PENDER COUNTY — As some displaced residents continue to await permission to enter FEMA-supplied travel trailers, four months after Hurricane Florence caused widespread flooding in communities along the county’s rivers and floodplains, FEMA and Pender County officials expressed differing accounts of a meeting this week to address the issue.
“According to FEMA the process of placing residents in units should take five days or less,” Pender County Assistant Manager Chad McEwen said in a county update earlier this week. “Many of our residents are waiting over a month. FEMA agrees that our permitting and inspections process is not the cause of the delays, [but it is] rather the lack of organization and incompetence of their own contractors.”
He later said that in some cases residents have waited up to 90 days to receive keys for a trailer, and is unaware of any cases where storm-related inspections, the county’s responsibility, have taken more than 36 hours to complete.
Related: Displacement in Pender County, Part Three: ‘Nobody really has one finger on it’
“I am not trying to assign blame, but Pender County has taken the brunt of the blame for these delays, and reality does not support that,” McEwen said.
He said the county has waived inspection fees and worked overtime to expedite the permitting process for these trailers. As a result, 90 percent of all inspections are completed the next day, according to McEwen.
Pender: Delays a result of incompetent contractors
Before the hurricane, FEMA awarded its prime disaster housing contract to a company called MLU Services Inc. based in Athens, Georgia — a result of FEMA policies in place to speed the federal agency’s ability to roll out disaster housing after a storm.
According to McEwen, on Tuesday county officials met with FEMA and state-level housing officials, including Tracy McCauley, who is overseeing FEMA’s post-Florence temporary housing program. During a conference call Pender Chairman George Brown voiced the county’s opinion on “how completely unacceptable this housing rollout has been in the county … and the concerns about the quality of work that the trade folks involved in this process have provided through their FEMA contractor,” McEwen said.
“They need to have a better process in place, to not have these people with units in their front yards for several weeks before they can get into them,” McEwen said. “That’s adding insult to injury when you have a unit in your front yard, and for no reason explained to you, you can’t get into it because the contractor can’t coordinate the plumbing getting hooked up, or electrical fails five times.”
Burgaw farmer Stephanie Kramer said she waited a month to get into her trailer because of mistakes and inefficiencies made by an MLU Services electrical crew.
“I didn’t have any issues with the county inspecting or passing it. Every mistake regarding the electrical set-up was made by FEMA’s contractors,” Kramer said.
“And under no building department in this state that follows the international building code would some of the work we’ve encountered pass. So it’s not a Pender County issue,” McEwen said.
FEMA: “This does not accurately reflect” Tuesday’s meeting
When asked about McEwen’s account of Tuesday’s meeting — including his assessment that both county and FEMA officials agreed that trailer delays were a result of disorganization and incompetence of FEMA contractors — FEMA spokesperson John Mills said the delays were instead a result of permitting issues.
“This does not accurately reflect what FEMA told Pender County officials during Tuesday’s call,” Mills said on Thursday morning. “FEMA has been working closely with Pender County officials to resolve permitting issues over the last few months.”
He said homeowners and renters are required to have working water, sewer, and electric hook-ups to make a temporary housing unit ready for occupancy.
“In Pender County, repairs have been needed to make some of the utilities operable, and this has caused delayed move-ins,” Mills said.
Further delays were a result of many impacted areas in the county located in “high-risk flood zones known as floodways, where local ordinances and federal regulations prohibit most construction,” according to Mills. As as a result, Mills said, FEMA is not allowed to place emergency temporary housing units in these locations.
Pender County wasn’t initially told that, McEwen said.
“They’re not allowing units to be placed in a designated floodway. We were not aware of that requirement, nobody was aware of that requirement until after the storm when they told us that,” McEwen said.
According to Mills, FEMA has provided a total of 171 housing units in Pender County, and fewer than ten people are still awaiting keys and necessary utility hook-ups.
“We are working closely with power companies, permitting offices, and residents to get people housed as soon as possible,” Mills said. “Going forward, dozens of eligible households are expected to live temporarily at commercial mobile home parks, not on their private property.”
Mills also disagreed with McEwen’s statement that the entire process — from delivery of the trailer to when keys are handed to a resident — should take three to five days, as told to him by FEMA.
He again responded, “This does not accurately reflect what FEMA told Pender County officials during Tuesday’s call.”
“It is important to remember FEMA-supplied housing is only temporary and does not solve the issue of a shortage of available, safe permanent housing in communities like Pender County,” Mills said. “FEMA does not always provide temporary housing units after hurricanes.”
After Florence, there were 34 counties designated for individual assistance in North Carolina — but only 13 counties were approved for direct housing, according to Mills.
“That’s because the other counties have sufficient rental resources — available properties — to provide temporary housing for survivors. Of the 34,000 North Carolina households provided with $125 million in FEMA grants for uninsured losses, only about two percent are eligible to live temporarily in a FEMA direct housing unit.”
In Pender County, according to Mills, the eligibility rate for direct housing is five times higher than average for two main reasons: extensive damage and a lack of available housing away from flood zones.
“Direct housing is only a last resort in communities with limited available housing away from flood zones,” Mills said.
Floodplains, centralized parks, streamlining the process
McEwen said that Chairman Brown expressed the county’s concerns “very succinctly to the FEMA folks” — mainly that things were occurring outside the county’s control, further compounding harm to its residents in the months after the storm.
“They took responsibility for it, which is some consolation,” McEwen said of McCauley and other FEMA and state officials during Tuesday’s meeting.
He said one idea discussed during the meeting was identifying private or public land that can serve as a central location for FEMA trailers, with public water, electric, sewage, and road infrastructure already in place. Such a location, or possibly two locations, would “cut out all this time lapse that’s taken up with [FEMA] trying to find sites and property.”
![A map at the Emergency Operations Center in Burgaw showed flooding, when the county’s rivers began to flood, two days after Florence made landfall. “The white [on the map] was all that was left dry during this event — 857 square miles, that was all that was left dry. The rest of that was water,” EM Director Tom Collins said.](https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.portcitydaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Flooding-in-Pender-C..jpg)
“When a storm like this hits, we don’t need to be scrambling to find one lot in a park in Burgaw, two lots in a mobile home park in Rocky Point, three lots in a park in Wallace,” McEwen said.
A central location on high, dry land would also provide a solution to FEMA floodway restrictions, according to McEwen.
“If they knew they weren’t going to allow units in floodways, and knowing floodways are where the worst flooding is, they should’ve had a plan in place where these people could go,” McEwen said. “Those are lessons learned, ways we can work with the federal government and FEMA to identify these areas ahead of time so these people aren’t waiting so long next time.”
Ultimately, McEwen said that it comes down to communication between state, federal, and local governments – and streamlining FEMA processes with county systems. He also said that McCauley has been responsive, good to work with, and “understands that there needs to be improvements for the next time.”
“There’s not a lot that can be done about the past, but we certainly don’t want to repeat it,” McEwen said.
Mark Darrough can be reached at Mark@localvoicemedia.com
