The Federal Emergency Management Agency last week opened applications for a program to help communities protect themselves from fires, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes.
The agency canceled the program last year, but a federal judge in the U.S. District of Massachusetts ruled that the program’s cancellation was unlawful and ordered the agency to reinstate the funding. Now, $1 billion is available to states, local governments and tribes.
Dustin Evon is the tribal resilience coordinator for the village of Kwigillingok in Western Alaska, one of the communities hit hardest by ex-Typhoon Halong. The village participated in the FEMA program before it was canceled. Evon said it is still unclear how useful the new version of the program will be for Alaska villages like his.
“There is good news, but we'll see how it goes,” Evon said. “A lot of these grants don’t really fit our rural Alaska villages.”
Last spring, FEMA canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, calling it wasteful, ineffective and too concerned with political agendas. Twenty states sued FEMA in response. After ruling in favor of the states in December, in March, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns ordered FEMA to take steps to restore the program.
Kwigillingok residents for years have been working to protect themselves from flooding and erosion and voted to relocate several years ago.
In 2022, the village was accepted into FEMA’s program, to select a relocation site. Village leaders also applied for another grant to do a feasibility study for the site, but the program was canceled.
“We were all devastated,” Evon said. “This is like, a year and a half of work all down the drain.”
FEMA leaders said the relaunched program will now focus on ready-to-build infrastructure projects, move money faster and shift responsibilities to the states.
The agency also said it will eliminate phased projects, funding for hazard mitigation planning and technical assistance provisions – the very things that tribes like Kwigillingok applied for in the past.
“When done correctly, mitigation activities save lives and reduce the cost of future disasters,” FEMA’s interim director Karen Evans said in a statement.
The agency also said in a statement that the program previously was too focused on climate change.
Evon, with Kwigillingok, said the move away from phased projects is concerning. He said that in rural Alaska, materials often need to be barged in, and construction can take place over several seasons. The revised program doesn’t seem to account for that, he said.
“We might not be able to utilize it because, as you know, Alaska has four seasons, and we can only do summer-to-freeze-up projects,” Evon said. “And the project we were planning was going to be a multi-year, and in phases.”
Kipnuk is another Western Alaska village that was devastated by Halong. The village applied for technical assistance through the same FEMA program in the past but did not receive the award.
With most of their village destroyed by the storm, residents voted this month to relocate to higher ground.
Rayna Paul, the village’s environmental director, said she hopes her village can apply to the reopened FEMA program for help with relocation.
“I think it's an important program, and we need all the resources to relocate to a safer, elevated area,” she said. “Before a natural disaster hits, we need to be better prepared.”
Sheryl Musgrove, the climate justice program director at the Alaska Institute for Justice, has been working with leaders from Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. She said she hopes that Alaska villages can use the reopened program for relocation.
“That funding is to build resilience communities,” she said. “And one way to be resilient is to relocate, whether it's just simple infrastructure or an entire community.”
She added that with many federal climate and environmental grant opportunities shut down, there will be more competition for the funding that’s left.
The application for the program is open until late July. The status of projects previously considered for the awards was not immediately clear.
