18 Months, Four Major Disasters - Now HUD Aid Arrives In Lake Charles, LA; 5% Of Residents Gone

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The Louisiana city of 85,000 has been hit by four major disasters in the last two years: The double-whammy of Hurricanes Laura and Delta in the summer of 2020 was followed by a deadly ice storm that winter, plus another devastating flood last spring. Climate change has not only made extreme weather events like these more severe and less predictable, but it has also eroded the marshland barrier that once protected coastal Louisiana from storms as they made landfall.

More than a year later, the region has now received an unexpected deluge of federal relief. Late last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, announced that it will send $1.7 billion in extra hurricane relief money to Louisiana; around $450 million will go to Lake Charles to fund long-term housing repairs. That’s enough to put a significant dent in the $3 billion of unmet needs that Governor John Bel Edwards has said remain from the 2020 storms. The money represents an unexpected boost for the ailing region, whose population has declined by at least 5 percent since Laura — one of the fastest rates in the nation.

However, the late arrival of this money also highlights the limitations of the federal disaster relief system. Because funding depends on the whims of a gridlocked Congress, it often arrives after many people have already been forced to leave their homes for good. In the immediate aftermath of a major disaster like a hurricane, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, arrives on the scene to distribute aid money to victims. FEMA distributes this money out of a multi-billion-dollar pot that it can use for whatever disasters happen in a given year, and most of it helps pay out people who’ve lost their homes or their belongings. The agency spent about $1 billion on the immediate recovery from Laura, which caused around $19 billion in total damages.

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Unlike FEMA funding, however, HUD’s disaster recovery program does not have permanent statutory authorization, meaning the agency has to start a lengthy bureaucratic process from scratch every time Congress authorizes it to spend money on disasters, rather than cutting checks right away. Because of this, it took another four months for HUD to announce how much money it would ultimately distribute and to issue guidance for how states could use that money. The $600 million that Louisiana ended up with was far less than local officials wanted. For the rest of the autumn and winter, both of Louisiana’s Republican senators fought to secure more relief money, but their efforts couldn’t overcome congressional gridlock: At one point Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, a fellow Republican, blocked the passage of a standalone aid bill. The Louisiana delegation then hoped the money might appear in the massive omnibus spending bill negotiators hammered out last month, but it didn’t.

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https://grist.org/extreme-weather/lake-charles-hurricane-recovery/

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