Finalist: Hannah Dreier and Andrew Ba Tran of The Washington Post

Why FEMA is denying disaster aid to Black families that have lived for generations in the Deep South.

By Hannah Dreier and Andrew Ba Tran 

HALE COUNTY, Ala. — Not enough people were signing up for help after a series of tornadoes ripped through rural Alabama, so the government sent Chris Baker to figure out why. He had driven past the spot where a tornado threw a 13-year-old girl high into a tree, past where injured cows had to be shot one by one, and past where a family was crushed to death in their bathtub. And now, as another day began in this patchwork of destruction, he grabbed a stack of fliers with a picture of an outstretched hand and headed to his car to let people know Washington had assistance to offer.

“So we’ll do a convoy?” Baker asked the local official who had offered to show him around, looking down to check that the badge identifying him as a specialist with the Federal Emergency Management Agency was in place.

He needn’t have bothered. “There goes FEMA,” called a woman on her porch as they drove by. Two burly White men in khaki cargo pants on a hot day — who else would it be? A majority-Black county named for an officer in the Confederate Army, Hale County is a place of little interest to outsiders; an area of dense forests, catfish farms and 15,000 residents, most of whom can trace their ancestry back to enslaved people or plantation owners.

President Biden has instructed FEMA to prioritize getting help to these kinds of “too often overlooked” communities — the places that climate change is already overwhelming with more storms, floods and heat waves. And Baker was eager to do just that. “That’s why we’re knocking on what doors we can,” he said.

Baker was new to the agency, and this was his second deployment to a disaster zone. His supervisors had asked him to spread the word that people who lost homes to the March 25 tornadoes still had time to apply for grants of up to $72,000. But as he canvassed the area, a different message was spreading much faster: That people here were in fact not eligible for anything, because of how they had inherited their land. Because of the way Black people have always inherited land in Hale County.

More than a third of Black-owned land in the South is passed down informally, rather than through deeds and wills, according to land use experts. It’s a custom that dates to the Jim Crow era, when Black people were excluded from the Southern legal system. When land is handed down like this, it becomes heirs’ property, a form of ownership in which families hold property collectively, without clear title.

People believed this protected their land, but the Department of Agriculture has found that heirs’ property is “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss.” Without formal deeds, families are cut off from federal loans and grants, including from FEMA, which requires that disaster survivors prove they own their property before they can get help rebuilding.

Nationally, FEMA denies requests for help from about 2 percent of applicants for disaster aid because of title issues. In majority-Black counties, the rate is twice as high, according to a Washington Post analysis, in large part because Black people are twice as likely to pass down property informally. But in parts of the Deep South, FEMA has rejected up to a quarter of applicants because they can’t document ownership, according to the Post analysis. In Hale County, FEMA has denied 35 percent of disaster aid applicants for this reason since March.

Not that Baker knew much about that; not yet. His bosses had sent him out from his office in Atlanta with a list of metrics. Eight counties eligible for help. Four weeks until the deadline to apply. Eight hundred applications received so far, of which 100 had been approved. There was nothing on the briefing sheet about heirs’ property. He had visited several areas now, meeting with officials and volunteers. But when he arrived in Hale County, local emergency management director Russell Weeden had suggested a tour to see “the real damage.”

They pulled up a narrow dirt road, then got out and climbed a gravel path to the first stop of the day. The tornado had tossed debris across several acres of scrubby grass. The air was heavy and silent, with few trees left for birds to perch in. Baker passed an embroidered pillow and a sequined high-heel shoe, and then the full wreckage of a three-bedroom home that had stood since a generation after the Civil War came into view.

“Well, this house was certainly blown away,” Weeden said.

“Isn’t that something?” Baker said. He reached for his notebook and went to get a closer look.

***

The question of what happens to heirs’ property after a disaster is not unique to rural Alabama. FEMA has been grappling with the issue since at least 2005, when 20,000 heirs’ property owners were denied federal help after Hurricane Katrina, according to a USDA report. It came up again in 2017, when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. That time, FEMA denied more than 80,000 applications because of title problems.

There is no legal basis for requiring disaster survivors to provide incontrovertible proof of homeownership. FEMA created that requirement on its own, to combat scammers who make off with as much as 1 percent of aid each year. In 2018, under pressure to resolve the crisis in Puerto Rico, the agency created a process for people to self-certify homeownership.

But the fix applied only to islands and tribal areas, and it was not extended to the Deep South, where in internal correspondence, FEMA has recognized heirs’ property as “a perennial issue.” A FEMA spokesperson said the agency still requires most disaster survivors to prove ownership because “land ownership is recorded as a standard practice” in all of the continental United States and “self-certification of ownership increases the agency’s vulnerability” to fraud and improper payments.

“So this was two elderly people, and they were at home,” Weeden explained as Baker peered into the house on the hill. There were just a few walls left, tipping at odd angles. Clocks lay on the ground, all stopped at 4:35, the time the tornado touched down. Weeden said the house belonged to a brother and sister who had lived there nearly 90 years and were found by rescuers sitting dazed on a log. “I don’t know if they’re going to rebuild or what.”

Baker thought they sounded like ideal candidates for help. The information they would need was laid out in his flier, but he was starting to understand that there might not be anyone around for him to hand a flier to. “Sometimes you can get messages out on the highway overpasses,” he said — but Hale County didn’t have interstate highways. “It’s hard in a rural spot. You could put it on a cow, maybe,” he said, then fell silent.

The ground they were standing on, like so much Southern land, had been purchased by a Black family during Reconstruction, a time when a generation of Black workers saved up and bought every plot they could, no matter how barren and unpromising. Within a few decades, a new class of landowners emerged: By 1910, Black people made up 10 percent of the U.S. population but 14 percent of its farmers. In Hale County, more than a quarter of farmland was Black-owned.

It was a short-lived era of prosperity, however, as Black landowners began buckling under what the USDA describes as a “well-documented” system of discrimination, including exclusion from loans and swindles by officials. Bands of poor White farmers threatened to murder Black landowners if they didn’t flee. Historians believe that many lynchings from this time, including hundreds in Alabama, were carried out to take Black property. By the end of the 20th century, the share of Black-owned farmland in Hale County had fallen to just 3 percent, including the plot on the hill, where the only sounds were the wind and a smoke alarm chirping somewhere.

“Sorry to be taking you out to an area where there’s nobody,” Weeden said.

“No, it’s quite all right,” Baker said. They got in their cars and headed to the next site the local official wanted to show Baker, unaware that a neighbor had been watching the whole time. Her name was Bernice Ward, and later that day, she went to see the owners of the house.

“I called y’all about five times and y’all didn’t answer,” Bernice said as she pulled up and saw two frail people sitting outside the suburban home where they were temporarily staying.

“We ain’t been nowhere but here,” said Albert Nixon, who was about to turn 90. “We probably didn’t hear the phone.”

“I was gonna come here and get you and take you to the house to talk to FEMA,” Bernice said.

“They were at my house?” Albert asked, surprised an agency that had twice rejected his applications for assistance would be seeking him out. “Ineligible — Ownership Not Verified,” the rejection letters had said, leaving Albert confused as to what the problem was. “I been living there all my days,” he said.

“I’m tired of being here,” his sister Jessie Johnson, who was 88, joined in.

“We’re a long way from home,” Albert said of the place where he and his sister had spent their childhoods picking cotton and had never left, even after their siblings had moved away or died. For Albert especially, his whole life was tied up in those 40 acres of fertile land and the shotgun shack to which he had added three rooms over the years. He had kept up the peach and pecan trees his father planted, and gotten up early each morning to feed the cows and chickens right up until the day the tornado hit.

It was part of a tornado outbreak that killed seven people, with 150 mph winds. The siblings had sought shelter in Albert’s bedroom, the innermost room of the house and the place where they had been born. As they clung to a four-post bed, the winds lifted off the roof and threw it into the woods, exposing a sky that looked to them like nighttime. The windows shattered, and something gave Albert a black eye. Within seconds, the storm ripped apart every room but the one in which they were sheltering. When it passed, they crawled out through a hole where the chimney had stood.

They had grieved to see their orchards and animals suddenly gone. And they were disoriented by what came next, when they moved to a house in another town that had stood empty since a family tragedy played out there. The siblings spent most of their time in the carport, where Bernice was now trying to help Albert understand the status of his application. She didn’t know the details, so she called their grandniece, who had contacted FEMA’s national helpline on the siblings’ behalf the day before.

“We have to prove that you own the house,” the grandniece explained.

“It ain’t in my name; it’s in my granddaddy’s name,” Albert said. “My daddy and them never did change it over.” Just before he died, Albert’s grandfather had warned the family never to let a White man take their land. Albert believed that by keeping the plot as heir’s property, he had minded his grandfather’s words. “A lot of folks been trying to buy the land. Trying to take it. But they won’t get it as long as I’m living,” he said.

The grandniece suggested that Albert might at least be able to show he paid the property taxes.

“I paid for it, but I told them, ‘Let it stay in my brother’s name,’” Albert said. “And my brother’s dead.”

“Oh well see, I don’t know,” the grandniece said.

“If I wasn’t old, I would’ve cleaned it up myself,” Albert said.

After a while, Bernice got up to leave. “I’ll come see you again in a few days,” she told the siblings.

“We’ll be here,” Albert said.

***

All through the morning and into the afternoon, Baker kept following Weeden down red dirt roads that looked much like they had 50 or 100 years ago, except that with every turn, there was more wreckage.

“At least they had it bolted down,” Baker said as they passed a trailer so obliterated only the tie-down anchors were left. “Didn’t hold up too good, though.” He looked out at a home that had been stripped into planks, where black-eyed Susans were growing from a smashed pink dollhouse. “Tornados always seem to be attracted to the trailers,” he said. They saw a spot where a homeowner had piled the remains of his walls next to a sign saying, “Free bricks.” Not all the homes had been reduced to rubble. Weeden also took him by a five-bedroom house that was still standing but had 10 red, black and blue tarps where the roof had been. “That’s hard,” Baker said.

Stop by stop, Baker’s understanding of the need in Hale County was growing deeper. Five hours into the day, however, not a word had been spoken about titles, wills or heirs’ property. Weeden hadn’t mentioned it, if he was aware of it at all. Baker didn’t know to ask. And the people who might have told him were not around.

And so the men continued on with their mission, even as the owner of the house with the tarps was continuing with his, which was to prove that the home he had built for his wife and sons a quarter-century earlier indeed belonged to him.

What the owner was trying to do specifically was get signatures. That’s what a lawyer told Lonny Wilson, 60, to try to do after he received a denial from FEMA. He needed to get all the heirs to the family land to sign a notarized form attesting that he owned his house. There were 15 of them in all, scattered from Las Vegas to Boston.

With no other option to repair the damage from water seeping through his ceilings, Lonny set out to visit his sister, who lived nearby. Hers should have been the easiest of the signatures to get, but he had given her a form the week before and had heard nothing since.

He walked through a field of broken trees that smelled like sweet pine, worrying about what would happen if someone decided not to sign. So many things could go wrong. There were scams in which developers buy out a single heir and then force an auction of the whole plot, which was how Lonny’s wife lost her land. There were cases in which distant relatives who didn’t even know they had a stake in a property tried to sell it after receiving a call like the one Lonny would be making to his relatives. And there was just the simple fact of what can happen in families. “You never know what a person will hold against you. Sometimes blood is worse than water,” Lonny said.

His sister Evelyn Pickens came to the porch to meet him. “Hi, come on in,” she said. “It’s hot and the mosquitoes are out.”

“Thanks,” Lonny said and walked past her into the living room, where he saw the form sitting on her coffee table, still blank.

“It's raining every other day in the house. If I keep waiting, I'm going to have to demo it down,” he said. “They’re telling me I need documentation.”

“It’s no problem to sign it. I just wasn’t in a rush,” Evelyn said, and soon was on her way to the county seat of Greensboro, parking next to a statue of a soldier with a Confederate flag, the tallest one on Main Street.

The town notary watched Evelyn sign Lonny’s paper and stamped it with a seal. “I bet you’ve seen a few of these,” Evelyn said. “How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing. I’m not charging to do those,” the notary said. She’d been stamping affidavits all month as families struggled to come up with something to show FEMA before the approaching deadline. “This is about all we can do to help right now.”

Evelyn thanked her. “The truth is we don’t even know if FEMA will accept this,” she said. She slipped the form into her purse and drove back to the house with the mismatched tarps, where Lonny was waiting outside.

One down, he thought when he saw the letter. Fourteen more to go.

***

Baker and Weeden weren’t the only ones touring the back roads that afternoon. So was a police officer named Eric Wiggins, who made his own survey of the disaster zone five days a week.

Wiggins, 47, was one of Greensboro’s six patrol officers. He had moved back after retiring from the Navy and was living on heirs’ property handed down by his great-grandfather. He’d been renovating a trailer that once belonged to his grandmother, adding hardwood floors and new appliances. The family gathered there for holidays, and each summer, his cousins came back from the East Coast so their kids could swim in the creek and relearn how to run barefoot on rough red clay. Eric was planning to put in granite countertops next. But the tornado demolished the trailer, and after FEMA denied his application, Eric had decided not to appeal because he knew he couldn’t produce a deed.

To him, the destroyed houses he passed each day were evidence of government neglect. “Two months, no progress. Is that going well?” Eric asked on one of his rounds. “But this is a segregated town, and the community that got hit was predominantly Black. So there’s no urgency.”

Eric liked to slowly circle the area in his cruiser, stretching each lap out to an hour and a half. He tapped his horn and waved when he spotted children playing or older people on porches. He felt lucky to be able to stay with his mother while he figured out what to do next. Otherwise, he might have ended up like people he knew of who were in far worse shape, such as Joe Lee Webb, sleeping in his truck next to his destroyed family home, or Clarissa Skipper, living with two kids in an old trailer with a fallen tree in the middle of it.

The roads were quiet except for an occasional wild turkey stepping out of the forest. Before long, Eric saw one of the people he most worried about — a man named Ronald Reaves, who had moved to a hotel with his daughter after a tornado smashed their home into a hillside. Eric stopped his cruiser next to a house where Ronald was rebuilding a porch. “How’ve you been?” he called out.

“I’m hoping it gets better,” Ronald said. “I’m thinking maybe we’ll get one of those storage sheds or a camper. I just need a little place for a bed, a place for a bathroom.”

“It ain’t that hard for me because I’m at my mama’s. But I know what it’s like,” Eric said.

“It been real rough, man,” Ronald said. “We can’t get no help. FEMA’s taking too long, you know what I’m saying?”

“I know it. They denied me, too,” Eric said.

“Oh, for real?” Ronald said.

“They denied a lot of people,” Eric said. “They want you to show ownership, and a lot of people are on heirs’ property.”

“This is all heir property, though,” Ronald said. “I don’t understand how they’re doing us like that, to all these folks.”

“Don’t nobody understand,” Eric said, and wished Ronald luck.

“I’m about ready to give it up,” Ronald said, shaking his head.

Turning back toward town, Eric pointed out Briana Bouyer’s place, which was roofless and teetering. She, too, had been denied with a letter that began, “Ineligible — Ownership Not Verified.” Instead of trying to sort out the title, she and her husband got a loan to buy a small house elsewhere.

“I saw that on Facebook, and good for them, but you lose something when you move away from family land,” Eric said.

He looped around and passed a museum marking the place where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once hid from the Ku Klux Klan. On the other side of the street now named for the civil rights leader, the homes were mostly abandoned, the paint peeling, roofs sagging, windows broken. “See what I mean?” Eric said. “Things change if nobody stays.”

Finally, he stopped at a clearing that looked like it had been swept clean except for a red wooden porch. Only the trees, which were full of pink building insulation and twisted metal, gave any indication of the home that had stood there. These were the remains of Eric’s trailer. “It took five minutes and everything was gone,” he said. He hoped eventually to get a bank loan to rebuild. “If I was to leave, this land would grow up and look like a forest,” he said. “There would be no life in it.”

***

“So this is pretty much how it looked the day of,” Weeden said when they pulled up to the last stop of the day. There was no house, only a red wooden porch. There was pink insulation and metal in the trees. A cop had lived there, Weeden said. “When we got here, he was at home, but his trailer was no longer at home.”

“At least the porch survived,” Baker said quietly.

In all, he had visited a dozen properties, talked to no owners, and posted one flier. He asked Weeden to keep spreading the word. “It’s horrible when something like this happens,” Baker said, “but we get to come in and help.”

“That’s what I tell them: At least apply. All they can do is say no,” Weeden said.

And that was how Baker’s day in Hale County came to an end.

Two weeks later, he was back at his desk in Atlanta. His team was preparing for what was forecast to be an especially punishing hurricane season, and Baker had a stack of reports to look through. But he was still thinking about the need he had seen in Alabama, and about a conversation he’d had with a state official just before he left. The official explained that many Black families, including his own, shared inherited plots of land and were cut off from federal help as a result.

“That can’t be right,” Baker had said. “We must have something in place for that.” But the official insisted, so on his drive back, Baker called his FEMA supervisor, who told him that this was indeed a problem throughout the South. No clear deeds. No clear wills. No clear property tax records. And that was how Baker finally learned about heirs’ property.

Now he found himself turning to FEMA’s 300-page Individual Assistance handbook to figure out what could be done for the people whose homes he had visited, who already seemed to have vanished from their land.

Flipping through the arcane rules, Baker saw a list of documents the agency will accept as proof of ownership. The first was an original deed. “Well we don’t have that,” he said. The next was an insurance bill. “That’s not going to work,” he said.

He remembered how random and extreme the destruction had been. The sequined high heel. The dollhouse sprouting yellow flowers. He didn’t like to think that he had been advertising help that people had no chance of getting.

Next on the list was a property tax receipt. “But that’s not going to be in their name,” he said. The last option was a formal will. “But they don’t have that, either,” he said.

Then Baker got to a caveat. “FEMA may accept a written statement as a last resort,” he read, relieved to have found a workaround. This was the fix allowing people in Puerto Rico to self-certify ownership. “Oh, but that’s just for the islands,” he said, and sighed.

Baker was proud to work for FEMA. He believed in its mission. But he didn’t understand why the rules would be set up like this. The deadline to apply for help was just days away now. The owners of the houses he had seen would have to appeal to local charities or make whatever arrangements they could on their own. “One case like this is too many, honestly,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s the family that we care about, not how the land came down.”

He thought of the elderly siblings who had ridden out the tornado in their home. The way the walls must have shuddered and then been wrenched loose. The daze they must have been in when they crawled out. Baker looked over the list one more time. “It’s too bad. There’s nothing in here,” he said.

About this story: The Post reviewed more than 9.5 million applications to FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program since 2010 to determine rejection rates based on land title issues. Details on the Post’s methodology and summarized data can be found on GitHub.

As climate disasters increase, a last-gasp FEMA camp for wildfire survivors tests the government’s obligations to the displaced.

By Hannah Dreier

CHICO, Calif. — Mike Erickson had been living in the trailer park for 341 days when he saw the new sign. It was unmissable, a blue billboard at the entrance to what had become a place of last resort for families made homeless by the worst wildfire in California history. Its message was unmissable, too. In 12 days, the site would be closing and everyone would have to be out.

Mike knew who had put it there. The same agency that had carved this trailer park from nothing after the 2018 fire, transforming a 13-acre field between a cemetery and a set of train tracks into a haven for survivors to start rebuilding their lives: the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Nearly a hundred families lived at the site at one point, but one by one they had been moving away until on this day in September only a handful were left. Mike’s trailer was at the farthest end. There were no streets here and no addresses, just small numbers glued to the sides of trailers. His was 83.

He trudged back through the gravel, wondering what to tell his wife. “I thought by now we’d have something figured out,” he said.

Sixty years old, Mike had arrived at this moment because of a FEMA program intended to be among its most merciful, but which has become fraught with challenges in a time when whole communities are being wiped out by unprecedented wildfires and storms.

When survivors are left with nowhere to go, the government sends FEMA to give them free housing, typically for up to 18 months after the date of the disaster. The agency has provided emergency trailers to nearly 200,000 families over the past 15 years. 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 truly long enough to shelter the most vulnerable? Is it sufficient to give them housing or do they need social services, too? And should an emergency management agency really be playing landlord for years at a time in the first place?

For Mike, the looming question was more urgent: What would happen after these 12 days?

Inside the trailer, his wife, Crystal Erickson, 60, was lying in a hospital bed that took up most of the small living room. Partially paralyzed from a stroke and unable to navigate through the gravel with her wheelchair, this is where she spent all her time.

“What’s up, honey?” she asked.

“FEMA came by. Same thing as always,” he said, trying to sound relaxed. But after 35 years together, she knew when something was wrong.

Mike took her hand, patted it and let go. “Just trust me,” he said.

* * *

Mike and Crystal were in this park because their home had been destroyed by the kind of wildfire that was once unheard of in the United States but that now, after so many others — the Dixie Fire, the Caldor Fire — seems almost routine. Known as the Camp Fire, it had started before dawn in November 2018, raced through terrain made tinder-dry by drought, burned down almost every house in the mountain town of Paradise, and killed 85 people and displaced 50,000, including Mike and Crystal. They were among the last to evacuate and had driven through thick black smoke listening to the pop of propane tanks exploding.

Afterward, FEMA had to decide what to do with the people like the Ericksons had just become — survivors without insurance, without means, who had never been homeless before but were now.

It wasn’t clear at first that the government would build a trailer park. FEMA had turned away from those after the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort, when families lingered in flimsy, formaldehyde-tainted mobile homes. The agency experimented instead with making emergency repairs directly to survivors’ homes. It also partnered with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to give families rental subsidies and mandatory case management to connect them with social services.

By 2013, the FEMA trailer park had gone almost extinct. But under the Trump administration, the agency returned to building entire communities of trailers from scratch, saying the alternatives were costly and inefficient. The Government Accountability Office later found it was impossible to evaluate this claim because FEMA doesn’t systematically track costs or outcomes for its housing programs. The national council set up by Congress to advise the agency immediately called on FEMA to resurrect its direct repair program, and elected leaders from hard-hit states asked FEMA to bring back its HUD partnership.

But FEMA continued to see trailer parks as the best option, at least for the time being, saying in a statement: “FEMA is evolving. We are not the same agency from 10 years ago, and we will not be the same agency in 10 years from now.” As a result, thousands of families were soon living in trailers again, including at the Chico site, which cost more than $300,000 per trailer to set up. Mike and Crystal moved there in September 2020. Before that, Crystal had spent six months in the hospital, while Mike had bounced between motels and campsites. They also lived temporarily at a different FEMA site. But Trailer 83 seemed to offer a kind of stability they hadn’t experienced since before the fire.

The place came with rules, one of which said tenants had to submit proof every fifteen days that they had applied for at least one permanent housing option. Every fifteen days, Mike turned that in, along with the results: nothing. Rental vacancies had fallen to less than half of 1 percent in Chico as 20,000 fire survivors crammed into a city of 90,000. Mike wrote personal letters to landlords of wheelchair-accessible apartments but didn’t hear back. When he went to sign up for affordable housing, he learned that the waiting list was three years long and closed to new applicants.

Now, with 11 days left before the deadline to move out, Mike flipped through a notebook where he’d written down the names and numbers of every official he had spoken with since the fire. As he began making calls, he fidgeted with his hair, which he used to wear in a buzz-cut but had grown out into tangled curls.

The first person he reached was a young woman at a social services agency. He told her about who he had once been: a man who had coached his son’s Little League team, held a steady job, owned a home and had lost that home in 2016, buried in medical debt after his wife’s stroke. He said they moved to a rental with their 18-year-old son, who helped care for Crystal while he worked. He explained their son had initially moved to Trailer 83, too, but FEMA had said he couldn’t stay because he wasn’t on his parents’ paperwork, and that with no one to help Crystal during the day, Mike couldn’t work, and so they were living on her disability payments of $2,800 a month — $1,799.31 of which FEMA was now billing them for because a few months earlier, overwhelmed, he had missed turning in proof of his fruitless rental searches.

By the time he got around to telling the woman that they were about to be evicted, she was letting him know that she couldn’t help. “We don’t really have room for new cases,” she said, but offered to connect him with another nonprofit.

“Okay, I sure appreciate it. Thank you,” Mike said.

After a while, Crystal fell asleep and Mike slipped out for a walk. There was no greenery at the site, no shade, and no color aside from the green trash bins outside each home. He walked past Trailer 46, where a small woman who liked to keep to herself peeked through the blinds. Past Trailer 11, where a father, preparing to move out, was trying to scrape off the glow-in-the-dark stars he’d put up for his kids. Past Trailer 7, where a FEMA eviction notice fluttered on the door, warning, “We have not been able to contact you by telephone and must speak with you right away.” Mike knew that the man who lived inside had a hole in his trachea and couldn’t talk.

When he reached Trailer 32, a snarling German shepherd ran at him. The dog had bitten him twice, but Mike liked visiting with its owner, Jay Rose, who was stacking boxes in the truck he used for his job hauling portable toilets.

“You mind if I ask if you found a place to go?” Mike asked.

“No, just putting stuff in storage,” Jay said. “I’m gonna be the last one in here.”

Mike told Jay about his efforts to find a place. “I’m so fried now, it’s hard to even make contact,” he said.

He didn’t want to stay too long. He’d left his phone charging and worried about missing a call from someone with a lead. He hurried back, climbed the steps and checked his phone in his bedroom. No calls.

* * *

Mornings in the trailer often started the same way: With Crystal hearing tires rolling on gravel and Mike looking out to see if it was FEMA. With nine days to go, Crystal heard that crunch as Mike was making coffee and braced herself, but it was only a garbage truck. “I’m surprised they’re still taking the trash away,” Mike said, and dropped the curtain.

But there was someone from FEMA there, on the other side of the park. Housing task force leader Sharon Rodarte had come to check on the last tenants. These were always the hardest cases — the families who left behind wrecked appliances, or walls full of holes, or towering piles of junk and trash, or in one case a dead dog. “Some people aren’t grateful,” she said when she walked up to Trailer 7 and discovered that the man who couldn’t speak had moved away overnight, leaving behind a broken pipe that was gushing water beneath the unit.

Now she headed toward Trailer 83. Crystal heard the crush of tires and a knock at the door. Rodarte explained that she was there because she had a phone number for the Ericksons to call — “our housing navigator for trying to find homes for people who are going to be homeless.”

Mike grabbed his notebook and stepped outside, closing the door behind him. He had written the word “deficient” in it, and he looked down and read from the page. “You know this place is deficient for us,” he said.

“Okay, I don’t want to get into this,” Rodarte said.

But Mike was off now, listing the things that had made life so difficult in the trailer. No roll-in shower. No way to cool the place below 78 degrees. No washer or dryer, even though it wasn’t safe to leave Crystal alone to go to a laundromat, which was why there were five garbage bags of laundry sitting by the door.

“I’m gonna go,” Rodarte said. “Just give the man a call.”

“Okay, just walk away,” Mike called after her. “Thank you for being so courteous and respectful.”

Back inside, Mike regretted getting mad. “I’m exploding over nothing lately,” he told Crystal, who instantly blamed herself. She had been more emotional since the stroke, cycling through feelings of calm, fear, anger, grief, and now another emotion took hold, this time making her cry. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry,” she said.

“It’s not your fault, you know that. You didn’t start that fire,” Mike said. He turned on the television for her and gave her a sippy cup, the kind a child might use, with two shots of brandy.

When he called the housing navigator, he got an automated message saying that the phone system was down. Mike hung up and looked out across the park. He wondered, how have so many people figured this out?

That evening, there was another knock at the door. This time it was their daughter, Rita. She’d lost her home in the fire, too, and, like their son, was barred from the extra trailer bedroom. She lived a few blocks away, in a tent under an oak tree. Paradise fire survivors make up about a third of Chico’s growing homeless population, and many had moved into the 100-person encampment where Rita was staying. Rita didn’t talk about all that went on there, like the man who had been stabbed to death in a fight a few weeks earlier as she watched with horror, prompting her to start carrying a hunting knife in her bra and another in her backpack.

When she walked in, Crystal’s mood changed again. “Give me a kiss,” she called.

* * *

There were tasks Rita did almost immediately whenever she visited. She combed Crystal’s hair, trimmed her fingernails, gave her sponge baths.

Mike did everything else. He checked Crystal’s blood sugar five times a day. He made her meals and helped feed her. He put fresh bandages on the bedsores she’d been developing. And sometimes he left her alone, as he did one morning with seven days left before the deadline. He tried to get out every day to clear his head, even if it was just to hit a few golf balls and watch them skip across the gravel.

Before he left, Crystal asked him to straighten her in bed so she could breathe better. “I think I’m a little cockeyed today,” she said.

“You’ve been cockeyed for years,” he said, teasing.

Some things Crystal only let herself think about when she was alone, like how badly she’d deteriorated since the fire. After her stroke, she had still been able to sit up on her own. But with no physical therapy in more than two years, she’d grown weak and rigid. The only person who had come out was a nurse who monitored her blood-thinning medication for a while, then said she had to stop because the gravel was damaging her car.

Crystal had worked in nursing homes, and made Mike promise that he would never put her in one. It was an easy promise for Mike to keep. He’d grown up with distant parents — an alcoholic father and a strict mother — and had wanted his own family to be close and loving. But people with disabilities are often unnecessarily institutionalized after natural disasters, especially if they are poor, according to a 2019 report from the National Council on Disability. Crystal didn’t think she could avoid long-term care much longer. Lately, she was sleeping with the overhead light on because of a dream she’d been having in which she had been sent to hell for being a burden on her family.

When Mike got back from the store, she told him about how she was longing to see trees and grass. “I feel stupid for wanting that,” she said.

“It’s not stupid,” Mike said, and proposed they at least go out to the porch. It was a 10-minute process to get her out of bed by himself. He rolled her back and forth to get her into a net, which he then attached to a lifting machine. He began pumping a lever to lift the net into the air. When Crystal was suspended, he maneuvered her toward a wheelchair, and then hit the lever again to lower her until she could sit.

Outside, the air was dry and full of ash from two wildfires burning nearby. Minutes passed. She was smiling. Then she looked uncertain. Then she was in pain from her bedsores and started crying. Then she was calling out for Mike, who had gone inside to do the dishes.

He rushed her back in and hoisted her in the net as her crying turned to screaming. “Oh God, just do it,” she screamed, suspended now above the bed. But Mike was afraid of letting her fall and was so focused that he didn’t hear the crunch of approaching cars.

It wasn’t until someone was knocking that he looked out and saw two FEMA security guards and two women who were strangers. “Give me a minute,” he yelled. But the knocking got louder and so Mike paused and threw the door open, revealing Crystal suspended in the net, clothed in only a T-shirt.

“You might as well get a front-row seat,” Mike said to the group. The guards looked aghast and took a step back. “You want to know why we haven’t gotten out of here? I’m doing this all day long.” Mike slammed the door. “You’re doing good,” he said to Crystal as he lowered her into bed and pulled up her sheet.

When he opened the door again, the guards had retreated to their cars and only the two women remained. They said they were from a disaster case management program and wanted to help Mike apply for a subsidized apartment. “FEMA just reached out to us, with the site closing in a week,” one of the women said. “We’re here to support you.”

Mike felt a flood of relief. He invited them in, apologizing.

“Please do not apologize,” the woman said. “My heart is feeling for you right now.”

She helped Mike fill out an application and said she would get them signed up for food stamps, too. She suggested the Ericksons might be able to buy their trailer and move it somewhere permanent, because FEMA generally auctions them off at the end of housing programs, with bids sometimes starting at a few hundred dollars.

Another mood shift for Crystal, as she thought of a trailer park near her son and how nice it would be to see him more often.

The sense of hope the women brought with them carried over into the next day, and the day after, five days to go now, as the Ericksons waited to hear about the housing application and another stranger arrived at their door. Word had started spreading among Paradise survivors about their case. The visitor said he’d heard that Crystal lived in a hospital bed and couldn’t even shower. He had come over on his own with a large rubber tub for her.

He and Mike wrestled the tub inside, moving bags of laundry to make it fit. Soon, the trailer was filled with steam from hot water and the comforting smell of bath soap.

“Oh, that feels good,” Crystal said after Mike had put her in the net and maneuvered her into the tub. She waved her arms beneath the surface of the water, transfixed. She could feel her hands and legs unclenching. She started splashing. “Do I get to stay here forever? Till they move us out?” she asked. Mike smiled. “Soak as long as you want,” he said.

They went to bed feeling better than they had in 349 nights. And then came the next day, four days left, when the good feeling began to drain away.

* * *

How is hope dashed? In three conversations.

First, the women came back and explained that the Ericksons couldn’t buy their trailer because FEMA wasn’t selling them to survivors who had failed to provide regular proof of rental searches.

Then, another case manager stopped by and told them that they hadn’t qualified for the apartment. Their income was too low. And there was nothing else to apply for. “Trust me — we have looked everywhere, in every town. We are in a housing crisis in this county and we have literally tried everything,” she said.

And then a FEMA supervisor called to say that if the Ericksons were not out by the deadline, they would be trespassing and he would call the police. “I’m sorry about it, but that’s the way it goes,” he said. “We’re at the end of the game. It’s really in your best interests to move on.”

Mike felt his temper rising, but spoke softly so Crystal would not hear. “We’d love to move on,” he said. “We’re not here because we love to be here. You know that, right?”

“Well, we have done everything we can under federal law, as FEMA, to help you out,” the supervisor said.

Two days left to go now, and FEMA workers were showing up to collect keys from the remaining tenants, including Jay Rose, the man who had predicted he would be the last one left in the park.

The inspector who completed his walk-through waited with her finger on the circuit breaker until he microwaved a last frozen breakfast sandwich. “Good luck,” she said as she flipped off the power. He had 10 days paid at a motel, and then would be sleeping in his truck.

Away went Jay. Away went his snarling dog. Away went everyone else, and by that evening, the only trailer left in the park with anyone still home was the one where Crystal was in her hospital bed and Mike was on the porch when a truck pulled up.

The man who got out had dozens of colorful tattoos over his arms and legs, and he handed Mike a business card that said “Stephen Murray: Camp Fire Survivor/Supporter.” He explained that he had helped others facing eviction from FEMA parks and had heard from a friend of a friend that the Ericksons were about to be put on the street. “I’m going to at least try to get you in a hotel for a few nights,” he said before he left.

What an unbelievable place this is, Mike thought as he leaned with his elbows on the porch railing. Created out of nothing. About to be nothing again. And his last version of hope coming down to a man who had the slogan “Stephen Murray Spreading Love” tattooed on his biceps and etched into a rubber bracelet, which he had slipped off his wrist and onto Crystal’s.

For three years now, it had been one strange and heart-rending thing after another, going back to those first weeks after the fire when Mike was living at a campground and had seen people clutching blankets and struggling to speak coherently.

“I used to look down on them and think, ‘Can’t you pull yourself out of that?’ But now I can’t pull myself out of it, either,” he said.

Mike needed to go in and check on Crystal, but he kept staring at the moon, which was glowing red through the fire smog.

“I don’t condemn them anymore,” he said. “I didn’t understand how far you can go down, I guess.”

* * *

One day left now, and when Mike woke up, he was struck by how quiet the park had become. In that silence, his phone rang.

“Finding a handicap hotel room in California is hard,” Stephen said. “But I’ve got one.”

And just like that, the Ericksons had a place lined up. It would be for a week. Stephen said he would pay for it. He had also rented a storage unit and would send someone for the hospital bed.

“Thank you,” Mike said, and then told Crystal that they had a place to go.

“It’s got sidewalks, right?” she asked.

“Yes,” Mike said.

She tried to picture it. “I’m so excited to get out of here,” she said.

Mike had some boxes saved, and he started taping them together. He didn’t need many. There wasn’t much to pack, mostly donated clothes and kitchen supplies.

“You’re always so organized,” Crystal said, watching Mike fold up her blankets.

“Not this time,” he said.

He taped together a new box and tossed in a pair of pliers that were among the only things they’d saved from the fire, a self-help book about managing stress and the notebook with his FEMA information.

It didn’t take long. An hour and 14 small boxes. Now that they had a destination, Mike arranged for a paratransit bus to come.

He rolled the lifting machine through the trailer for a last time, swung Crystal in the net and lowered her in the wheelchair. A few more minutes and he had the bed stripped and disassembled. Nothing more to do but sit and wait.

“Way too quiet in here,” Mike said, and unpacked the radio so he could listen to music.

At last, there was the sound of tires on gravel, and a friend of Stephen’s took the boxes and the bed. Another rumble and the bus arrived.

Mike followed Crystal down the ramp, leaving the trailer door open. He helped strap her in and paid their fare. As the bus began rolling away, Mike looked out the window, taking everything in one last time, while Crystal squeezed her eyes shut.

“I don’t want to look around. I can’t stand this place,” she said.

Mike was remembering the early days when they first moved in, before their son left. “The kids not being able to stay with us, that just tore our family apart,” he said.

As they approached the entrance, Crystal glanced back at the lot. “I liked it better when there were all those trailers,” she said.

“It made a great driving range to hit the golf balls,” Mike said, and with that, the bus passed through the fence and turned right, and the Ericksons were gone, except for a few things they had left behind. A lawn chair, a fan, a mirror, a mop. All of it noted by a FEMA inspector who came later that day. “Okey-doke,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot worse.” The deadbolt didn’t work, so he pulled the front door shut and pronounced it good enough. “We’re finished,” he said, and hours later, as night settled in, Trailer 83 was a shadow in a dark corner of an empty lot. There was nothing to break the silence as midnight came and then went and the park was officially closed. The housing program was over. FEMA had fulfilled its obligations to the displaced.

At the motel across town, Crystal was asleep and Mike, who had been so excited when they arrived that he jumped into the pool with a whoop, lay awake in bed. They’d ordered pizza and watched a movie, and when they got tired, Crystal had asked Mike to leave the overhead lights on. Now, as she slept, he stared up at them, thinking that they couldn’t afford to stay beyond the week Stephen had booked.

They would need to find somewhere to go. He had six days left to figure it out.

Her home still wrecked months after a freak storm, an Iowa woman’s FEMA ordeal presages the turmoil ahead as climate disasters worsen

By Hannah Dreier

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — On the morning Kim Schmadeke decided to make a final plea to the U.S. government for help, she peered out through drawn curtains at her battered neighborhood.

Trees on the ground. Tarps over roofs. More tarps over shredded sides of homes — all remnants of a freak inland hurricane that blew through in August 2020, tore down half the city’s trees and damaged 90 percent of its homes. It was a brutal storm that was especially damaging to mobile home parks like Kirkwood Estates where Kim lived and where, seven months later, she was the last person who hadn’t given up on getting the help Washington officials had promised in the first days after the disaster.

“This ordeal is wreaking havoc on my life,” she began typing on her computer, beneath a buckling ceiling. On the floor were tubs marking the areas too soggy to step. In the bathroom, the toilet was tilting because of the rotting floor and the shower had stopped working, leaving her to clean herself up at the kitchen sink.

She read back what she had typed, imagining how the words would sound to the people she was sending them to at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Does that sound stupid?” she asked. And was the correct word wreaking? Was it wrecking? “This ordeal is causing me much mental anguish,” she retyped.

This was her third attempt to get help from the country’s rescue team against natural disasters, which, as extreme weather events multiply, has also become its de facto rescue team against climate change. Amid predictions of more storms, fires, and floods, one of the first things President Biden did after taking office was give FEMA a bigger mandate, starting with an initiative to steer billions of dollars toward protecting against climate disasters before they strike.

But the reality is that even as millions of Americans will soon be turning to FEMA as disasters worsen, the agency has grown dramatically more restrictive with the help it gives out. Iowa is one indication of this: According to FEMA data, 22,000 people applied for aid, and 19,000 received notices telling them they were not eligible. Of those 19,000, Kim was among the few hundred who didn’t take that initial no for a final answer. And now, even though she knew that most people who appealed were turned down again, she set her mind to persuading the agency that she needed its support, going slowly to get the words right.

“The damage to my home is mounting,” she typed. “I have mold growing, water running down the walls and my front door will barely open and shut. On top of that, my toilet is sinking into the floor.”

She kept typing. “Please stop playing games with me,” she wrote and then deleted because it might sound angry. “I feel like I have been left out to dry and am spinning in circles,” she wrote and kept going for more than an hour.

Her trailer was intentionally dim, with layers of blinds and lace curtains drawn against the neighbors who called her a “sweet old lady” and had no idea of the damage the storm had done to her home. An intensely private person, she had told no one the details of what her life had become except for the officials she had confided in twice and was now about to tell again.

She finished and reread what she had written. “That’s a good letter,” she said.

* * *

The agency she was writing to is one of the most crucial in times of American need. It has a budget of $24 billion and has had the same mission for 42 years: “helping people before, during and after disasters.” FEMA was created after a series of earthquakes and hurricanes made it clear the country needed a way to coordinate emergency responses. It has grown to become the bulwark against America’s worsening climate crisis, with major programs that provide temporary housing and grants to disaster survivors.

But independent reviews have shown it is not an agency that succeeds in helping everyone equally. Last year, an advisory council set up by Congress found that key FEMA programs are less accessible to disadvantaged Americans, especially poor people, and that the more aid a place receives after a disaster, the more unequal that place becomes as it recovers. “Through the entire disaster cycle, communities that have been underserved stay underserved, and thereby suffer needlessly and unjustly,” the council found.

The council singled out the Individual Assistance Program, which helps homeowners without adequate insurance rebuild after federal disasters. FEMA used to approve about two-thirds of applicants. But that changed after the agency came under criticism for letting fraud slip through following Hurricane Katrina. In recent years, the program’s approval rates have plummeted. Six million households applied for help between 2017 and 2020 and FEMA sent rejections to 4 million of them. In 2021 so far, FEMA has approved just 13 percent of applicants, its lowest rate yet.

Chris Smith, who ​directs the program, said the rejection rate “is not front of mind” with him. “What we do strive for is to provide financial assistance that can help make a home safe and secure and habitable,” he said.

This was the program’s directive on Aug. 10, 2020, when a massive complex of thunderclouds began to gather in South Dakota on a morning that had been forecast to be clear and sunny. The sudden windstorm, called a derecho, raced into Iowa, gathering strength as it went. By the time it darkened the noontime skies over the eastern part of the state, it was moving faster than Hurricane Sandy or Hurricane Harvey, with winds reaching 140 mph. It tore through the state’s farmland, unwrapping metal silos, picking up and throwing tractors, and flattening millions of acres of drought-parched corn before growing stronger still and crashing into the mobile home parks on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids, and into the trailer Kim had been taking meticulous care of for two decades.

Sixty years old now, Kim had bought the trailer when she was 38, with money she saved during a short-lived job with the U.S. Postal Service. Until then, she and her daughter had been bouncing between low-rent apartments. With its two bedrooms, pineapple-stamped wallpaper and small yard where she planted flowers, the trailer was “life-changing,” as Kim put it. “We moved so much, and when we moved in, it just gave us stability,” she said. Her daughter lived there until she went to college, and after that, Kim had lived a mostly solitary life.

When the storm rushed in, she found herself unable to stand without being knocked over. She lay gripping the couch cushions, listening to tree branches crack and bang against her roof. In a matter of minutes, her home was ruined. She remembers seeing water streaming down the walls. She remembers opening the door and seeing streets covered in torn insulation and the glitter of smashed car windows, then closing the door and hugging herself on the couch.

The following night, Kim was taken to the hospital with a panic attack, her heart racing as she worried over how she would fix everything. The power stayed out for days. When it came back on, she found out that Cedar Rapids had been declared a federal disaster area, making her eligible for up to $71,000 in Individual Assistance aid.

She applied immediately and received a response the next day. “ASSISTANCE NOT APPROVED,” it began. Twice more she saw the word “ineligible,” and then realized it was only because the agency’s automated system hadn’t found proof in public records databases that she owned her home. So Kim wrote an appeal, a choice only 3 percent of FEMA applicants make.

After a few weeks, she got another letter. There was no explanation this time, just a check for $48, which was followed a few days later by another check, this time for $1,312, also without explanation. She appealed again, saying the money was not nearly enough to cover her damage, and that resulted in another check, again with no explanation, for $2,036. But the contractors had said it would cost $9,400 to fix the roof and the bathroom alone. Kim guessed at what FEMA wanted her to do with the money. She got the branches removed, replaced the insulation so her water pipes wouldn’t freeze, and had the trailer put back on its foundation to stop its shaking. The money wouldn’t stretch far enough to fix the bathroom, though, and it was long gone by the time she was sitting at her desk with her finished appeal letter.

The last step was to upload it. “Honest to Pete, I used to know how to do this,” she said as she looked at a list of file options. “Come on, Kimmy,” she said.

Frustrated, she went back to the FEMA site and saw a box that explained she needed to upload her letter as a PDF. “A word document will not be accepted,” it said.

“Oh lordy,” Kim said. “Does it really have to be a PDF file? I have no way to do that.”

She went back to her letter and clicked through each toolbar looking for a way to convert the file.

“I just don’t remember,” she said. “I guess I can’t send this.”

But she needed to send it, so she spent 15 minutes more looking through different toolbars. Finally, she stopped clicking and sat back in her chair, wondering what to do next.

* * *

She would have to mail the letter. But before she could do that, she would need to find ink for her printer, which cost money. And make copies of the letter, along with the contractor estimates and photographs of the damage, which cost money, too. And she had nothing but a few coins in her wallet. Before the pandemic and the storm, she had been earning as much as $100 a night driving a taxi. Now fares were scarce, and some nights she couldn’t even cover gas.

Kim had grown up in a big family in Cedar Rapids, but the family had fractured, her daughter was rarely in touch, and the last time the park management asked for an emergency contact she had written, “Don’t have anyone.” Mostly, she spent her time watching home improvement shows, like the one playing the next day as she got ready to go to work. She moved around the trailer slowly. Her diabetes was making her dizzy lately. Her knee was giving out, too, and she needed surgery, but she was putting it off until the bathroom was fixed because she was afraid if she sat on her lopsided toilet with her full weight during her recovery, it would surely go through the floor.

There were so many small indignities in her life now. She had been taking time off to give her body a break, but the taxi company owner told her that if she worked an overnight dispatch shift, he would pay her right away.

“We have to make sure everything is perfect for this family,” the TV host was saying as she turned off the show, and then she was outside for the first time in days, driving past a trailer where a woman was using her nursing school loans for roof repairs, past a trailer where the storm-shattered walls were being held together with duct tape, past a trailer in which a family was living even though the home was missing an entire side, and soon she was at the small dispatch office where she was looking forward to using a bright, clean bathroom.

When the sun rose in the morning and the woman on the day shift came to relieve her, Kim asked if the owner was still coming in. “He was going to pay me this morning,” she said.

“I thought he was, but he told me, ‘Tell Kim I’ll pay her later,’ ” the woman said.

“Oh, I thought he was coming in now,” Kim said.

“I have a $10 bill on me if you want it,” the woman said.

Kim shook her head. “But that’s nice of you to offer, though.”

That night she was back at work again, this time driving a taxi and picking up a woman at a house where the foundation had been damaged by a falling tree.

“That must have been a huge tree,” Kim said when the woman got in, noticing the stump still embedded in the concrete.

“Yes, it’s been quite the project,” the woman said and added she was still figuring out what to do after being denied federal help. “I didn’t qualify because of something. It was weird,” she said.

Seven months later, the mysteries of FEMA were a constant refrain.

A woman who needed a ride to a convenience store told Kim she regretted not fighting for disaster aid after her car was destroyed. “I told my boyfriend, ‘Let’s appeal this,’ but he was like, ‘I had enough,’ ” she said. “It was like we couldn’t handle any more disappointment.”

A man with a walker who needed a ride home from the grocery told Kim how he had struggled to apply online and eventually given up. “FEMA kept me waiting. Everything was outside my reach,” he said.

In the weeks after the storm, there were so many instances of people being turned down that J’nae Peterman, program director at a Cedar Rapids nonprofit that deals with housing emergencies, raised the issue with a FEMA liaison. “He told me the first step is always to be denied, and then you have to appeal,” Peterman remembered. She remembered him explaining the reason had to do with fraud and abuse, and her responding: “These are people in crisis. They see a denial letter, they throw it away and move on.”

Peterman was far from the first person to point this out. In September 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office urged FEMA to revise its denial letters after a review found that they lead people to believe that preliminary decisions are final. FEMA has not changed its process, but it has started putting out news releases encouraging survivors to appeal its decisions.

Not that Kim or the people in her taxi knew of these discussions. Instead, their conversations were like the one Kim had with her last fare of the night, who was worried about bedbugs. “You’d think the storm would have killed all those. It killed everything else,” the woman said.

“It killed my house, that’s for sure,” Kim said.

“Are any of the repairs done yet?”

“I need a new roof,” Kim said and left it at that.

She dropped the woman off and suddenly was crying. All the talk of damage and denials had her worried that her letter wouldn’t be good enough. Her knee was aching. She had made $57 and still needed to fill the taxi with gas.

The next day, at a supermarket, she fed her pile of photos and estimates into a copier and pressed buttons trying to make the machine start. Finally, a young clerk came over to help.

“It was a crazy storm,” he said, seeing the photographs.

She had planned to send a certified letter at the post office, but her head was swimming, so she headed back to the trailer to rest. She folded the documents into an envelope. The mail truck would be along soon. She decided to take a chance and leave it in her mailbox.

“This way, I can just get to work,” she said. “Oh, I hope I make lots of money tonight.”

She put three stamps on the envelope, then added a fourth, just to be safe.

When she got back home 10 hours later, she pulled up to the circle of light beneath her lamppost. “Let me check,” she said, and looked into the dark mailbox.

“Well, it’s on its way.”

* * *

The address the letter was headed to was a building in the suburbs of D.C., one of four processing centers that deal with the thousands of versions of Kim who contact FEMA every day.

Mostly, their contact comes in the form of phone calls, which can surge to more than 100,000 a day after a major disaster. But written appeals go to these centers as well, to be handled by workers who read them and — if they are persuaded the case deserves another look — call contractors and order inspections to check for fraud, then calculate new awards. The centers are an increasingly vital part of FEMA’s operation. But the agency is best known for how it shows up on-site soon after a disaster, like it did in Iowa, where it set up six drive-through tent centers for people to file applications, including one in the parking lot of the baseball stadium where Kim went to file her first appeal.

Kim remembered talking with people wearing the blue FEMA jackets she recognized from TV and driving away feeling optimistic. She went to the stadium because FEMA comes into cities and towns, but it doesn’t typically go into neighborhoods, leaving that to local officials who report back on what is needed. In Kim’s case, the only person who came to her trailer in the days after the storm was a man with an EMT badge who took her blood pressure, whose face she saw again on the news, with a warning that he was posing as a medic and faced felony charges.

FEMA kept its tents up in Cedar Rapids until the end of September and in early November closed the window to register for help. As chance would have it, a few days after Kim sent her letter and while she was waiting for a reply, two FEMA officials drove in from Missouri to check with the city on how things had been going. They were meeting with city manager Jeff Pomeranz, who was hoping to do his own version of what Kim was attempting and ask FEMA for more money. In his case, he needed millions of dollars to clear fallen trees on public property.

“We don’t have mountains and oceans, but what we have is beautiful trees, so we’ve got to get them back,” he said as the meeting began.

They were in a basement training room at City Hall. Everyone was wearing masks because of the pandemic. The lights were out, and a mechanic was puzzling over the light switches in one corner. The room had been set up with chairs and tables for the meeting, but the men had stayed standing as they exchanged business cards that were hard to read in the dark.

“Well, one of the reasons I wanted to stop by is to check, ‘How are we doing?’ ” said DuWayne Tewes, the official overseeing FEMA’s Iowa response. “It sounds like so far no complaints?”

“Things have really been going very well. I absolutely feel like FEMA was a partner with us all the way,” Pomeranz said, and clasped his hands in front of his chest to emphasize his gratitude.

“That’s what I love to hear,” Tewes said.

“We wouldn’t say that if it wasn’t the absolute truth,” Pomeranz said.

“Great,” Tewes said. He glanced down at his notes for the meeting. “Well, you know, one of the great things I saw was how the community came together,” he said.

“They still are,” Pomeranz said.

Amid such pleasantries, the men continued to stand in the dark, shifting their weight back and forth as the mechanic grabbed a chair, stood on it, and began poking at one of the lights that wasn’t working.

“All events are different,” Pomeranz said now, moving on to the topic of trees and his hope that FEMA would give the city $60 million for cleanup. “But you know, you lose a structure, as long as no one’s hurt, you can rebuild the structure. But in the case of a tree, you can replant a tree, but before it has the effect of a tree canopy, you’re looking at decades.”

The visitors nodded. “It’s a process,” Tewes said, “and we’re doing everything we can,” and as he went on, explaining the process, Pomeranz sighed and put out a hand to support himself against the wall. They had been standing for 40 minutes. The mechanic gave up and left, and Pomeranz thought of one more thing he wanted to check on.

“What about the Individual Assistance perspective? Has that been going pretty smoothly?” he asked.

“The registration window has closed, but there might be other avenues,” Tewes said. “There might be a voluntary agency to hook them up with.”

Pomeranz smiled and nodded and said, “Okay, great. That was very important to us, and I know the federal government moved on that and just kept things going without a hitch.”

After an hour, Tewes asked if there was anything else the agency could offer. Pomeranz shook his head no.

“We just haven’t had any negative issues,” he said.

“That’s what I really love hearing,” Tewes said.

“Absolutely. We’re good.” Pomeranz said. “Sorry the lights were off,” he added as he walked the men back up to the street.

Outside, the two officials stood in the sun, masks still in place. “Well, I freely admit, I am very pleased,” Tewes said to the other FEMA officer. “You can’t see it, but I have a giant grin on my face.”

* * *

Ten minutes away from City Hall, Kim lifted her lace curtain because she thought she had heard the mail truck.

Nothing.

Later, she checked the FEMA site once more. Still nothing. It was her night off, so she turned on a home improvement show where the host was looking with disdain at a windowless bathroom he was supposed to renovate. “It’s a basement bathroom,” he said.

“Still better than mine,” Kim said.

Sometimes, Kim imagined being on the shows she watched. “But there are people more in need,” she said. “And they usually pick families.” She watched as the camera panned over a new toilet and a double vanity sink. Now the host was showing the family their made-over home and the father was crying. “I’d be crying too,” Kim said and fell silent. The episode wasn’t over, but she shut it off.

It had been five days since she had sent her letter, and she was wishing she had used certified mail. Had she added enough stamps? Had the return address label fallen off? Would she even know if it never arrived at its destination?

On the sixth day, she found an Internet shut-off notice in her mailbox and called the company. “I’ve never missed a payment and the one time I’m late you’re going to shut me off?” she said. The representative agreed to give her a few more days, and Kim put the letter next to the overdue car insurance bill and water bill, which had tripled since her toilet began leaking after the storm.

At the one-week mark, she was back at work and got lucky with a $108 fare. Internet paid, insurance paid, water bill paid. “That’s something,” she said.

At the two-week mark, the park management put up a sign saying “Spring inspections are starting,” and told Kim that she needed to bring the outside of her trailer up to standard if she wanted to keep living there. She promised to get it repainted that month.

Day after day was the same. Wake up. Clean herself at the kitchen sink. Check the FEMA site. Check the mail. Go to work. Watch a show. And spend the last hours of the night on a street where it was too dark to see the twisted trees and tarped roofs, too dark to see anything but little pools of light here and there, and in one of them was Kim at her desk checking the FEMA site one more time before she went to sleep.

And then came the 26th day, when Kim checked the site and saw a letter waiting for her.

“ASSISTANCE NOT APPROVED,” it began.

She read it slowly, then read it over again, looking for a reason and seeing nothing except that she had received “all eligible assistance for this type of loss.”

Her printer was still out of ink, and so she began copying down the letter by hand for her records. Her chest was tight and it was hard to breathe. Despite everything, part of her had believed that the agency would give her more help. She copied down the words “you are not eligible,” and then the word “ineligible,” and then she stopped writing and started to cry. She shut off her computer, washed herself in the kitchen sink, turned off the lights and went to bed.

She wasn’t going to write to FEMA anymore. She wasn’t going to appeal. She was done.

Inside the struggles and heartaches of FEMA’s massive covid funeral assistance program

By Hannah Dreier

DENVER — The only light in the apartment came from the glow of a computer monitor and a candle that was supposed to smell like Christmas cookies. The trainers had said to cultivate calm and self-care, and Irene Hild was trying. She called over her cat, took a deep breath and logged on to her computer, where the blue logo of the Federal Emergency Management Agency appeared.

“I hope you had a wonderful weekend and you’re ready to go,” came the voice of the shift manager overseeing FEMA’s COVID-19 Funeral Assistance call center. The system had been crashing all morning, she said. “It’s been doing its thing again. Just use your judgment.”

Irene and her colleagues joked in a group chat that “just use your judgment” should be the motto of the assistance line. It was the main reason Irene, 23, had decided this would be her last week with the program, which provides up to $9,000 to offset funeral costs for victims of covid-19. She had started the job when FEMA created the call center in the spring. She liked the idea of helping bereaved families, and had also been thrilled to make $11.40 an hour instead of the $6 she’d been earning as a barista. But several thousand tearful, frustrated, confused callers later, she was done. She just wanted to get through her final days without stumbling and making some grieving stranger’s life even harder.

FEMA set up the assistance line this year after Congress set aside several billion dollars to pay for covid funerals. In a matter of weeks, the agency hired about 4,000 contractors across the country, turning fast-food servers, retail workers and Uber drivers, many in their early 20s, into government representatives and de facto grief counselors. More than a million calls came in when the program opened April 12, with some people trying dozens of times until they got through.

Now, with covid cases rising and snags in the program fueling a backlog of applications, calls were surging again. People who had just lost their loved one that morning, people who had been waiting on FEMA for months and were on the brink of eviction, people who said they needed the money to stop a crematorium from disposing of ashes, or to retrieve a body from a mass grave, all of it came to Irene. With 70 pages of scripts and instructions on her screen, she was the person advising about what was possible and what was not for families across the country who were dealing in the most intimate and specific ways with the pandemic.

“The most significant responsibility I’d had before this was making coffee, which if you mess that up, no one’s life is going to get ruined,” she said as she put on her headset and set her status to “available.”

Soon, a call from Tennessee appeared in her queue.

“This is the FEMA COVID-19 Funeral Assistance line. My name is Irene. We are deeply sorry for your loss. How can I help you today?” she said, repeating the red text on her screen in a bright, singsong voice.

“Good morning or whenever it is,” said a woman in a soft tone. “Out of curiosity, where are you located?”

“We are not authorized to say where we are, unfortunately,” Irene said, reading from the script. “What can I answer for you?”

“Okay, sorry. I’ve been very depressed today,” the woman said. “I cried before I got on the phone. My husband died in July 2020. I did the services as cheap as I could because my husband got covid, then I got covid and couldn’t work, so I’m just wondering what is going on. I’m sorry I’m babbling. I’m just very depressed and sad.”

“Of course, of course, take your time, ma’am,” Irene said. She was jiggling her foot on the floor impatiently, but her tone was smooth and sympathetic. The guide on her screen said, “Communicate warmth. Allow for emotional expression or crying without interruption,” and for the next couple of days, that’s what she was determined to do.

***

At first, the call center job seemed like a stroke of incredible luck. Irene had received a message from a recruiter who saw her résumé on a job site. She remembered that the interview consisted of three questions. Did she have any call center experience? Irene answered no. Was she bilingual? No. Could she start in two weeks? Irene answered yes, and that turned out to be enough.

FEMA was working fast. The agency has historically reimbursed funeral expenses when people die in federally declared disasters regardless of financial need, paying for a few hundred memorials a year. Suddenly, officials had to figure out how to expand the program to accommodate all the Americans who had died of covid by that point in the spring — 500,000 — with no way to know how much higher the number would go. “This was something that was completely unprecedented,” Deputy Assistant Administrator Melissa Forbes remembered. “We did it the best we could.”

So far, the program has paid out $1.5 billion to 226,000 families, but beneath the numbers is a program that has been fraught from the start. There were so many elements to figure out. Lawmakers initially wanted to reimburse families whose loved ones had covid-19 symptoms listed on their death certificate, but, Forbes said, the agency decided that “to be good stewards of the federal taxpayer,” the death certificate needed to list the coronavirus itself. Officials considered building a new online application system, but determined it would be quicker to take registrations by phone. That meant building a huge call center operation, which meant writing scripts, sending laptops and headsets across the country to turn spare rooms and closets into FEMA-approved workstations, and putting together a day of training to prepare the new hires.

Irene was in the first group of trainees. She watched on her laptop as a FEMA worker reviewed the five stages of grief and talked about how to soothe callers “experiencing emotional crisis” given the “current pandemic environment.” The second half of the training focused on the distress these calls might cause agents. “The work we do is often times difficult and emotionally draining,” the trainer said. She encouraged the group to use deep breathing, prayers and mantras to relax, and gave them one of FEMA’s own devising: “Stress is not necessarily something bad — it all depends on how you take it.”

That was a Thursday. On Friday morning, Irene started taking calls. She reminded herself to sit up straight because the training had said that posture affects the tone of your voice. A tracker at the bottom of her screen was supposed to count the number of people on hold, but it only had space for two digits and blinked “99+” all day long. She remembered her first callers, and how nervous and excited she was to talk to them. A man whose voice kept cracking as he registered for the funerals of his mother, wife and brother. A son who wanted to know if he could claim his father’s death if he had also been sick with cancer. A woman who kept her on the line for an hour said she was fending off loneliness by talking with her husband’s ghost. After that, it all began to blur together because there were so many calls coming in — people wanting to sign up, people wanting to find out how soon until they could be done with FEMA forever, people wanting to thank her, people wanting to yell at her, perhaps knowing she was not allowed to hang up, and now eight months later and with two days left to go, a woman from Alabama was asking her why things were taking so long.

“It’s been months and months and months and I’ve called in every week,” the woman said. Irene could hear the exasperation in her voice, and she kept her eyes on her script as the woman launched into a long story about how she had struggled to figure out the delay.

Irene saw the problem — an agent had incorrectly marked her relative as having burial insurance, which would disqualify her from getting help. It was a mistake new hires often made, clicking the wrong button when they heard someone had life insurance. “Let me just go ahead and fix that,” Irene said.

“Well thank you,” the woman said.

“Fingers and toes crossed,” Irene said.

She hung up, wishing all calls could be that easy, with an actual solution to offer. The automated system counted down 30 seconds for her to collect herself before the next one, and here it came, a young woman from South Carolina who had requested reimbursement for her mother’s funeral back when wait times were shorter. Her paperwork was all in order, but, Irene said, following the script, “our official time frame is now more than 90 days from the date of registration.”

“Okay, because I borrowed money from people and they’re asking. They’re here on speakerphone,” the woman said, and began to explain that she was on disability and had no income, her mother had worked as a maid and had no savings, her father had sold his van to try to finance the funeral, but it still wasn’t enough even for a simple graveside burial. When relatives heard about FEMA’s reimbursement program, they loaned her several thousand dollars, but now they were getting impatient. “So do you know how long? It won’t be too much longer?” the woman asked.

The woman calmed down and thanked her. “I thought you were a recording. You have such a nice voice,” she said. It turned out she was calling because she wanted to get email updates about her case, an issue that needed to be handled by another department. “If you hang on one moment, I’ll get you transferred and they’ll be able to help you,” Irene said.

Thirty seconds to reset. The next call came and Irene turned the volume on her headset as high as it would go to make out the words of a man with a halting voice and heavy accent calling from New York City. “I first applied for help almost seven months ago,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Let me take a look here and see if we can’t get this straightened out,” she said in her calmest, slowest voice. She saw that the man had submitted a death certificate for his father from April 2020 that listed conditions associated with covid-19 — pneumonia, lung damage, heart failure — but not the virus itself.

“Since the death did happen right at the start of the pandemic, just contact a doctor who treated your loved one and get them to write a statement,” she said. The script said to call the man’s father “the deceased individual,” but her judgment told her that “loved one” would be easier for the man to hear.

The man explained that his father had died in a nursing home and never saw a doctor. He said he had already attempted to get the death certificate amended at the city records office. “I went there many, many times. Twenty times I went there, but they won’t change anything,” he said. “They didn’t know what was happening. It was just, ‘No oxygen is getting to his lungs,’ and he died.”

“Got you,” Irene said, bouncing her foot on the carpet. “Give me one second.”

She looked through the guide, trying to find a solution. “Then what we’ll need is something from the nursing home saying he had symptoms consistent with covid,” she said.

The man sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

After she hung up, she took off her headset and was silent for a moment. “He sounded really worn out,” she said, and wondered what he was going to do — and meanwhile in New York, the man also hung up, wondering the same thing.

***

The man she had been talking to was named Yong Chao Liu and he was 70 years old. A small Buddha sat on the table next to him, along with a harmonica his father had given him. He looked out at the street, debating what to do with advice from the woman at FEMA who knew his paperwork but nothing else of his life.

Go to the nursing home, she had said, but he hadn’t been to the nursing home since the week the city went into lockdown in 2020, when he had stood outside for an hour and a half in the empty street, hoping to drop off orange juice and cookies to his dying father inside.

Talking with government officials, even friendly ones like the woman on the phone, made him anxious. He had grown up in Shanghai and been sent to the countryside for reeducation during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He immigrated to New York as a young man, found a job delivering takeout, and helped get green cards for his parents and younger siblings, all of whom settled within a five-block radius.

His father, Si Yuan, had been in his 90s, living independently in a rented apartment. He was supposed to have had only a brief stay in the nursing home, to recover from an infection. But then the pandemic began, Queens became an epicenter, and the nursing home had become the single deadliest facility in the borough. By mid-April, 44 of its 300 residents had died of covid-19.

As the oldest sibling and the only one who spoke English, Yong Chao took charge of the funeral arrangements for his father. Si Yuan’s body lay in a refrigerated truck outside of the nursing home for 10 days as his children, who mostly worked in the Garment District, struggled to gather money and find a funeral home with space for another body. In the end, Yong Chao borrowed $15,000 to finance the burial, going into debt for the first time since leaving China.

He still had not paid the money back a year later, when he saw Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on television, holding a news conference near the nursing home to announce the new funeral assistance program. “We are going to make sure that FEMA implements this well, that it is done in a way that’s easy for families to apply and get the dollars​​,” Schumer said.

Yong Chao signed up the day the call center opened. He faxed in his father’s documents and funeral receipts, and then he waited, and soon he and his daughter, Angela, began calling to ask about their claim. One call center agent said the issue was that his paperwork was illegible. Another said he needed to submit a more detailed death certificate. As he visited different government offices in Manhattan applying for documents, Yong Chao was becoming too anxious to sleep. He called FEMA so often that he memorized both the help line phone number and chunks of the script. When he told Angela about the call with Irene, she asked if it might be time to give up.

“They make it sound like, ‘We’re helping you out,’ and maybe they’re trying to, but really they’re asking for a task that we can’t get done,” Angela told him.

“But maybe if I go,” Yong Chao said. “FEMA says we just need a letter. It’s not a big deal.” And so he slipped his FEMA documents into a plastic bag and got on a train crowded with commuters, some of whom were wearing masks and some of whom weren’t. He sat staring straight ahead until the end of the line, then he walked 20 minutes to the nursing home, remembering how desolate the area had been the last time he had seen it.

Inside, Yong Chao asked to speak with an administrator. “My father died here,” he said. The receptionist typed Si Yuan’s name into her computer and a photograph of him appeared on the screen, along with the label “Discharged: Deceased.” Yong Chao looked away. “Please take a seat,” she said.

He waited as visiting hours began and the lobby filled with people carrying balloons and flowers. The receptionist went on her lunch break. The lobby emptied again as visitors went up to see their loved ones.

“My father was in good health when he came here,” Yong Chao said quietly.

At last, the administrator came out. “How can I help you, sir?” he asked.

“My father died here,” Yong Chao said, and pulled out the detailed death certificate he had requested from the city. “Somebody called me and said he had pneumonia, high fever, no oxygen — the symptoms of covid-19. FEMA said if you can write this case looks like covid-19, they can reimburse.”

The administrator shook his head. He had heard versions of this request before. “The problem is that during that time, the nursing home could not test for covid, so doctors couldn’t say,” he said.

Yong Chao pushed the death certificate toward him, along with a fact sheet about the funeral assistance program. “Our request is very low,” he said.The administrator studied the death certificate and explained that it was not even filled out by the nursing home doctor, who had herself been sick with covid and required to stay home during that catastrophic week, but by a nurse who had since quit. “At this point, we cannot revise a medical record,” he said.

“But actually it was covid,” Yong Chao said. “I’m just begging you. We borrowed a lot of money. We don’t have anything. We don’t have money to pay it back. FEMA can give us relief. So we just need you to help us. Can you please help us? Can you just say it was related?”

The administrator shook his head again. “It wouldn’t seem unreasonable — this was ground zero for New York City. But at that time, testing was not available in nursing homes. It’s not that we didn’t want to, it’s that we couldn’t.”

“Please,” Yong Chao said. He was thinking about how he should have pushed harder to visit his father one last time, should have gotten him back into his apartment as soon as the pandemic began. He didn’t want to leave without at least extracting a promise from the administrator to look into his case. “Why can’t you take responsibility? $9,000 is very important for us,” he said.

“I understand,” the administrator said, wrapping up. “Unfortunately, what FEMA is asking for is a very difficult standard for you to prove.”

Yong Chao asked if he could leave his phone number. “I just need some help,” he said.

The administrator wrote it down but warned, “I’m not hopeful.”

Yong Chao thanked him and bowed. He walked back to the station, taking a longer route to avoid the busy streets. “No matter how hard I work, still nothing,” he said. He didn’t know what else to do, except maybe give the FEMA helpline another try. “I’ll call again,” he said.

***

‘The best thing you can do is call back,” Irene was telling a woman in Kentucky. It was the first call of the morning on her final day of the job. Sometimes she told people to call back weekly. Sometimes she told them to call back in a few days.

She was counting the hours until her shift ended. The scented candle was burning low. Her cat was at her feet. “I’m so ready to be done,” she said.

A woman in Wisconsin called to file an appeal: “All they paid for was to have his body burned. They didn’t pay for the urn, they didn’t pay for the service or anything.”

A man in Arizona: “This is my fourth time calling today.”

A woman in Ohio: “Oh my land, it's been an awful year.”

The system counted down 30 seconds. Irene checked the time. Two more hours. Here came another call. Another. A caller in California. A caller in Illinois. A caller in Georgia: “I feel like I’m being pushed to the side and no one is trying to help.”

Just a few more and she would be finished. Eight months of callers in all the stages of grief. Eight months in which she had learned so much about what a person in emotional crisis sounds like. About how people hurt. About how people are angry. People who don’t listen. People who yell. People who offer a kind of patience and faith that broke her heart. Eight months, and she had learned about a country in the midst of a pandemic, the relentlessness of it, that the deaths kept coming every day. On this day alone, by the time it ended, 1,555 more people would be killed by the virus, and 1,555 more grieving families would be eligible for help from FEMA.

But not from Irene. “Good evening, this is the COVID-19 Funeral Assistance line,” she said, answering her final call, with a woman from Los Angeles whose daughter had just died in an intensive care unit. The call went on for six minutes and ended with the woman’s question unresolved, but she thanked Irene anyway. “Of course, of course. I hope you have a good rest of your day,” Irene said. The shift manager told her she could take off early to send back her laptop and monitor. She put down her headset and looked at the blue FEMA screen for the last time. “Okay, good luck,” she said, and set her status to “unavailable.”

Why FEMA’s billion-dollar program to prevent disasters failed to save Mount Olive Road

By Hannah Dreier and Andrew Ba Tran 

GRASS VALLEY, Calif. — They had put it off for weeks, but now the ground had stopped smoldering and the weather had cooled, so Michael Goetze set out with his son to see the home that a wildfire had turned to rubble and ash.

They had one goal: Find the wedding band Michael had worn for 40 years of marriage.

“It’ll be there. Titanium doesn’t melt,” his son, Jeremy, said as they drove to the house.

“But the fire was so hot, everything else is going to be dust,” Michael said.

Following behind them were members of their church. A dozen people worried about Michael, a 61-year-old man with a booming voice who had once hosted pool parties and volleyball contests at his home, but had grown quiet and withdrawn in the past year after his wife fell ill and died.

They drove through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, past the dense pine trees that looked suddenly ominous and overgrown. “This whole place is just turning into a tinderbox,” Michael said.

Their street, Mount Olive Road, was lined with charred remnants of cars and houses, all destroyed in August by what came to be known as the River Fire. When they parked and got out, smoke from a wildfire miles away caught in their throats. Pieces of ash were drifting down in clumps.

“It’s bad today with the ash,” Jeremy said. “Kind of claustrophobic.”

This was the road where Michael had lived for most of his life, where Jeremy, 40, had grown up, and where both men had worked every day making granite countertops. It had always felt safe to them. But a map filed away in a county office told a different story: The local emergency management department had traced Mount Olive in brown highlighter, singling it out as a place highly likely to burn in a wildfire. The county wanted to clear away dry grass and thin the trees to reduce this risk. That work can cost millions of dollars, and so in 2018, Grass Valley applied for a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Then came a record-breaking wildfire season, and then an even bigger one, and when the fires started again this summer, the county was still awaiting FEMA’s decision.

As natural disasters worsen, President Biden is directing FEMA to shift more of its efforts to preventing them. This work was always a small part of the agency’s role, but now Biden has committed an unprecedented $5 billion in new funding to minimize future disasters, and Congress designated several billion dollars more in its recently passed infrastructure bill.

A review of internal FEMA data obtained by The Washington Post, however, shows how difficult such a shift might be. Of the $11 billion FEMA has allocated for this program over the past decade, only $1.5 billion has been spent. The vast majority of the money is caught up in bureaucratic delays that leave counties waiting years to get started on what they describe as urgently needed work. In the case of the Mount Olive Road project, FEMA moved the proposal into the final stages of review this fall, almost four years after the county first applied. By then, the River Fire had jumped the road and burned down 140 buildings, including Michael’s house and granite workshop.

Since the fire, Michael had been ruminating over all the things he left behind when he evacuated. He hadn’t wanted to come back, but Jeremy hoped the wedding band might bring him some peace.

Before they walked up to what was left of Michael’s home, the group stood in a circle and prayed. “We know that you are a God of comfort, and we hope that we find comfort today,” a man read. “Amen,” Michael said. Someone had brought disposable hazmat suits and he tried to put one on, but it was too small for his 6-foot-7 frame. He put on a cloth mask instead and said he was ready.

***

For decades, FEMA’s dominant strategy has been to come in after disasters to coordinate cleanup and recovery. This is why the agency was created 40 years ago, but as climate disasters grow more frequent and devastating, FEMA is refocusing on a policy known as mitigation, which involves trying to intervene before catastrophe strikes. In places that flood, it might mean elevating houses. In places prone to hurricanes, it means retrofitting buildings to withstand damaging winds. And in areas vulnerable to wildfire, it means clearing space around homes. Biden is counting on these programs to contain the spiraling expense of federal disasters, which cost an estimated $99 billion last year. “The evidence is overwhelming that every dollar we invest in resilience saves $6 down the road, when the next fire doesn’t spread as widely, or the power station holds up against a storm,” Biden said in September.

How to get the money into communities, though, has been a continuing challenge. A Post analysis found that counties wait an average of seven years to complete their FEMA-funded projects, and that during those waits, applicants for fire mitigation experience an average of three more major wildfires, and applicants for storm mitigation experience two more hurricanes. The Post analysis also found that FEMA is about half as likely to fund grants for rural areas like Grass Valley, and that poor counties and places where White people are a minority face longer delays in getting grants approved.

In its own analysis, the Government Accountability Office found that counties struggled with a “cumbersome” process that entails hundreds of pages of supporting documentation, multiple rounds of review with different FEMA reviewers, and years of requests for additional information. Local officials told The Post they see federal mitigation funding as a last resort. In some cases, workers have threatened to quit if they ever had to deal with the grants again. In other cases, communities have withdrawn applications or opted out of the program after realizing how much staff time it would take, including at least half the California counties that saw wildfires this past summer.

“There’s a lot of money there. But we’ve all kind of shied away because it’s so complex to access,” said Ken Pimlott, chair of the Fire Safe Council for El Dorado County, where one of the biggest wildfires in state history destroyed a thousand buildings. Seventy miles to the east, the North Tahoe Fire Protection District applied for a grant in 2010 to clear space near homes, but FEMA review requirements delayed the project for eight years. “We think we should have been able to get right to work,” Eric Horntvedt, the district’s forest fuels coordinator, said. The district was halfway through the project when the Caldor Fire began burning toward Lake Tahoe in September.

David Maurstad, who runs FEMA’s mitigation program, said grant applications take a while to process because the projects are complex. “Everything we’re doing, we’re doing with the focus of how we can turn seven years into six years into five years,” he said. “As different issues are brought to our attention that need to be addressed, we do what we can to make steady improvement.” He said some policies that frustrate applicants, like the requirement that counties wait on FEMA approval before starting any part of their projects, are necessary to safeguard taxpayer dollars.

Grass Valley decided to apply for a grant because mitigation work “just wouldn’t be possible for a small, rural community without it,” county spokeswoman Taylor Wolfe said. More than 90 percent of homes in the 100,000-person county are classified as “high” or “extremely high risk” for fire, and hundreds of residents have requested help protecting their homes. “There’s a lot of people who are scared to death, and they can’t afford to get a contractor out,” Jamie Jones, executive director of the county Fire Safe Council, said.

Jones helped apply for the $4.8 million FEMA grant in 2018. But her hopefulness faded as years passed without a decision. She and her colleagues sent emails checking on their application. “Do we have any updates?” they wrote. “Our leadership is really interested in progress on this,” they wrote again months later. The responses came back the same: still under review. When Jones saw footage of homes burning in the River Fire, she remembers thinking, “Please let it not be someone who was waiting.” Later, she drove by the ruins of the Goetzes’ house, where her kids had gone to pool parties thrown by Michael and his wife, Wendy, and wondered whether the county could have done more.

The River Fire was the kind most likely to be suppressed by mitigation; it was driven largely by dry vegetation, not wind, and had spread by climbing into densely packed treetops. It started burning toward Mount Olive Road from a campground in the canyon below as Michael and Jeremy were finishing work. “Get out. Just leave now,” they remembered a fireman shouting. As they drove away, they saw a vortex of fire charging up the mountain from the opposite side of the road, and when they awoke the next day, it was to photos their friends had sent them, taken from newscasts, of their home destroyed.

Now, as they prepared to start the search, a man from their church walked around marking the site with yellow caution tape. He roped off the dead trees. The 250-gallon propane tank that smelled of gas. The piles of ash that might contain disintegrated batteries or pieces of asbestos that had been used in the house as flooring. Jeremy managed to get a hazmat suit mostly zipped up, put on a KN95 mask, and, apologizing to the man who had just marked the hazards, stepped over the caution tape. “I’m trying to remember the layout of the house. It’s kind of hard when it’s not here,” Jeremy said.

Michael told him he had kept the wedding band in a glass on the bathroom windowsill, so Jeremy knelt down where he thought the bathroom wall would have been and began to dig. He found a buried slab of the granite shower. At least he was in the right place.

Michael watched from outside the tape. “Jeremy can always find anything,” he said, and soon, Jeremy uncovered a melted glob of glass with a sparkling piece of melted metal embedded inside.

“It’s something gold,” he said, and showed it to his father.

But it wasn’t the ring. “Yeah, I think there were gold earrings on the window ledge,” Michael said, and explained that Wendy had kept her jewelry collection there.

Jeremy went back to the pile. He found more lumps of glass with melted silver and gold inside, examined each one, and put them aside. The church members were looking around, too, calling out what they found. A ball of coins, all melted together. A fireproof box with orange pill bottles containing the medicine that Wendy had taken when she was sick with cancer. The crushed frame of the chair where she had spent her last days.

There was nowhere for Michael to sit but the propane tank, so he sat down amid the gas fumes, thinking about when they first moved in. Wendy had taught art at the grade school down the road, and they had covered the walls with her paintings. In the summer, they rented a shaved ice machine and invited the neighborhood kids over. There was so much Michael wished he’d saved from the fire: the paintings, Wendy’s scrapbooks, the clothes that Jeremy’s sisters had wanted, her jewelry.

Jeremy searched through the rubble until he hit the black dirt underneath. His hazmat suit had split and plumes of ash were falling onto his lower back. His mask was broken, dangling from one ear. “I think we’ve done enough, Jeremy,” Michael said. “Who knows, it might have been so hot that it melted.”

“All right,” Jeremy called back, but he stayed where he was and picked up a sieve he had brought to sift the wreckage more finely. He was coughing and rubbing at his red eyes. He lifted a piece of sheet metal and found something that looked like a ring, but when he picked it up, he saw it was just a steel washer. “Dang it,” he said.

At the other side of the ash heap, someone called, “I found something.” They had unearthed a set of utensils, gray and rust-colored from the fire. Michael smiled when he saw the discovery. “That’s our wedding silverware,” he said.

Michael held the silverware as they walked back to the cars. He paused in front of the granite shop, where something had exploded and bent the warehouse doors outward. The others gathered in front of him. “I appreciate you all coming and helping,” he said.

“Oh, we love you, Mike,” one of the men said.

Michael explained that Wendy had picked the silverware out with her artist’s eye. It was delicate, with ornate roses looping down the handles. “We used it every day for 41 years,” he said. He rubbed the soot off one of the forks and held it up.

“Look, you can see the roses here,” he said.

***

A week later, after hearing the county would be coming soon to start clearing debris, Michael and Jeremy decided to try again, just the two of them. They arrived better prepared, with hiking boots and perfectly fitting hazmat suits. And this time, instead of watching from the sidelines, Michael went into the ash pile. Wondering whether the bathroom walls might have tipped over backward as they collapsed, he began searching beyond the footprint of the house, and almost immediately, he saw a chunk of glass with a dark shape within it. “I think I found it,” he shouted.

Jeremy headed toward him, but before he could get there, Michael grabbed a shovel and shattered the glass, and there was the ring, blackened and rough, but intact. He held it in his palm.

“Look at that,” he said.

A few days later, a truck of workers showed up at the property in white-and-green protective gear and spread out looking for toxic materials to haul away. “Jackpot right here,” one of them called, and waved the others over to four disintegrated car batteries that needed to be carefully lifted into bags and sealed in a plastic barrel. They emptied the propane tank Michael had used as a seat and spray-painted pink Xs over the pockets of asbestos. One pulled out a rubber gripper to lift up a piece of sheet metal roofing. “That stuff will cut you like a knife,” he said. The crew leader wrote down their findings on a clipboard: seven batteries, one and a half gallons of toxic chemicals, 1,770 square feet of asbestos. The county estimated it would cost $100,000 to clear the property, most of which would be paid by FEMA — not with funds from its mitigation program, but through its much larger recovery operation.

By midmorning, the leader announced, “We’re rolling out.” The men drove to the next home, searched it and kept moving along Mount Olive Road. It was a slow process and a hazardous one that would go on for months, and as they continued their work, Michael was sitting in Jeremy’s kitchen one afternoon at the granite counter they had built together. He was wearing the ring, which he had cleaned and tried to polish.

“All the time I spent looking for it. It was probably meant for you to find,” Jeremy said.

Michael nodded and turned the ring around and around on his finger. “Remember how the fire department had that guy racing down the street, yelling at us?” he said. “It was like, ‘This can’t be happening.’ ”

“Yeah, seriously,” Jeremy said. “The smoke was just coming right straight toward us.”

“If I’d known the fire was going to take the house out, I could’ve gotten the water pump going,” Michael said. “You kind of imagine if you’d stayed back, maybe you could have saved everything.”

Jeremy listened, not sure what to say. His home was deep in the woods, surrounded by dry grass and sloping tree branches. Like his father’s property, this one also appeared on the map in the county file, some yards away from another road the grant application said needed urgent mitigation work. The country roads were covered now with handmade signs advertising tree-trimming services, but Jeremy didn’t have money for that. Instead, in his own version of mitigation, he had bought a chain saw to cut back the low branches and looped a garden hose over the roof.

Michael was quiet for a moment and then began describing a dream he’d had the night before. “I’m going back in the house and looking around and nothing’s burned. And it’s like, ‘What is going on?’ ” he said.

“Better not to think about the past,” Jeremy said finally. “Don’t even think about tomorrow. Certain things, you just don’t have control over them.”

By Hannah Dreier

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is ending a policy that had prevented many Black families in the rural South from getting help after natural disasters. The agency announced Thursday that it will no longer require disaster survivors living on inherited land to prove they own their homes before they can get help rebuilding.

The change follows a July report from The Washington Post that detailed how FEMA was regularly denying help to Black families living on land passed down since a generation after slavery.

For years, FEMA has required applicants for disaster aid to provide a deed or other formal proof of homeownership. The agency said this was necessary to prevent fraud. But the policy cut off thousands of Southern families seeking grants for repairs after disasters destroyed their homes. More than a third of Black-owned land in the South is passed down informally. Land handed down in such a manner becomes heirs’ property, a type of ownership in which families hold property collectively. It’s a practice that dates back to the Jim Crow era, when Black people were subject to what the Department of Agriculture describes as a “well-documented” system of discrimination, including exclusion from loans and swindles by officials.

A Washington Post analysis found that while FEMA denies help to about 2 percent of disaster survivors nationally because of title issues, the rate is twice as high in Black-majority counties. In parts of the Deep South, FEMA has rejected more than a third of disaster aid applicants for this reason.

Families living on heirs’ property will now be allowed to self-certify that they own their homes. FEMA will also accept letters from local officials and bills for home repairs as proof of ownership. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that the changes were needed to ensure that help reaches minority communities. “The changes we are announcing today reflect our commitment to always do better,” he said in a statement Thursday.

FEMA has come under intense pressure to make this policy change in recent weeks. Several lawmakers’ offices met with agency staff to discuss heirs’ property issues. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) called for heirs’ property changes in a letter to Mayorkas. “As recently documented by The Washington Post, FEMA’s regulations and procedures regarding property title have tended to have unfortunate disparate effects on Black homeowners,” the senators wrote.

Separately, the House committee that oversees the agency approved legislation that would require FEMA to accept self-certification of homeownership from all disaster survivors. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) said at a hearing that the legislation was needed because “FEMA has tried to work through these challenges, but efforts have been ad hoc and inconsistent.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is expected to introduce similar legislation in the Senate this month.

On Thursday, lawmakers welcomed FEMA’s policy reversal, but said they would continue to push to codify the change in law.

“We trust this FEMA to do the right thing and help people facing these circumstances, but we need to ensure these protections extend to future disasters,” said Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.), who sits on the Transportation Committee and was touring Hurricane Ida damage in LaPlace, Louisiana. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions. People can’t fix the properties with intentions. People can’t go on with their lives with good intentions.”

The new guidelines will apply retroactively to Aug. 23, to cover damages from Ida and flooding in Tennessee. The legislation moving through Congress would require FEMA to reopen cases going back several years. For now, though, heirs’ property owners who lost homes to other recent disasters will remain stuck outside the federal recovery system.

In Hale County, Alabama, police officer Eric Wiggins was glad that future survivors will have an easier time getting help than he did after a tornado turned his home into splinters on March 25. But he wishes the changes could apply to his community also.

“What’s the difference between Ida and what happened over here? A disaster is a disaster,” he said.

Wiggins said he still sees people living in trucks or in homes without roofs as he makes his rounds in the impoverished county where FEMA denied 35 percent of applicants because of title problems. He’s been living with his mother while he tries to sort out a deed for his destroyed home, which sat on land passed down informally since Reconstruction.

“This just happened. It’s barely been six months.” he said. “It’s not like we’ve all figured out a way to recover.”