Story by Kayla Guilliams
The current model of hurricane recovery, a bureaucratically complex system of push and pulls between local, state and federal resources, insurance policies and non-profit organizations, is failing to help low and moderate income residents fully recover after disaster.
Those in Robeson County, North Carolina, know the failures of the system all too well. The county was hit by Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence in 2018, flooding a community with a median income just over $30,000, the second lowest in the state. When the storms passed, residents struggled to get the financial assistance they needed to recover.
Just 2 percent of properties in the county have flood insurance, the first line of defense a resident can have against hurricanes. The average recipient of individual assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency got no more than $4,300, not nearly enough to cover damages faced by low- or moderate-income residents. The state designated funds to distribute for recovery, but they got stuck in bureaucracy for months. And once they were distributed, they mainly went to homeowners — not the residents in Robeson who are renters, and who make up nearly a third of the county’s population.
This lack of assistance and struggle to access it has left many Robeson County residents feeling invisible, and has stained the trust they have for the current model of recovery. And it’s not just Robeson — neighborhoods, non-profits, policy analysts and academics all across the country are questioning how America’s broken disaster recovery system should be reformed, with some saying community groups should lead the charge.
“I’ve seen the spectrum of devastation when something like this happens to someone,” Adrienne Kennedy, a former resident of Robeson County, said. “And you either get numb, or you get busy.”
Kennedy’s family had lived in low-lying South Lumberton, off Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and along the Lumbee River in Robeson County, for three generations. When Hurricane Matthew struck the county in 2016, everything changed.
“We immediately set out to rescue people that couldn’t get out because the water was just coming so fast,” she said. “All we knew to do was help people. We didn’t know where we would stay, what we would do, but we knew we would help people.”
Kennedy, her family and her neighbors spent 23 hours rescuing people from the rising waters. By the time the storm passed, her home was uninhabitable. She had to stay in a hotel with her three children for 10 months before crossing county lines and moving north to Fayetteville, just 30 minutes outside of Lumberton.
“One day my son came up to me and asked, when are we going home? And I couldn’t answer that,” she said. “I was like, this is how everybody else feels. They don’t have an answer.”
While Kennedy moved to Fayetteville after Matthew, she still had hopes of fixing up her home in South Lumberton and moving back. But when Florence hit just two years later, her home was hit by two large pine trees, largely undoing the progress she had made since Matthew.
Many residents throughout Robeson County faced similar damages as Kennedy. And despite facing these damages, many were unable to access the financial resources they needed to recover.
Flood insurance is the strongest defense residents can have against flood-heavy storms like Matthew and Florence. Property owners in flood zones, like those along the Lumbee River, are technically required to have an insurance policy. But Noreen Clancy, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation who focuses on disaster and flood insurance policy, says that requirement often falls through the cracks.
“If you have a mortgage, and you live in a designated flood zone, they’re supposed to require that you carry flood insurance,” Clancy said. “But then a disaster happens, and all these people who are supposed to have it, don’t. So we think somewhere in the chain of mortgages getting sold and resold, that requirement gets dropped and there’s no compliance on it, which is a problem.”
Flood insurance is also just too expensive for some residents to afford, so while low and moderate income residents are more likely to live in a flood zone and face damages from hurricanes than higher income residents, they are less likely to have flood insurance.
According to a 2018 study from FEMA, the median income of a North Carolinian who has flood insurance is $70,000. The median income in Robeson County is just over $30,000, but half of residents make less than that, meaning shelling out anywhere from $700 to $1,500 every year for a flood insurance policy isn’t possible.
“Insurance is just one more expense,” Brianna Goodwin, assistant director for operations at the Robeson County Church and Community Center, said. “One more monthly expense that most people here can’t afford.”
Around 95 percent of flood insurance policies are provided through the National Flood Insurance Program, which is run by FEMA and provides subsidized rates. But policy costs have been rising between 5 percent and 9 percent a year after Congress instructed FEMA to let rates rise to better reflect flood risk in the early 2000s. Policies are also going to continue to get more expensive as climate change increases the risk of flooding across the country.
Because flood insurance is so expensive, just 463 individuals in Robeson County had flood insurance when Matthew hit, and just 890 did when Florence hit, despite thousands of residents in the county living in an active flood zone.
Flood insurance is so valuable to residents because of how much damage it can cover. After Matthew, the average policyholder who filed a claim in Robeson County got over $49,000. After Florence, the average policyholder got nearly $41,000. This is a lot more than other sources of aid, meaning those who can afford flood insurance are often able to recover better and faster than the low-income residents who can’t.
“If you don’t have insurance, you can try to get some funding from FEMA’s individual assistance program,” Clancy said. “But, it’s usually very minor and it’s not going to come anywhere close to covering your costs.”
FEMA’s individual assistance program is a program designed to restore property to a “safe and sanitary living or functioning condition” — not to pre-disaster conditions. However, regardless of the agency’s intent, it’s one of the first programs a lot of residents without flood insurance look to when trying to recover. And when applicants are denied, or given just a couple thousand dollars, it’s a punch in the gut during an already sensitive experience.
Over 18,000 residents in the county looked towards FEMA’s individual assistance program to get aid after Matthew, and nearly 12,000 did after Florence. Over half of the applicants that applied after Matthew were denied assistance, and nearly two-thirds of the applicants after Florence were denied. There were no significant differences in acceptance rates based on income.
Applicants can be denied for a myriad of reasons. If an applicant living in a flood zone received assistance from the program in the past, but hadn’t gotten flood insurance since, they’ll be denied. If FEMA determines that the ability of the applicant to live in the damaged home was not impacted, they’ll be denied on the ground of insufficient damages. And if the damages an applicant faces are due to deferred maintenance, an experience disproportionately faced by low or moderate income residents who can’t always keep up with home repairs, they’ll be denied.
Those who did get assistance got very little. The average applicant in Robeson after Matthew got just over $4,200, despite many applicants facing similar damages to those who received over $40,000 from insurance, and the average applicant after Florence got just over $3,400. Some didn’t even get that. When FEMA assessed Goodwin’s home, they found $25,000 in damages, but offered her just $900 in assistance.
“If people think FEMA is going to come in and help you after a disaster, if it’s flooding, that’s not really the case,” Clancy said.
When these federal programs fail, residents can look towards the state for aid. After both Matthew and Florence, North Carolina was designated millions in federal funds to allocate to communities for recovery and mitigation. However, the state has made a name for itself as a notoriously slow spender. Two years after Matthew, it had spent just $2 million of the $236.5 million it was designated.
“Expediency when it comes to funding is a huge issue,” Goodwin said. “There are people who still didn’t have their house fixed from Hurricane Matthew when Florence hit, and it’s hard to even scratch the surface of how differently things should have been done.”
Today, NC is rolling out funds to impacted homeowners through ReBuild NC’s Homeowner Recovery Program, a program the state initiated through the NC Office of Recovery and Resiliency to repair and rebuild homes for residents with a household income less than 150% of the area median income. As of Oct. 21, over $28 million had been allocated to 385 homeowners in Robeson County through the program, amounting to over $73,000 per person. While this program has been beneficial to homeowners, it doesn’t address any damages faced by renters, who make up nearly a third of the County’s population.
Because there’s so many sources of aid coming from all different levels of government, residents are left scrambling to figure out what programs are available, what programs they’re eligible for and what programs will actually meet their needs. Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, says that’s part of the problem.
“There’s not a clear pathway for survivors who are having to go through this,” Montano said. “There’s so many different criteria for eligibility and all of these different programs that are scattered across multiple levels of government in different government agencies, and the whole recovery system is just so complicated and confusing for people to go through.”
After Hurricane Matthew hit Robeson County, Kennedy started the non-profit Seeds of H.O.P.E to advocate for equitable disaster recovery, to empower her community and to help residents prepare for and deal with disaster. While she no longer lived in Lumberton due to the hurricanes, she made the drive down from Fayetteville nearly everyday to do her outreach.
When safety nets like flood insurance, FEMA and aid from the state fail to provide support for impacted residents, community groups like Seeds of H.O.P.E are there to fill in the gaps. The role of community in hurricane recovery is especially pronounced in areas like Robeson County, where many residents struggle to navigate the bureaucratic complexities of the current recovery system.
“Our literacy rate is very low in the county, so you’re trying to fill out this extremely complicated form when you may not even have a high school education, and sometimes you go through this entire process just to get denied,” Goodwin said. “I mean that’s a really crushing experience for a lot of people.”
Countless groups in Robeson County have helped the community recover from Matthew and Florence. The Robeson County Church and Community Center has provided thousands of households with food, medical equipment and direct financial assistance. The Robeson County Disaster Recovery Committee has helped thousands of families with recovery since 2018. Kennedy’s organization, Seeds of H.O.P.E has provided the community with disaster relief, recovery advocacy and information on hurricane preparedness.
Community groups are vital because they’re on the ground before, during and after a disaster. They know where invisible, vulnerable populations are, what their needs look like and what neighborhoods struggle the most with recovery. Without them, a lot of the community would fall through the cracks.
Many of these groups say a more community-based approach to disaster recovery should be adopted. Since they are so intertwined with impacted communities, they say if they were given more resources, they could more efficiently allocate them to those who need it most.
“Let’s say after Hurricane Florence our organization was given money to help rebuild homes,” Goodwin said. “We would have immediately hired case managers, set appointments, individual situations would have been evaluated, and they would have gotten the help they need.”
Community groups can be more efficient not only because they better understand their community, but because they can bypass some of the bureaucratic roadblocks government funds get stuck in, potentially making their funds more quickly accessible. These groups are also better equipped to identify those most vulnerable and in need of help in the community.
“It’s really those local organizations that are there through to the very end,” Montano said. “But they are not getting, at all, a proportional amount of resources. Anything that can be done to direct funding and resources to those existing local organizations is really important.”
It’s not just these groups that see the benefits of a more community-based approach. Noah Patton, a housing policy analyst with the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, said the coalition recommended this year that recovery efforts be partially led by community-based nonprofits, and said they should be provided more funding in order to take on more recovery responsibility.
A community-focused approach will also make more sense in the face of climate change, according to the NLIHC. As hurricanes become more frequent and more destructive, FEMA won’t be able to keep up. They also can’t increase aid given through their individual assistance program or decrease flood insurance prices because they can’t subsidize residents living in disaster-prone areas.
“If you’re FEMA, what you want is for people to recognize their risk rate. So if you live in a risky area, recognize that it’s going to cost you more to live in that area and be prepared to pay that price,” Clancy said. “So maybe you make a decision to move to a safer area or to a house that’s higher up. FEMA can’t subsidize people living in risky areas.”
This mindset has led to the proliferation of buyout programs that allow the state to buy and demolish homes in flood prone areas. In January, NC received $150 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to buy out, raise or rebuild homes in flood-prone areas like those along the Lumbee River. The intent of the program is to financially help residents either move to higher ground or become more resilient to imminent floods.
But programs like these have raised concerns from residents, including Kennedy, who fear buying and destroying homes may take priority over raising or rebuilding, potentially destroying the community that once was in neighborhoods along the river.
“Policymakers very often bring up what is viewed a bit as an all encompassing solution, which is people just moving away,” Montano said. “But that doesn’t account for this cultural component which is our history, our culture, and that’s part of what makes our communities, communities. And unfortunately, I don’t think there is any kind of overarching formula of how to figure that out.”
Focusing on resiliency efforts, rather than relocation, can keep neighborhoods in disaster-prone areas intact. If more money was allocated towards mitigation and resilience, Clancy said, less money would have to be spent on recovery after the storm passes, and more communities could withstand the impacts instead of having to move away. Since 2010, South Lumberton has faced a 19% decline in population.
“We need to start pre-funding some of these actions and not just leave everything to a post event because you can just never get on top of it,” Clancy said. “You’re just playing catch up and you’re always just repairing and repairing and repairing. What we want to do is prevent and prevent and prevent.”
In addition to making houses more resilient, measures that defend areas from being flooded in the first place need to be built. Constructing berms, mounds of earth built along bodies of water to prevent flooding, or floodgates, adjustable gates used to control water flow, could help with this flood prevention.
“One of the main keys for improving a low-income community’s ability to withstand disaster is ensuring that infrastructure projects are being distributed equitably,” Patton with NLIHC said. “They need to be built in proportion to risk, and not just where higher income individuals live.”
Kennedy emphasized that investing in the community to create jobs and economic empowerment should also be seen as a resiliency effort. If more of the community had economic stability or financial freedom, they could bounce back from disaster quicker and easier, and rely less on programs that have failed them time and time again.
These conversations surrounding disaster recovery are becoming more urgent as climate change makes hurricanes more frequent and more intense. The Atlantic saw its most active hurricane season to date just this year, and in Lumberton, it’s a matter of when, not if, the next storm comes.
“It’s this feeling of every time you try to get back up, you just get knocked down again,” Goodwin said. “The people here are very resilient, but everybody has limits, and I think that the majority of us are kind of pushed to the brink at this point.”
Montano said to help Robeson County, and other communities across the country, deal with the ongoing threat of disaster, the country needs to see sweeping, federal disaster recovery reform.
“We need to rethink how we’re preparing communities for the disasters that do happen, we need to look at how we are approaching response and we need to look at how we’re approaching recovery, and what we can be doing to make that more effective and efficient across the board,” she said.
And for Kennedy, the fear that another storm will come and undo the progress that has been made is imminent. But for now, she is continuing her work with Seeds of H.O.P.E, where she empowers her community and serves as a mouthpiece for residents that can sometimes feel invisible.
“Some people are not getting the help they’re supposed to get. And I’m here to sound the alarm,” she said. “I’m here. I come to the community. I hear all of these stories. And they’re not made up.”
