The best experience we've ever had with a government agency

A listener shares her experience with FEMA

While the election news cycles continue to dominate, thousands of Americans are actively rebuilding after massive hurricane damage. There have been a lot of stories and conspiracies circulating - particularly in Western North Carolina - about how the government is and isn’t playing a role in the recovery efforts. We’re working to get someone from FEMA on the show to discuss that directly.

In the meantime, we wanted to share this story from our dear listener, Olivia, about the experience she had with FEMA after her home was destroyed by the Woolsey Fire in 2018.

In November of 2018, I was 24 years old and had been married for 9 months. We lived in the mountains of Malibu, I work in film and television, and at the time Nick worked at a local teen mental health rehab facility. He had built us a 284sf tiny house that we adored and have such fond memories in.

The Woolsey Fire interrupted all of that the day after a shooting in our community made national news.

We evacuated to Sherman Oaks, CA to stay with friends, and it took a week to be able to access the land we lived on to even see that our tiny house had been destroyed.

Shortly after the residents of the area were allowed to return, they were forced to evacuate again because torrential rain turned the burned land into a horrific mudslide zone.

A few weeks later, the man that owned the land we kept our tiny house on reached out to let us know that FEMA (which we’d never heard of before) had set up a base camp in the adjoining community. We waited in line for an hour or so, but while we were there, volunteers were actively walking along the line, passing out sandwiches and water. I remember feeling really emotional, it sort of felt like what I imagine being in a bread line during the depression was like. You knew nothing was your fault, but the helplessness and robbed independence were overwhelming.

We sat down with a very attentive FEMA agent. We had an odd situation because, technically, we were in violation of the California Coastal Commission by living on the section of property we were on. FEMA did not care; they just wanted to help us recover.

We didn’t have insurance on the house because we couldn’t find a company that gave us enough confidence that they would actually cover us in the event of an emergency. Nick built the house to code but there wasn’t/isnt? exactly a code for tiny houses built on auto hauler goose neck trailers, haha. So, we never felt sure that an insurance company wouldn’t try to evade payout by saying that we weren’t accurately covered. Our lack of insurance actually worked to our favor, as there were no waiting-on-insurance-barriers to receiving funds. If I remember correctly, FEMA may wait to distribute the bulk of funds until after your insurance company tells you what they will cover. FEMA will issue a maximum of $35k, so it is certainly no replacement for home insurance on a home easily worth over a million dollars in our area, but our estimation that our tiny house was worth approximately $35-50,000 with materials having cost $25000, we were relieved to have FEMA step in.

FEMA connected us with an agent who went to see our property and document the damage. It took a while for that agent to be able to access the property because of area hazards, but they were eventually able to go within, I think, about 2 weeks. We actually had a couple of agents work on our case, but as one turned over the case to another, they were given all the notes and information available to the previous agent, so we never had to repeat our traumatic story. I was always grateful for how much FEMA did not re-traumatize us and I think that is in large part due to their administrative efficiency. We did not receive the initial $750, but I don’t think they offered and we didn’t ask for it. At the time, we were safely housed with friends, and I think that was probably why they may have judged we didn’t need it.

Sometime after Thanksgiving, we were in a gas station when Nick checked our bank account and told me we had received $27k in FEMA assistance. We were overjoyed, and to this day, I think it’s the best experience we've ever had with a government agency.

Hope this account helps provide some depth to the discussion/and or help other listeners in their FEMA journey!

-Olivia

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