”
By Hannah Dreier
Just as natural disasters have become more frequent and intense, FEMA has grown dramatically more restrictive with the help it gives out.
FEMA used to approve two-thirds of survivors who applied for help rebuilding their homes, but that changed after the agency came under criticism for letting fraud slip through following Hurricane Katrina. The Post revealed that FEMA is now rejecting nearly 90 percent of applicants for aid, some of whom are living with leaking roofs and crumbling floors.
Inside the struggles and heartaches of FEMA’s massive covid funeral assistance program
By Hannah Dreier
Follow a young woman burned out from call-center work in FEMA’s covid funeral reimbursement program and a man on the other side of the country trying to fulfill an impossible bureaucratic requirement to get assistance for his father’s funeral.
Why FEMA’s billion-dollar program to prevent disasters fails the most high-risk communities
By Hannah Dreier and Andrew Ba Tran
As climate disasters worsen, President Biden is directing FEMA to shift more of its efforts to preventing them. Biden has committed an unprecedented $5 billion in new funding to minimize future disasters. But of the $11 billion FEMA already allocated for this work over the past decade, little more than $1 billion has been spent. The vast majority of the money is caught up in delays that leave poor, rural and non-White towns and cities waiting years to get started on urgently needed work.
Impact
The series won the 2022 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Investigative Reporting.
