EDITORIAL: Fix disaster aid problems; don’t play politics with them
We fear what we'll see is the latter. So does the governor. His spokesman, Ford Porter, told the
So far, he added, nearly
That's true. But that's a pittance compared to our still-unmet needs and the federal funding that should be available and in use now. As we learned earlier in the summer, the state still has more than
State recovery officials attribute the holdup to the many reports and requirements that the federal
So did state Sen.
Last week, though, HUD approved several key environmental reports from the state that will allow the release of federal disaster grant funds, perhaps as early as this month. That will be great news, when it happens.
But we can't shake the belief that our state emergency-management and disaster recovery bureaucracies weren't up to the challenge that Matthew delivered. The hurricane brought unprecedented flooding and dramatically changed the definition of what should be included in this state's flood plains. It also should have forever revised thinking about who needs flood insurance and who doesn't.
When Hurricane Floyd brought similar flooding to parts of this state in the summer of 1999, it was called a once-a-millennium flood. But less than 20 years later, we experienced one that was even worse. And with catastrophic flooding the new signature of hurricanes (consider
So we hope our legislators can resist the temptation to play politics with problems related to Hurricane Matthew relief, and instead launch a bipartisan project to improve our state's disaster-response systems. They should work with HUD administrators as well, to find ways of speeding the federal requirements for disaster assistance.
There will be another Matthew. We'll get clobbered again. When it happens, we need to be better prepared, on every level.
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