WHEN FEDERAL DISASTER AID DOESN’T SUFFICE: AN ANALYSIS CONSIDERING DISASTER AID RELATIVE TO SUSTAINED DAMAGE

Abstract

The level of outlays that individuals and communities receive following a disaster strongly influences the rapidity and the degree to which they ultimately recover. While there is no prescribed formula for the level of cumulative federal aid a community will receive following a disaster, one might expect it to be relatively proportional to the amount of damage sustained, in part because most recovery programs are primarily based on sustained damage. However, a simple analysis of the fraction of damages that are later restituted by federal disaster aid (which we call “federal disaster coverage”) for all major hurricanes hitting the U.S. between 2008 and 2017 shows that this fraction is highly variable. For some storms, the county-level variation is more than six orders of magnitude. In this work, we investigate the county-level correlates of higher rates of federal disaster coverage. We do this by answering (1) What community and hazard characteristics are important predictors of counties that receive aid but that do not incur damage? and (2) Where damage is incurred, what community and hazard characteristics in a county influence federal disaster coverage? We find that counties that receive aid but have no reported damage are more likely to experience greater storm intensity and more hazard exposure than observations that do not receive aid, suggesting that these counties’ damages are unreported. Concerningly, these counties also exhibit greater social vulnerability and less local capacity. We also find that federal disaster coverage decreases as per capita damage increases, which has two interpretations. First, this could suggest that more severe disasters receive less marginal aid than less severe disasters. Alternatively, should damage among counties be held equivalent, the result suggests that less populous counties receive less federal disaster coverage. This may reflect the predominance of federal disaster aid being aimed toward the recovery of public infrastructure, of which rural communities have less. Our findings regarding how social vulnerability relates to federal disaster coverage are mixed. Some variables show that greater social vulnerability increases the likelihood of receiving higher federal disaster coverage, while others show a decrease. We find that greater local capacity consistently increases the likelihood of receiving more federal disaster coverage. Overall, our findings suggest some level of disparities in disaster loss reporting and federal aid disbursement among counties. In particular, areas with higher social vulnerability and lower local capacities are more likely to have unreported losses and receive less federal disaster coverage. Federal agencies (such as FEMA and HUD) should ensure these communities have sufficient access to and support during the federal aid application process to improve outcomes.