State, feds now taking applications for disaster assistance

By Megan Gannon
Applications opened last week for Western Alaska residents to ask for assistance related to losses from ex-typhoon Merbok.
Local officials have been encouraging people to gather as much documentation as possible for damages suffered during the storm, whether that means digging up old receipts or finding pictures of property, including subsistence camps and equipment. Now residents will begin navigating bureaucratic processes to help cover some of the costs. But as morning frost collects on vehicles and snow dusts the mountains, time is running out to rebuild and recover before freeze-up.
“We’re trying to expedite the process as much as we can because winter is coming in so fast,” said Jen Wallace, an emergency management specialist with Alaska’s Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Management, who was in Nome this weekend in between trips to Elim and Stebbins. “The timing of the storm is kind of scary for everybody. We’re doing things a lot quicker than we normally would.”
Both FEMA, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Alaska’s state government have so-called Individual Assistance, or IA, programs, and those who suffered damages from the storm are urged to apply for both. FEMA registration is available at disasterassistance.gov or 1-800-621-3362 through Nov. 22. Registration for the state program can be done by Nov. 17 at ready.alaska.gov or 1-844-445-7131. In an attempt to overcome connectivity issues and other hurdles, representatives from both the state and FEMA recently started to visit badly hit villages including Golovin and Hooper Bay to help residents complete their applications.  
Wallace said state officials are trying to make sure their federal counterparts are aware of the cultural differences that set western Alaska apart from other areas of the country. That might mean looking to village leadership, if receipts and invoices are unavailable, to verify ownership information for generational camps and other property. FEMA also adopted a change last year to expand the types of documents it can accept, and this storm will test how smoothly those new policies work in rural Alaska.
“FEMA is required by law to verify an applicant’s occupancy in housing assistance and some types of other needs assistance,” said Thomas Kempton, a public information officer with the agency. “What they want to do is try to make this as easy as possible for people to apply and to use alternative ways of documentation, because documentation is always the thing that kind of makes it difficult.”
FEMA’s individual assistance program covers housing and so-called “other needs” assistance with grants up to $39,500, said Kempton.
Housing grants can be used to pay for repairs to windows, doors, floors, walls, ceilings, cabinets, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning system and other structural parts of a home that may not be otherwise covered by insurance. Other needs, meanwhile, can include medical and dental expenses, subsistence equipment and supplies, vehicles and transportation expenses related to the disaster.
Alaska’s individual assistance program has some similarities with FEMA’s program and is broken down into three categories: temporary housing grants, housing assistance grants and other needs assistance grants.
“As we look at delivering these programs simultaneously, we have to keep in mind that we’re not duplicating and paying for the same item twice,” said Jeremy Zidek, public information officer with Alaska’s DHS&EM. “It’s the first time that we’ve tried to deploy these programs like this. Normally, we do FEMA first and then state second, but because of our timeframe and winter freeze-up, we’re trying to deliver them simultaneously. We’re going to work very closely with FEMA as individual assistance to try to minimize the issues.”
Housing assistance grants offer up to $18,950 for applicants to repair damages not covered by insurance to their primary place of residence. Zidek explained that in some cases, the state had been able to assist with the labor required for those repairs, using volunteer sources like Samaritan’s Purse or the Mennonite Disaster Service.
Applicants could also be eligible for up to another $18,950 under the state’s other needs assistance program. Subsistence items, and in some cases, infrastructure, like fish camps, could be eligible for that program, said Zidek.
Grant amounts for temporary housing, meanwhile, are calculated based on family size and local rates of stay. But Mark Roberts, Alaska’s State Emergency Operations Center Manager, acknowledged that simply offering funding might not be sufficient in regions already suffering from a housing shortage.
“One of the challenges we’re going to find is that our temporary housing program typically buys housing for folks or gives them money to purchase emergency housing for a period of time,” Roberts said. “If there’s no housing available, then that’s kind of a challenge for them. They have to look to another community or try and figure out something else.”
In Nome, about a dozen people have been displaced by the storm. Several rental apartments on Front Street, including six units in the building that houses the Polar Café, were damaged by the floodwaters, wind and waves. At the City of Nome’s final emergency meeting related to storm last Friday, City Manager Glenn Steckman said he was looking into the possibility of opening a shelter.
“It’s just a real problem,” Steckman said. “I don’t want people sleeping in their cars because their apartment unit was either flooded out or because the building owner is concerned that if there should be a fire, he or she does not have the proper smoke alarm system operating,”
To help speed up those repairs and get displaced people back in their housing, the Nome Common Council held a special meeting on Monday to pass a resolution to establish a loan program to offer business owners along Front Street loans up to $25,000 each.
Steckman explained that the funds would allow property owners to finish their repairs and reopen their businesses while they wait for assistance from FEMA, the state, flood insurance or property insurance.
“It is essentially a bridge loan which would last about nine months with no interest,” Steckman said. “If they fail to meet that we would then look at putting them into a regular loan at 10 percent interest.”
Steckman said that the City has been in regular contact with business owners and expected to move quickly.
“If businesses came in this week, we would probably have their checks cut within a day,” Steckman said.
A motion to adopt the resolution was passed by councilmembers present: Jerald Brown, Doug Johnson, Mark Johnson and M. Sigvanna Tapqaq.
The Small Business Administration additionally has loans available. Businesses and non-profit agencies may borrow up to $2 million to repair or replace assets, with other funds available to mitigate damages during future storms. Homeowners can apply for loans up to $200,000 to repair or replace real estate, while homeowners and renters may be eligible for loans up to $40,000 to repair or replace personal property.
State and federal officials have yet to come up with an estimate for the total amount of damage wreaked by the storm. When Gov. Mike Dunleavy submitted his request for a federal disaster declaration on Sept. 20, his office wrote that the costs were likely to “far exceed” the costs of the 2011 storm that hit Western Alaska. For comparison, a preliminary damage assessment of that 2011 storm found about $8.5 million in public assistance costs and at least $21.5 million in road damages.
Roberts said Alaska’s DHS&EM would be conducting a preliminary damage assessment for infrastructure Oct. 11 to 14 with FEMA, which should produce some more refined estimates of some of the most expensive losses.
“This is a really expensive event,” Roberts said. “Quite frankly, individual damages and suffering are huge, but the big-ticket infrastructure things are what’s very costly, and sometimes those totals aren’t known for a couple of years once the repairs are mobilized and contracted. We have a short construction season, so there’s temporary repairs made and then they come back in the spring and do permanent repairs and sometimes it takes two seasons to get that done.”