As Hurricane Milton Approaches Florida, FEMA Faces Severe Staffing Shortage

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is running out of staff to deal with the potential devastation of Hurricane Milton as it barrels toward Tampa with wind speeds that have reached 175 miles per hour.

As of Monday morning, just 9 percent of FEMA’s personnel, or 1,217 people, were available to respond to the hurricane or other disasters, according to the agency’s daily operations briefing. To put that into context: Over the previous five years, one-quarter of the agency’s staff was available for deployment at this point in the hurricane season.

Even in 2017 — arguably FEMA’s busiest year in the past decade, after Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston, Hurricane Irma plowed through Florida, and Hurricane Maria plunged Puerto Rico into darkness — FEMA’s staffing reserves at this point in October were 19 percent, more than twice the levels they are at now.

The agency said Monday afternoon that it is well equipped to handle the strains. “FEMA is built for this,” said Leiloni Stainsby, the agency’s deputy associate administrator for response and recovery.

But FEMA is stretched not just by the brutal aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people and destroyed sections of western North Carolina. Its staff is also responding to flooding and landslides in Vermont, tornadoes in Kansas, the aftermath of Tropical Storm Debby in New York and Georgia and the Watch Fire in Arizona.

And those are just the disasters that were declared in the past two weeks.

“The agency is simultaneously supporting over 100 major disaster declarations,” Brock Long, who led FEMA during the Trump administration, said in a statement. “The scale of staffing required for these operations is immense.”