CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Groups that play a key role in helping West Virginias recover when disasters hit are concerned what the future may be if there are major changes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
West Virginia Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (VOAD) Executive Director Evan Conley told state lawmakers Tuesday said if FEMA funding and scope are cut it will stretch non-profit groups even further.
“Our main concern going forward is recovery cases exceeding the capacity of what non-profits and its partners and our membership can come up with going forward,” Conley said. “We all know the uncertainty of FEMA going forward.”
Conley said the possible changes to FEMA would be magnified in West Virginia because the frequency of disasters has been increasing.
“Right now, West Virginia is having a significant flooding event at least once every six months which will drastically impact what the non-profit community is able to do,” Conley told lawmakers.
VOAD is currently helping residents who lost a lot in the February floods in McDowell, Mercer, Wyoming and surrounding counties and the devastating Father’s Day weekend floods in Ohio and Marion counties.
Conley said VOAD is still an effective organization when it comes to organizing non-profit and non-partisan groups to help with disaster relief along with securing grants to help meet unmet needs but it’s a much smaller organization than it was in the years after the June 2016 flood.
Conley said VOAD had 40 to 50 employees in the post-2016 flood years. He said now the organization is down to 4 to 5 workers and a few interns. He said VOAD continues to do the job but at a much slower pace.
Conley said one of the greatest needs in West Virginia in disaster recovery is increasing the number of case managers that are assigned to help disaster victims in the months whether or not an event is declared a federal disaster.
“The difference from 2016 to now, nearly a decade later, is the capacity to complete this work and it’s the same across the state,” he said. “It’s the same across the state–there’s very little capacity when it comes to case managers.”
VOAD does partner with Catholic Charities of West Virginia. Catholic Charities CEO Mark Phillips told lawmakers the group is trying to increase the number of case managers, even if they can only do it on a part-time basis.
“We have 15 certified disaster case managers on staff at Catholic Charities, 75 percent of those folks have another job they are doing but they can be activated to do case management,” Phillips said.
He said that may be the model that will need to be used from now on across the state.
“Those will be folks that might have 10 to 15 hours in a disaster but if you can get 15 or 20 of those individuals in a county or city in the wake of something then we’ll be in much better shape than we are now,” Phillips said.
Phillips and Conley appeared before the Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding.