The Federal Emergency Management Agency has received 2,274 applications for aid connected to flooding in mid-July, far below the number it received for flooding a year earlier.
The deadline to apply for Individual and Household Program aid for the 2024 flooding was Monday. FEMA data shows that of the Vermonters who applied to the program this year, about 1,547 of them have had their applications approved so far, totaling $8.7 million in aid.
By comparison, more than 6,100 people applied to FEMA in 2023, and more than 3,600 had their applications approved, according to FEMA data.
Lamoille, Caledonia and Washington counties had the most applications received and the most aid distributed thus far for the 2024 floods.
The tally of this year’s approvals is likely to rise in the coming months as FEMA works through more complex aid requests and appeals. William Roy, the federal coordinating officer for both disasters, said a “handful” of applications are likely still left over from the 2023 floods, more than 16 months later.
He also provided data on a separate late July storm that hit the Northeast Kingdom weeks later and shared the same deadline for FEMA aid. FEMA has received 317 aid applications for that disaster and approved 209 of them so far, he said.
The lower number of initial applications could suggest that the amount of damage in 2024 was lower than in 2023, but it’s unclear how many Vermonters may have been left out of the process.
Liz Schlegel is a board member of Community Resilience for the Waterbury Area, a long-term recovery group that has spent months conducting outreach and helping residents of central Vermont navigate the FEMA aid process. She said the FEMA workers she met were “exceptionally nice,” but the agency itself was an “exceptionally challenging bureaucracy.”
“This is not a system designed to get people help quickly, and it is not a system designed to help people get the help they actually need,” she said.
She believes some Vermonters in need were left out of the process, citing state-level 211 data. According to Jason Gosselin, emergency management director at the Agency of Human Services, 2,671 Vermonters called 211 to either report damage or identify unmet needs, above the FEMA application total.
Schlegel said she encountered multiple levels of confusion and distrust in her conversations with Vermonters who could be eligible for FEMA aid. Some believed that calling 211 to report damage to the state had already started the application process. Others cited misinformation spread on social media in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
One complicating factor this year in particular were the number of Vermonters who suffered damage to their driveways, septic systems, wells and private roads, rather than directly to their home. Schlegel said many of them did not realize they could be eligible for FEMA funding.
If Vermonters went to the FEMA website to file an application, Schlegel said, they would initially be met with a question asking if there was damage to their home.
“What would your answer be to that, if your driveway was what was screwed up?” she said.
Roy confirmed that driveway and private road damage were significant this year, but he pointed to the multiple levels of outreach efforts that FEMA conducted for the 2024 storm to reach as many homeowners as possible and provide accurate information.
“Literally within an hour of the president signing the (disaster) declaration and it being announced for the mid-July storm, we had personnel out, initially in Barre and then in St. Johnsbury, knocking on doors, informing people of the individual assistance programs eligibility,” he said.
The agency also sent out press releases, set up in-person Disaster Recovery Centers and called Vermonters who had applied to follow up with them, he said. Last year, FEMA conducted 15,000 phone calls that added millions more to the amount of aid distributed.
Still, he admitted that some cases could be challenging to sort through. One example from this year was a 72-year-old woman in Sheffield living on a Class 4 road, generally a rugged, unmaintained road. The town-owned bridge to her home washed out, “and the town’s like, ‘Well, we fixed it in 2023. We don’t have the funds to fix it in 2024,’” he said. “That was kind of a tough position for us to be in.”
He said the agency sought to get her “as much money as she was legally eligible for,” including a dislocation allowance while she was forced to leave her home. In other cases, FEMA has been able to connect property owners to volunteers like the Mennonite Disaster Relief Service to help ease the gap between what they were eligible for and what they needed.
One positive Schlegel pointed to was an early 2024 FEMA rule change that allows the agency to give any applicant an immediate $750 to cover some of their expenses while their application worked through the system.
“People who had that experience in July 2023 — who did not have a good experience, let’s say — were exhibiting a fairly passionate ‘hell no,’” she said. “Even though we could say, ‘It’s better, they made some reforms.’”
Both Schlegel and Roy mentioned a Vermont-specific barrier to getting people to apply: Vermonters being reluctant to take help away from others.
“They’re hardy people, and most often they say, ‘Well, I’m OK. I’ll make it through. I really don’t need it,’” Roy said.
“(We) have had to put a lot of time into, like, those coaxing conversations that go, ‘you just took a $25,000 hit that probably, you cannot actually afford, let’s see if we can get you a little help,’” Schlegel said.
Although the application deadline has passed, Roy said that some Vermonters might still be able to apply if they discovered damage they were not previously aware of due to exceptional circumstances, such as living out of state or being hospitalized.
More details on FEMA’s eligibility, application process, and aid available are on FEMA’s website for the 2024 flood.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Fewer people applied for FEMA flood aid this year than in 2024. Could the need be higher?.