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While water contaminated by the Guadalupe river retired after the fatal floods in Kerrville, Texas, this month, residents returned to find their homes, vehicles and destroyed companies. Tilted with shocking and in an urgent need to rebuild, many turned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the besieged organization created to help people as a result of natural disasters.
The answers they received went from “fantastic” to unnecessary to frustrating, residents told NBC News. Their experiences occur while FEMA is faced with a future in which it could be radically reshaped or closed in the management of the White House of Trump and Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Home Security, which supervises the agency.
Timothy Gloria, from Kerrsville, said that his experience in Fema had been exasperating. It was recalled from his work in the morning of the floods by a neighbor who clung to a tree while the waters got up. Gloria arrived around 6 am to find her friend safe, but that of Gloria and her father, his motorcycle and an external air conditioning unit were swept away and the fence around her house was destroyed.
A few days later, on the phone with a worker from FEMA, he said that he had answered 21 questions about the damage to his property to receive emergency aid.
FEMA first granted him $ 50, he said.
“It’s like gas money,” said Gloria, 41, at NBC News. “And I didn’t even get $ 50. It was approved, but I still haven’t seen it.” He said that the FEMA website said the money was transferred to his account.
The frustrating more, he said, his first contact with a representative of FEMA stopped responding to his calls.
“She was not found,” he said. “I expected much more fema.”
John Mroczek lost a motorhome and two motorcycles in the flood. His spinning head, he looked for FEMA, which had installed a response center in the gymnasium in a church in Washington Street. Upon arrival, he was immediately struck by the presence of the agency.
“Fema awaits you,” he said. “They were fantastic. They sign you, you sit down and they come back to it. They will do anything, configuring your phone with its application to guide you to everything you need. ”
The striking contrast in experiences with FEMA in Kerrville serves as a case study for the agency that President Donald Trump said he said wants to “redo”. DHS secretary Noem said that the agency “should not exist“At any rate. Monday, the head of urban research and rescue of FEMA, Ken Pagurek, announced that he would move in the middle of scanning changes to the agency, including the requirement that Noem approves contracts of more than $ 100,000. In the meantime, despite some staff cutsThe agency is advancing in Texas, where 132 people died.
All this occurs when 20 states have announced a lawsuit against FEMA, during the cessation of an attenuation program before the disaster, which, in the past four years, has provided nearly $ 4.5 billion in funding to $ 2,000 projects across the country.
The FEMA and the DHS did not respond to several requests for comments.
But the former administrator of FEMA, Deanne Criswell, told NBC News that the contrasted reaction to the agency’s efforts was not surprising.
“Recovery is really complex,” she said. “There is a tendency to simplify what it takes to recover and rebuild a community, and especially to rebuild it in a way that makes it more resilient.”
Criswell added that FEMA is not an agency that enters and takes over. Rather, it completes local and state authority before, during and after natural disasters. “It really takes a partnership between the individual and their social worker or the local emergency manager and the state with his fema representative,” she said. “They must work together to help rebuild the community in a way that will also make it stronger and more resilient to future meteorological events like the one they have experienced.”
Shortly after the flood disaster in Texas, Rob Kelly, the county judge, or managing director, said that business losses in Kerrville should oscillate around $ 240 million. The county would have considered Increase land taxes To help the reconstruction of the infrastructure, which caused local demonstrations. Kelly said Fema would reimburse The city for emergency intervention costs. “But they are slow,” he noted. “The last time we had a large FEMA project, it took at least two, if not three years” to receive funding, he said.
Teresa Offut, Office Director of Rio Robles RV Park in Kerrville, said the most flagrant response in FEMA – including Hurricane Katrina In New Orleans and Mississippi in 2005, Hurricane Maria 2017 Puerto Rico and Hurricane Helene in the west North Carolina In 2024 – were not apparent in Kerrville.
“It seems that they are determined to make sure that it,” said Offut. “They were incredible by helping people settle after this tragedy. They help with insurance complaints, browse people through this process to ensure that all forms are complete, all processes are done correctly. They help contact the right people and just settle people because they have lost so much and it’s so overwhelming. ”
Mroczek said he had been in hurricanes and tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico, Montana forest fires and an earthquake in California. “I hope these natural disasters do not follow me,” he joked.
But in the aftermath of each case, he did not have to work with FEMA; Only insurance companies.
Mroczek said that FEMA’s response to Kerrville was so strong that it “cannot even describe how useful they are,” he said. “They will reorganize your phone, if you are old and not very informed in technology. They will stay with you for hours until you understand what can happen and what they can do. They give you websites and take you to the right agency to help you help you worry about your concerns. ”
The perception of the public of FEMA is sometimes fueled by a misunderstanding of what it does, said Criswell. Lorena Guillen, owner of Blue Oak RV Park and the Howdy’s restaurant in Kerrville, for example, expected FEMA to contribute to the recovery of her business. The 28 cars of his property were swept away by the floods and his restaurant next to it has undergone serious damage. The land could not be insured against damage caused by a flood, she said.
However, FEMA does not generally provide cash companies, but advice and other resources. In this case, he He directed it to Small Business AdministrationWhich, according to Guillen, could provide him with a loan.
“How will I hear will get a scary loan that I have to reimburse in addition to my mortgage?” She said. “My business left. It will take about a year to make it work again. ”
Its restaurant has undergone damage caused by floods, including “holes in the size of buses in the walls” and electricity and plumbing failures that Guillen paid to repair. She was amazed to learn that FEMA does not help small businesses with financial assistance.
“But what about us?” said Guillen, whose restaurant employs 16 workers. “We bring tourists. We hire local residents. Many, many, many companies are in the same boat. So, so as not to get anything from FEMA? Crazy. “
After disasters, FEMA becomes “a reimbursement agency,” said Criswell. Local states and governments are directing the reconstruction and the FEMA reimburses them for the reconstruction of the damaged infrastructure to which everyday people treat. In addition to that, individuals can also ask for help, which pays things like a place to stay.
After a few days, the “high waist” water that infiltrated Gloria’s house fell, he said, leaving a dirty mud and water collection under the 11-year-old daughter’s bedroom.
“You enter my house and you feel water from the dirty river we are just living in,” he said.
Like most Kerrville residentsHe had no flood insurance at his home. And it is desperate that the potentially dangerous “gunk” is removed under his daughter’s room. At the end of last week, FEMA said that it would receive $ 6,719 for home repairs, which would have cost $ 50,000, he said.
He called the FEMA support for his house “a joke”.
Gloria said he had asked for five different types of help, but that he was frustrated by the bureaucracy and the administrative formalities he met at each stage.
Criswell, however, said that FEMA was set up in this way for a reason.
“There are checks and counterweights, and therefore people are sort of frustrated by the type of documentation that FEMA could request to prove the occupation or to prove the property, or the types of losses,” said Criswell.
Global losses and back and forth with FEMA have wreaked havoc on Gloria, he said. “I fall into depression, so I continue to work because if I sit still, I have to look at the damages,” said Gloria. “And I don’t know when it comes back to normal – or if Fema will help me return to normal.”
