Amid reports of understaffing, disinformation and political haggling over disaster aid money, the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared Tuesday it is “well-positioned” to handle the needs of Floridians who become disaster victims as Hurricane Milton plows across the state.

On paper, the State of Florida appears to be as prepared as possible to cope with the storm, now proclaimed by President Joe Biden as “the worst storm of the century.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis has deployed a broad roster of agencies from the National and State Guards to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and various health and regulatory agencies.

But the heavyweight agency designed to provide states with the bulwark of their disaster recovery support is FEMA, a Carter Administration creation whose job it is to provide aid to people in impacted  areas by providing cash, technical help and guidance before and after storms do their damage.

In a statement, the agency said its administrator. Deanne Criswell, “is on the ground, meeting with officials across the impacted states to marshal the full capabilities of the federal government.”

The day before, Biden approved an emergency declaration for Florida, which authorized FEMA to coordinate federal disaster relief efforts.

FEMA said it has “pre-positioned” seven incident management assistance teams, eight urban search-and-rescue and swift-water-rescue teams, three U.S. Coast Guard swift-water-rescue teams, and multiple teams handling health care system assessments and disaster medical assistance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Other teams have arrived from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Defense. The latter is bringing 300 ambulances and 30 high-water vehicles.

“Right now, FEMA currently has 20 million meals and 40 million liters of water in the pipeline to deploy as needed to address ongoing Helene and Milton response efforts and can expand as needed,” the agency said.

The degree to which any South Florida towns or cities would need federal help remains to be seen. To date, evacuation orders have been confined mostly to the Gulf Coast region, and Milton’s post-landfall path is expected to move along Interstate 4, passing south of Orlando and heading out to the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Canaveral.

A spokeswoman for the City of Fort Lauderdale, which is currently under a tropical storm warning and flood watch with tornadoes a possibility, declined to speculate about the city’s post-storm needs, saying the city and Broward County would need to conduct assessments to learn if the damage is severe enough to qualify for federal assistance.

Mayor Dean Trantalis warned Tuesday that while South Florida is currently outside the most forceful part of Milton’s projected path, the area could still be susceptible to heavy winds, rains and flooding.

“Once Milton has passed, I fully expect that our city will participate in any way possible to render aid to communities around the state that have been seriously impacted,” he said in a statement. “I fear there will be true devastation as Milton is unlike any storm we have seen in our lifetimes.”

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The mission

FEMA’s  objective is to work to help states deliver assistance they can’t cover on their own, including costs for debris removal, emergency protective procedures and the restoration of public infrastructure.

It also offers grants to victims to help with temporary housing, home repairs, loss of personal property, and medical expenses.

The agency said Tuesday it has nearly 900 staff backing recovery efforts at a joint field office in Tallahassee and across the counties affected by hurricanes Helene, Debby and Idalia. The group includes more than 460 people supporting recovery from Hurricane Helene, more than 300 helping people impacted by Hurricane Debby in August, and more than 100 assisting those impacted by Hurricane Idalia in August 2023

This year, the agency has come under heavy pressure from a wide array of disasters ranging from hurricanes and floods in the South to wildfires in the West. During a presidential  election year, its work has been highly politicized, with allegations that it is picking and choosing recipients based on political background.

But during news conferences on Monday and Tuesday,  DeSantis himself acknowledged that he had no complaints about the flow and timeliness of financial aid approvals from Washington.

“Everything we’ve asked for from President Biden, he has approved, and we do think we’ll get more approvals for some of the individual assistance and the debris removal after landfall,” DeSantis said.

Disinformation slows effort

But in a Tuesday morning media call with regional reporters, Criswell reaffirmed that disinformation had hindered the FEMA operations in North and South Carolina and Tennessee, all states struck by Hurricane Helene.

“We have faced this with every disaster in the past,” she said. “This one is at a level honestly that I’ve never seen before.”

The rumors and inaccurate information about FEMA’s efforts are “creating fear in some,” she said, as victims navigate through the assistance process.

“I worry that they won’t apply for assistance, which means I can’t get them the necessary items they need,” Criswell said. “And so those are the biggest impacts I see as a result of this constant narrative that is more about politics than truly helping people.”

She said FEMA has always posted rumor control pages online to deflect bogus websites, ID thieves and fraudulent actors who try to steal federal aid money.

The $750 factor

Over the weekend, she needed to engage in a different form of rumor control — from Donald Trump, the former president of the United States and Republican nominee for a second term in the White House. If re-elected, he would again be the one to sign off on disaster declarations that would send FEMA into action.

But in an interview on Fox News, Trump repeated a rumor, debunked by FEMA, that the agency will provide only $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery.

Criswell said the sum is only a starting point for storm victims, Criswell told reporters on the conference call Tuesday.

The $750, she said,  “is to go out to individuals in the most-impacted areas” to replace food, medicine and clothing. “It’s an initial jump-start to help them replace income for that.”

“They will get additional assistance for home repairs or to relocate at a hotel somewhere,” Criswell added. “We will continue to work with them for longer-term needs.”

Finances sufficient — for now

Agency officials have blitzed the national and regional news media with assurances that the agency has enough money to cover both the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and the soon-to-arrive Milton, the second catastrophic storm for Florida in two weeks.

Through the end of September, the agency had handed out $2.1 billion in grants to individual victims of hurricanes, floods and wildfires.

The FEMA disaster fund was low on funds earlier this year, but Congress authorized a replenishment of its full $20 billion allocation last week when the new fiscal year started Oct. 1.

President Biden and lawmakers want Congress to return to Washington to approve more relief in the face of the damage Milton is likely to cause.