Maggie's Farm

So what we're saying is not that they don't know how, but that they'd prefer not to, and no one in authority in their lives is requiring it--or frankly, requiring them to do much of anything they don't happen to feel like doing.

And then they bomb their first jobs, because their bosses the quaint idea that they do in fact have the right to require employees to do things in exchange for paychecks.

My small county was brought to its knees by Harvey in 2017. There was a lot of buzz about FEMA help, but I discovered quickly that FEMA doesn't do most of what people assume it does. It does grant some emergency cash for displaced people who flee to hotels.

After that, FEMA's main function seems to be to funnel money to the state to dispense according to federal guidelines, which almost exclusively mandate state- or county-level building projects. There are byzantine cost-benefit standards, but what it comes down to is that FEMA is not interested in building whatever blew down, it mostly wants projects that meet "resilience" standards by theoretically making public assets less prone to being destroyed again in the next storm.

I don't think there are any FEMA funds available to rebuild homes or local businesses, or at least, if there are, the effort wasn't apparent here. They were a few Texas General Land Office grants for rebuilding homes. Nor did FEMA want to rebuild, say, county government offices; they consider that a proper burden for local taxpayers and county insurers. They could get interested in road and drainage projects and shoreline protection.

FEMA's biggest impact locally is its rules for flood insurance availability, not just for individual projects, but for the whole county. The county is terrified of violating FEMA standards by granting too many waivers, as FEMA overtly threatens to downgrade coverage for the whole county if theydo.