Day 1: KEYNOTE: Enhancing Survivor Assistance – Adapting to Unprecedented Climate Disasters with Chris Smith
“Our mission should be developing communities to better withstand the challenges of our climate, building better and smarter in the first place, not just building back better. Together, we can create a safer, more prepared locality, a more prepared state, a more prepared nation.” —Chris Smith
2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
Disaster recovery should empower, not exhaust. By rethinking individual assistance to be survivor-centric, we can restore dignity and put communities on the path to true resilience in the face of catastrophe.
Chris Smith is an experienced emergency manager who previously served as the Director of the Individual Assistance program at IEM/FEMA. In this role, he worked to support disaster survivors and communities through the provision of critical financial assistance and recovery resources. Drawing on his expertise in individual assistance, Chris now serves as a disaster consultant, dedicated to improving the way communities prepare for and recover from catastrophic events.
Join the discussion as Chris discusses the need to evolve the disaster recovery paradigm, leveraging state/local roles, private sector engagement, and innovative technologies to create a more responsive, streamlined system that better supports survivors, especially those impacted by wildfires, through individualized assistance and a focus on community resilience.
Highlights:
- 01:02 Mitigating Against Home Loss
- 04:22 What is the Individual Assistance (IA) Program
- 08:53 Key Elements to Pay Attention To
- 14:30 7 Key Principles to Support Survivors
- 19:50 Right Assistance at the Right Time
- 24:05 The Role of Education
- 27:14 Building Back Better AND Smarter
Twitter:
When disaster strikes, survivors shouldn’t have to navigate a confusing maze of bureaucracy to access the critical aid they need. From responsive systems to community resilience, learn practical steps to better support wildfire survivors with IEM/FEMA Director of Individual Assistance, Chris Smith.
#Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #IEM #FEMA #IndividualAssistance #EmergencyManagement #DisasterResponse #DisasterPreparedness #PublicPrivatePartnerships #TimelyCommunitySupport
Quotes:
02:55 “Human suffering and pain leaves an indelible mark on our souls and what we do, and it leaves that mark on survivors as well.” —Chris Smith
03:05 “You can never forget the stories that people tell you, and it is so important.” —Chris Smith
10:08 “That’s the reality on the ground when it comes to disaster assistance that’s being currently provided by the federal government— all of those offerings take time, and that ultimately risks the economic viability of the communities that we’re trying to stabilize and ultimately recover from.” —Chris Smith
12:39 “Oftentimes, the government knows what they need to do, but they’ve not synced these actions with their partners before the disaster happens. And then suddenly, we’re causing confusion and delay.” —Chris Smith
15:51 “Time is of the essence. We’ve got to get the right assistance mobilized at the right time.” —Chris Smith
18:08 “Challenge is okay. It challenges us to do what’s right for the people that we serve.” —Chris Smith
20:31 “Every survivor should have a recovery plan… But now, I believe we should have an individualized recovery plan for every individual who receives federal assistance or state assistance.” —Chris Smith
23:34 “Resilience is not an accident. You got to have your plans in place.” —Chris Smith
25:18 “It’s too late after the disaster to start to teach somebody about what recovery is and how to do it. We’ve got to have these conversations ahead of time.” —Chris Smith
27:14 “Our mission should be developing communities to better withstand the challenges of our climate, building better and smarter in the first place, not just building back better. Together, we can create a safer, more prepared locality, a more prepared state, a more prepared nation.” —Chris Smith
27:57 “How we recover can make us more resilient.” —Chris Smith
Meet Chris Smith, Director of Individual Assistance and Disaster Housing, IEM/FEMA Director of Individual Assistance (2015-2022)
Chris Smith, Director of Individual Assistance and Disaster Housing at IEM, is a seasoned emergency management professional with over 25 years of experience. His career highlights include leading the Office of Response and Recovery’s Individual Assistance Division at FEMA, managing the distribution of over $52 billion in federal assistance during 175 federally declared disasters. Chris also played a key role in developing and implementing a funeral assistance program funded by Congress in response to COVID-19, delivering over $2 billion in aid. Prior to his time at FEMA, Chris held influential positions in Nevada, including serving as the Chief of Emergency Management and Homeland Security Advisor to the Governor. His diverse experience, academic prowess, and commitment to community resilience make him a valuable asset to IEM and a respected figure in the field of emergency management and disaster recovery.
Connect with IEM:
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- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2JPGPzGVPRjVfhdJQyuO3m?si=5b5561dd3c9549e3
Transcription:
Chris Smith: I had prepared a lengthy speech with multiple PowerPoint slides, something to really energize the crowd. And then I thought, we probably better do something now. We’ve had some great presentations earlier in the day so far, and I expect that we’ll have great ones for the next couple of days. I just want to try to add to our aspirational beliefs of where we can go with the collective brain power that’s within this room and what we’ve all experienced, and what we can do to change some of the things that exist currently in our lives when it comes to recovery.
I come today with this heaviness in my heart because fire is impacting more and more communities around the country. I’m also from a wildland fire country. I’m from Nevada. I live in Washoe County, that’s Northern Nevada, where we’ve got the largest area of wildland and urban interface in our state. Our state’s known for everybody. When I say I’m from Nevada, they call, oh, I’ve been to Las Vegas. Well, there’s more to Nevada than Las Vegas. But we have a very, very large urban interface area.
This past Saturday, we had a fire start in one of our areas. That fire has now grown to roughly 6,000 acres. It has now taken 14 homes. We haven’t lost any lives yet. But for those of you familiar with the Reno area, the valley is full of smoke. Mount Rose is on fire, and it’s pretty devastating. Despite the fact that over the last 20 years since we had a fire in that area, we’ve done a lot of work to mitigate home loss. We’ve been allowing homes to be built, but they had to go in there, really take good care of them and create some defensible space. You know the drill. And the good news is, all the homes that we’ve saved had that defensible space. They all were built through the right standards and codes, and we were able to protect them.
As Jen said, I’ve been an emergency manager for quite some time now in public service for about 29 years. I’ve been a part of lots of presidential declared disasters. I’ve been a part of even hundreds more state and local emergencies. And the one thing that remains constant that I see consistently is human suffering. Pain leaves an indelible mark on our souls. It leaves that mark on survivors as well. You can never forget the stories that people tell you, and it is so important. I’m so glad you mentioned that listening to people’s stories is the most important way that we can start to heal. But those stories and the way that people look when they’re telling those stories, the loss that they demonstrate in their eyes drives me to help them find that path to recover. I bet that we’ve all heard the same stories and similar stories, and heard survivors say some of the same types of things. One of them that resonates with me is I never thought it was going to happen to me. I’ve seen it, but it’s never going to happen to me. And I just want to put a pin in that for a little bit later on.
So today, as Jen mentioned, I serve as a disaster consultant. And part of my prior work, I was able to serve the nation. When Brock got a call, I got a call to come to the FEMA headquarters to serve as the director of individual assistance. To tell you the truth, safe space. I couldn’t spell individual assistance when I went to FEMA headquarters. I went there to lead people and bring about a feeling of caring in the organization. There are many, many people in the United States who don’t know anything about the individual assistance program. And today is not that speech. So raise your hand, let me know who heard of individual assistance before? Yes. Okay, good. So we’ve got some.
Most folks in the room know what IA is. I’m going to refer to it as IA for brevity. This is a federal program. For those of you who don’t know that it is tied to a major presidential declaration, as Barack was indicating, there are two types. There’s a FEMA IA declaration, and there’s a FEMA PA or Public Assistance declaration. They can be combined to be a FEMA PA and IA declaration. So FEMA provides this assistance across the board to states that received this major disaster declaration. Many states also have individual assistance programs. So a state could have their own program. Doesn’t need a federal program to run it. Only about a quarter of the states have some semblance of an IA program, and they provide really minimal baseline levels of funding. This isn’t life changing stuff by any means, but some states do have some level of assistance they can provide to disaster survivors if it’s not a federalized event.
So when we think about individual assistance in totality, I like to think about it as many, many different things. One of them is an attempt for community mass economic stabilization. Congress created a way to provide large amounts of money to be injected into a community, into the people in that community, and provide financial assistance to those directly affected by the disaster. And in order for that state to be considered for individual assistance, there’s got to be a combination of exceptional damages. As Brock indicated to uninsured loss. Well, let’s just assume, for argument’s sake, that a state was issued an individual assistance declaration for today’s discussion. There are six Stafford Act elements that make up the IA program. There is the individuals in households program. That’s the money. That’s the one we’re going to talk about. There’s disaster case management. That’s the confusing one that Jen mentioned that baffles everybody. There’s the Crisis Counseling Program, there’s disaster unemployment, there’s disaster legal services. And in the palm of that hand, it’s mass care provided by public assistance.
I often refer to this as the helping hand of the federal government. This was the coolest job to have to be the IA director because we were able to support communities with these authorities. Now, as we talk about the individuals and households program, basic level stuff here, I’m not diving into it, but I’m going to talk about some baseline stuff here. Survivors may be eligible for a few types of funding. Immediate needs funding, which is meant to provide emergency cash for clothing, hotel rooms, gas. It’s a quick shot. There’s not a large requirement for proving damages or anything like that. It’s just a shot that gives money to an individual who’s been impacted or who had to evacuate from a disaster area. FEMA could also provide rental assistance. If that home is not habitable, they can provide assistance. Many of you know this, especially those of you coming to this conference from Maui that FEMA can provide that assistance for up to 18 months, and that’s fair market rent established by HUD. In and of itself is a pretty good benefit. States also can receive, or individuals can receive repair assistance so you can repair your home iff there’s something to repair.
People can also get personal property assistance to replace these essential elements that they might have lost in the home. Just a couple of months ago, you had to apply for an SBA loan. Get denied from that loan, and then you’re eligible for that assistance. That’s now changed so that doesn’t happen anymore. FEMA can also provide to the state and to the survivors direct housing, which is housing for 18 months in the form of whatever really FEMA needs it to be. It could be an RV, it could be manufactured housing. It could prop up housing very quickly. It could be a direct lease. It could be direct repair and replacement, and that usually only occurs outside of the continental United States. I describe all those things to you for a specific purpose, and that is to really lay down the fact that those are great things if I’m a survivor of a flood, or if I’m a survivor from a hurricane, or if I’m a survivor from a derecho, or if I’m a survivor from a tornado. But those things don’t necessarily help me if I’m a wildland fire survivor. And so I think this is the challenge now that we’ve got to come up with because there is no repair for a total loss. There is no muck.
Anybody familiar with mucking and gutting? Yeah, some of you have had hurricane work. So there is no muck and gut activity that’s out there for after a devastating fire. There are likely no home rentals, and certainly not enough and reasonable commuting distances when we deal with these mega fires. And certainly, even if there’s a case for direct housing, if we’ve got a great articulation for it, there will likely not be any infrastructure that’s available very quickly to help those who’ve been impacted by the disaster moving into a provided direct housing opportunity within the next six months. Realistically, six to probably eight months. That’s the reality on the ground when it comes to disaster assistance that’s being currently provided by the federal government. All of those offerings take time, and that ultimately risks the economic viability of the communities that we’re trying to stabilize and ultimately recover from. So that’s kind of the FEMA program in a nutshell.
Not a lot for survivors of fires, for sure. And that’s why I think the government has more of a responsibility than I think what we’re currently leveraging. Now think about this, if what we have in our collective experiences is based in disaster response and recovery and leverage that to manifest a more effective recovery based disaster experience, disaster assistance experience for survivors, that would be tremendous. Some of the things I’m about to say you may not agree with, some of the things you might. That’s all good. My hope is that it starts to stimulate some conversation and action about how we can come together and bring about change for the people that we’re trying to serve that have been impacted by disaster.
So a couple other baselines that I want to think about the role of government. We all might have a different perspective about what the role of government should or should not be in disaster recovery. It takes on many different shapes and sizes. Currently, it’s based on the government’s capability. It’s based on the government’s authority. And I’m not just talking about the federal government. I’m talking about the state government, local government, tribal government, what authority, what capability, what ideology might exist there, and tons of other inputs that really drive what the role of government could and should be. Government must assume the role that they may or may not be ready for when the disaster strikes. So a few key elements that the government should probably pay attention to is RESPONSE. Response focuses on saving lives and stabilizing incidents. We should expect that from our government to be able to coalesce the first responders, and make sure that that is an element that is going to exist in every one of our communities.
Government should also be able to think about short term recovery, stabilizing the community, stabilizing that tax base, limiting flight from our impacted areas, and thinking more about setting that foundation for long term recovery, which will focus on rebuilding. Oftentimes, the government knows what they need to do, but they’ve not synced these actions with their partners before the disaster happens. And so what then occurs is we’ve got the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. And then suddenly, we’re causing confusion and delay. Anybody ever watched Thomas the Train? Confusion and delay was one of my most favorite lines from that show, because it is exactly what emergency managers live every single day.
We talked a little bit about government and what some of our baseline government expectations could and should be. And then let’s look at survivors and what the survivor experience, what we think survivor experiences could and should be as well. So survivors, right off the bat. We don’t know where to turn. Nobody is a disaster expert when it happens. We don’t do a great job of coaching folks up to understand, what way do I go? What benefit do I accept? What benefit do I not accept? And that causes confusion. And oftentimes, distrust. Many times, survivors don’t have the ability to rebuild for a variety of different reasons, construction, labor, permitting, funding, whatever it is. Rebuilding is going to be a difficult process. Some don’t have insurance, or they’re underinsured. And then most importantly, I think I see this a lot in every disaster. It’s really common, the disaster recovery fatigue from the government, the overwhelming amount of information push and community meetings. You got to fill out this form. You got to call this number. All of those things trigger survivors and make us relive these things over and over, and over again. So we’ve got to have an experience where we build a new path for a survivor.
I have seven key principles that I think of when I think about what we could do anew for survivors in disasters? We could create a system that’s very responsive, that’s the R. We could enhance state roles, that’s the E. We could improve our survivor support, that’s the S. We can get the private sector more engaged not in response, but in recovery, that’s the P. We can have effective accessibility to our programs, that’s the E. The C is community resilience. And T is timeliness. We have to bring RESPECT back to the survivor, and bring that in a way that we can all get behind it and move forward in a new direction. Which is giving the survivor what they need right off the bat, instead of making them dance on one leg and spin around three times before you’re allowed to pass over the bridge that the troll lives at. The FEMA troll that lives there and does that work?
So the R in responsiveness, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, of course, time is of the essence. The goal is that we’ve got to get the right assistance mobilized at the right time. It doesn’t do us any good to bring you a couch when you have no place to put the couch. So get the right assistance at the right time for the individuals that need it. Streamline the process. A simplified application that gives you the basics, and the approval procedures that we can get done very quickly for a survivor so that we can move them into a place to receive benefits is the right place to be. State and fire disaster declarations, or state and fire emergency declarations happen very, very quickly. We can build a program and process that enables survivors at the state level, at the local level, to start to apply for assistance. And we can even dream big here, make data shareable so that we can actually take an application that we receive at the local level, and not make the survivor have to apply again at each level of government, but try to really coincide to have an application that can work at any level of government to get you at least in the door. There might be more information that has to come in down the line, but I think we can overcome that. The bottom line is, we’re trying to be responsive to our survivors.
I think the leveraging of artificial intelligence, something that I might need right now is something really to help us predict potential disasters and the impacts of disaster on our communities. So as a point in case, most recently, there was some AI analysis done of traffic evacuation routes out of the Lake Tahoe Basin, which is right where I live. How to get folks out of that basin. For those of you who haven’t been there, please come and check it out. It’s beautiful. For those of you who have, it is a remarkable place that we worry about people getting stuck in that basin because there are only four ways out. And if any of those ways are blocked, it’s going to create a tremendous amount of chaos, confusion and delay. And potentially, a lot of devastation. And because of that, this AI report came out of left field, and the local government officials had no visibility on that. It’s challenging their belief system now, but I think that challenge is okay. It challenges us to really do what’s right for the people that we serve. And ultimately, we don’t want to have challenges at the Lake Tahoe Basin when people have to evacuate out of there.
I like the infusion of Artificial Intelligence to help us think about things that we don’t see already, or that we’ve become immune to enhancing state and local roles. So state and local responsibilities play a crucial part of disaster preparedness and response. What they haven’t done so much is recovery. States for the most part, look at recovery, especially on their survivor side. Either it’s not a disaster, it’s the VOAD who are going to take care of it, or FEMA is going to take care of it. But we as a state really just don’t own that. And I think that’s got to change. States have to start to take more ownership in, I call it Focused Disaster Survivor Coordination. Making sure that there’s somebody who’s linking up with the federal agencies to train the state and localities within the state to help them understand what disaster response and recovery is really going to look like.
Mayor Bissen mentioned the overwhelming flow of federal resources that comes into a community during a disaster. I call that the tsunami of federal assistance, and it is overwhelming. As a local emergency manager, as a one person shop, I have a federal declaration. And the next day, I have all these people coming at me, asking me thousands of questions that I have no idea what the answer is. But I’ve got to go up several layers of government to get that answer. It’s not productive, and an overwhelming thing can be mitigated if the state can help train up those individuals who are working with it. So survivors support individualized recovery benefits based on needs. Let’s not give away things that you don’t need. Let’s make sure you get what you need at the right time.
Changing up the way that we are offering disaster assistance at the federal level and even at the state level to provide those funds at the right time, so that we don’t put people into a vicious cycle of, well, you didn’t use the money for the right reason. And therefore, we can’t give you anything more. I see a lot of heads going north and south there. And I think that’s a big one. Let’s give the survivors money that they need at the right time so they can spend it on the right stuff. I believe that every survivor should have a recovery plan. Every survivor should have a recovery plan. I come from the classroom where we used to teach. We were told to teach at a center mass at Target, and those high kids weren’t going to get a lot of their education. And the low kids weren’t going to get a lot of education. But now, I believe we should have an individualized recovery plan for every individual who receives federal assistance or state assistance. We got to be able to help them through and navigate that. There are no two ways about that private sector engagement. Big things here include public and private partnerships, which are fantastic. But they tend to only exist in response, and maybe even preparedness. I don’t see them really manifesting into those longer term recovery areas. And I think that’s an area for growth for our country.
I believe that business continuity planning in a way that helps really focus on recovery of not only the business, but also for the community itself. And what that business is a part of is an important integral part of how we focus on disaster recovery in communities. Workforce training. I’m gonna speak a little bit about it. I think that partnering with businesses to provide disaster preparedness and recovery training to their employees is critical. Again, we’re not teaching people how to recover, we’re teaching people how to respond, we’re teaching people how to prepare. But we say nothing about what recovery really means. What that’s going to be like. And I think all of us in this room can attest that recovery is where the hard work really takes place. All of it is about helping that community rebuild and recover, and that takes time.
Accessibility. We’ve got to do a great job of providing multilingual, multimodal support to individuals who’ve experienced disasters in multiple languages created so that there’s not a gap of people who didn’t know how to apply for assistance, or didn’t know about what information to get, or where to get that information. At no point now moving on, should we ever be assuming that in this country, we’re only going to have one language that we’re going to speak to? We’ve got to move beyond that and build our programs to be designed to have multiple languages that we can support people in. I recently learned of a state run Disaster Resource Center. This Disaster Resource Center was located at the northern part of the county, and the impact area was at the southern part of the county. And that just happened to be about 45 miles apart, and they did that because it was free. The building was free. They didn’t have to pay for it. Well, nobody went to that facility. And so the people who really needed the assistance weren’t getting that assistance because they didn’t have cars to begin with. So we’ve got to think more about who we’re serving, and how we’re going to get that service to them. So having Mobile Assistance Centers, rotating them to where the people are makes a lot more sense than having them navigate their way all the way across the county.
Community Resilience, a big part of this is planning. Resilience is not an accident. You have to have your plans in place. A pre disaster recovery plan should be in place in every community, especially every wildland fire community in this country to know what you expect to do when that fire happens. And how you’re going to recover from it is something that we should do. We don’t do it, but it should happen more and more. And so FEMA could incentivize us to get those plans in place. I will also say that community education is a huge part of what I believe that we don’t do a great job of educating our public, our homeowners, our renters, and our students. As a teacher, I spent a lot of time teaching people about the Donner Party, what happened in the winter as they crossed over the Sierra, and how they got stuck. Yeah, that’s important, but not as important as teaching somebody how to respond to somebody that might have a heart attack in front of them. And then how to respond and recover from a disaster that we know that community is susceptible to. We’ve got blizzards in Northern Nevada, but not like they used to have them during the Donner Party. I’m not too worried about that anymore. We should worry about other things.
Timeliness, Rapid Needs Assessments. Getting information from survivors right off the bat, teaching them how to give us the information that we can use to help them is an important part of that. So developing a system to give survivors an opportunity to report what they need immediately so that we can provide that to them is a way that we can move ahead more quickly, work more quickly. Streamlining our financial assistance, as I said. Developing community support networks, mobilizing local community based organizations, teaching them how to do recovery before the disaster actually happens. It’s too late after the disaster to start to teach somebody about what recovery is, and how to do it. We’ve got to have these conversations ahead of time.
So in closing, I know that many of these concepts aren’t novel, but they’re reframed based on our experiences that may have become tired or forgotten. Disaster Survivor Assistance is about more than just responding to a crisis. It’s about building a resilient, inclusive, supportive framework that empowers survivors and rebuilds communities stronger than before. As we think about fire, I believe our paradigm must evolve. We have an excellent response capability, as I mentioned. We practice responses. We focus on response. Response is all over social media. It’s all over TV. There were TV shows about response when I was a kid, Emergency 51 and SWAT were the reasons why I became a first responder. I wanted to be those guys in that truck, and those things doing that work that was cool. But what we don’t have is a TV show about disaster recovery. Could you imagine what that would look like? I can too.
So in this week’s episode, Chris tries to file an appeal with FEMA. And the city of Reno is trying to get a public assistance project approved by the nasty state grant personnel that won’t improve it but says, bring me another rock, because it’s not the rock that I’m looking for. And so we’ve got to start that application over again. That’s not a good episode, right? But that’s the reality of this all, that we don’t have something where we’ve not embraced recovery yet to where we have a response. And until we start to make that focus and that shift to build an equal response and recovery, we’re going to still continue to perform response flawlessly and have clumsy recoveries. Our mission should be developing communities to better withstand the challenges of our climate. Building better, building smarter in the first place, not just building back better. Together, we can create a safer, more prepared locality, a more prepared state, a more prepared nation.
Thank you, Jen, to you and the After The Fire movement. You and the team are champions for evolving how we support people and our communities affected by this devastating threat. To all of you in the room, together, we can create a more safe and prepared community that understands that how we recover can make us more resilient. Thank you very much for your time and your attention. I’ll be here all week so we can talk about this some more.