FEMA vows readiness as it prepares responses to concurrent crises

The Biden administration will have sufficient resources and personnel to respond to Hurricane Milton, officials said Wednesday, despite the ongoing recovery efforts related to Hurricane Helene and other disasters. 

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has deployed 1,200 search and rescue personnel to Florida, where Milton is expected to make landfall on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning, who will serve in addition to the 1,000 FEMA employees already in the state following Helene. Across the country, 5,200 federal employees have deployed in Helene response and President Biden has also sent 1,500 active duty military personnel to affected regions. 

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said her agency is not spread too thin and is instead well postured to help Florida respond to Milton. In addition to search and rescue staff, she has also sent incident management, power assessment and medical facility assessment teams into Florida ahead of the storm. The agency has millions of meals and liters are water prepositioned for distribution. 

“And let me be clear,” Criswell said from North Carolina before heading to Florida later on Wednesday, “these resource movements are not taking away from the ongoing, complicated response and recovery we are still working in the aftermath of Helene. I want the people to hear it from me directly: FEMA is ready.”

She expressed confidence despite FEMA currently responding to more than 100 active disasters across the country, which Criswell said was unprecedented at least in her tenure. She noted FEMA maintains a “layered approach” to its staffing, with its full-time disaster response personnel supplemented by headquarters staff and other employees at times when major crises arise concurrently. FEMA has also tapped employees from other agencies throughout government who have pre-registered to volunteer for details during emergencies. 

The emergency response agency has long struggled with insufficient staffing, which has been exacerbated by the ever-growing demands of a more intense and frequent disaster season. It has made headway in its recruiting efforts, however, and officials stressed they have the personnel necessary for the current crises. 

“We have enough personnel between FEMA, our federal partners to continue to support the response and recovery efforts from Helene, as well as what we're seeing and potentially going to see from Milton,” Criswell said. 

FEMA employees have said before even Milton presented itself as the potentially historic storm it has become that it was “all hands on deck” to respond to Helene, and staff from Hawaii to Texas were engaged in getting supplies and resources to the right places. Biden on Tuesday promised to send more federal employees to Florida as needed. 

“I’ve also surged thousands of federal personnel on the ground across the Southeast already [to] deliver every available resource as fast as possible,” Biden said. “And my priority is to increase the size and presence of our effort…as we prepare for another catastrophic storm about to make landfall.”

FEMA has been working hard to battle misinformation that has circulated since Helene struck, including by launching a “rumor response” page on its website. The breadth of the inaccurate data has waned, Criswell said, but still something the agency must confront. She noted, for example, that impacted individuals who never see someone "wearing a FEMA shirt" are likely still receiving water and food from FEMA stockpiles.  

Another such rumor is that FEMA is out of money and Criswell clarified the agency has $11 billion left available to it in its Disaster Relief Fund. She added she will assess the burn rate for the remaining funds once Milton makes landfall and determine whether FEMA will need Congress to inject more funds before it is currently planning to return in November. 

Either way, she said, her agency has made the necessary preparations.  

“Yes, this is going to be hard,” Criswell said. “Two massive storms have come our way. In only a matter of weeks, but this is what we do. We are here to save lives, and that is exactly what we are postured to do for these incidents.”