So as you may know, Dallas suffered a fairly serious tornado back in October. An EF-3 tornado tore its way across fifteen miles of the northern half of the city. Surprisingly, no lives were lost, and there were very few injuries- probably due to effective weather forecasting and emergency communications. Despite that, the tornado is the most costly tornado in Texas history, with an estimated 2 billion dollars of damage. This is in the same ballpark as smaller hurricanes.
So you’d think that FEMA aid and money would be forthcoming, since the scale of the disaster is large, and the Governor declared it a disaster, right? Nope, apparently FEMA ruled that since it was within the scope of the state and local governments to handle, they’re not going to help.
And that’s the problem with FEMA as it stands; it essentially penalizes states and localities that spend the money to be well prepared and ready for stuff like this, and it effectively rewards others that spend that same money elsewhere, and are ridiculously unprepared for this kind of thing. Like Louisiana; any time there’s a disaster of any sort, they trip over their own dicks and fall flat on their own faces and flail around in the mud and cry about it- you see it with every hurricane that hits, and with every other disaster- even COVID-19. And the Federal government ends up bailing them out, while telling other states like Texas to shove off, because we spent our money prudently.
There ought to be some kind of penalty to states like Louisiana, and/or some kind of reward/rebate to more competent/prepared states like Texas. I mean, FEMA *IS *supposed to be a sort of Federal-level emergency organization that takes over when state/local resources are overwhelmed, but there should be some kind of recognition that some states are governed by morons, and that they are overwhelmed because of incompetence and graft, not just a disaster that overwhelms otherwise prudent efforts at preparation.
That’s the complaint I have; it seems to my inexpert eye like the current setup incentivizes spending money in other places than emergency preparedness, because the Feds will bail them out, and penalizes states that spend money prudently.
