With the second major hurricane in the past two weeks now barreling toward Florida, state and federal emergency management officials were scrambling Tuesday to put personnel, equipment and supplies in place.
Officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency — amid ongoing concern over what’s expected to be the strongest storm surge in decades — insisted it is ready for Hurricane Milton’s expected landfall late Wednesday or early Thursday and is fully capable of juggling concurrent disasters.
“Yes, we have the resources that we need, both for the Helene response and for Hurricane Milton,” Keith Turi, FEMA’s acting associate administrator, said this week. “I will defer to the White House on the timing of when we may need additional resources, but we want to assure everyone we have the resources we need to respond to both Helene and Milton.”
Former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate also downplayed any fears that FEMA isn’t up for the daunting challenge it faces, telling NBC News this week that the “agency is built to manage multiple disasters.”
Not everyone is as confident, however.
Staffing at the federal disaster response agency has drawn criticism in recent years from the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog.
“They are running a razor’s edge right now, and they are pretty low in people,” Christopher P. Currie, director of the GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice team, said this week about FEMA’s staffing levels. “This is always the scenario we worry about.”
In May 2023, the GAO found that as of the fall of 2022, the agency had a disaster workforce strength of 11,400 employees — a gap of 35% between the actual number of staff members and FEMA’s staffing target of 17,670, according to the GAO. In that same report, the GAO found that as of July 2022, FEMA was involved in responding to 500 open disasters.
Currie likened FEMA’s situation to “trying to fight wars on multiple fronts,” adding that, based on his past interviews with personnel, “it will have a huge effect on morale.”
The agency lists roughly 27,000 staff members in Tuesday’s daily operations briefing document, but not all of them would typically be deployed to disasters, Currie said.
The agency didn’t respond to a request for its current staffing levels in time for this article; it cited its latest news release, which said it was “pre-staging a full slate of response capabilities in Florida and the region.”
But it’s clear that the agency is low on personnel, Currie said.
In the briefing document, 1,205 workers are listed as “available,” but just three of them specialize in “disaster survivor assistance.” (They are typically the first FEMA workers who speak with devastated residents in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.) Just nine of the 2,580 workers who specialize in “individual assistance” — the people who register people for those emergency payments — are available.
“I was blown away by that,” Currie said.
NBC News reported last week that FEMA put out a call for volunteers for a “surge force” in mid-September, citing a “severe shortfall” in some of its disaster response teams.
In an interview, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said the numbers cited fail to take into account other full-time staff members who are deployed as needed. “They take on new roles to help support the response, and then we move other resources around from areas that aren’t supporting life threatening missions,” she said.
Asked about the specialized roles that are especially low in staffers, she said, “That’s something that we watch, and that’s why we have it on our report every day, so we can monitor that.”
The emergency response to Helene, which left widespread devastation and killed at least 245 people across six states, has largely moved from a rescue phase to a recovery phase, allowing FEMA to focus on Milton and ramp up rescue and response preparations for that storm, said Fugate, the former FEMA administrator.
With Milton now headed its way, Florida has already declared emergencies in 51 counties. The hurricane is expected to strike anywhere from roughly Tampa to Sarasota, and meteorologists expect a storm surge in the immediate vicinity of Milton’s landfall at 10 to 15 feet — a level that’s “certainly not survivable,” Florida Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said at a news briefing early Tuesday.
Responding to back-to-back hurricanes isn’t unprecedented for FEMA. In 2012, Sandy and Isaac hit, and in 2004, four hurricanes — Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne — struck Florida within six weeks, causing what was then considered the worst damage in the state’s history.
But FEMA has also struggled with capacity, said Brock Long, executive chair of Hagerty Consulting, who was FEMA’s administrator from 2017 to 2019. In 2017, Long said, he helped manage FEMA’s response to hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, as well as the California wildfires. At the time, he said, the agency suffered from severe shortages, not unlike now.
“The scale of staffing required for these operations is immense,” he said, adding that disaster response and recovery depend on teamwork among state, local, federal and outside partners.
“FEMA is not, and should not be, the only line of defense,” he said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said early Tuesday that FEMA already has approved some pre-landfall requests from his state and that he expects it will fulfill more requests for assistance after the hurricane hits.
DeSantis added that the state had called up 8,000 National Guard members and had activated about 2,000 state troopers, and its Emergency Management Division was carrying out more than 1,250 “missions” around the state Tuesday. They included assisting local governments with evacuations by deploying safety personnel and dispatching food, water, fuel and generators and by installing flood protection systems at public water and electricity plants.
Other states also have provided emergency response personnel and equipment, including some of the 34 search-and-rescue aircraft that Florida had at the ready, he said.
“We’ve never had this many resources prior to a storm,” DeSantis said.
