Management Alert - Concerns with Potential Duplicate or Ineligible FEMA Public Assistance Funding for Facilities Damaged by Back-to-Back Disasters

The report objective was to emphasize the potential challenges that FEMA will face in providing Public Assistance funding for facilities that may have sustained damages from back-to-back disasters. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria — some of the most catastrophic disasters in recent United States history — resulted in multiple disaster declarations and billions of dollars in damages to areas within several Gulf Coast and Southeast states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. We noted many of the same designated disaster areas for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma overlapped areas also declared for incidents earlier in 2017 and 2016. As a result, many of the same facilities affected by an earlier incident may have also received damage under Hurricanes Harvey or Irma before repairs to the facility had been completed. To avoid obligating duplicate repair costs to an affected facility, FEMA will need to discern which incident caused damages to the facility and whether repairs necessitated by the previous incident were complete. Therefore, FEMA needs to make certain that it has effective controls in place to minimize the risk of funding duplicate or ineligible repair costs of facilities damaged by back-to-back incidents.