Dina Titus Questions Witnesses on Including Extreme Heat in FEMA Disaster Planning

FEMA's Role in Disaster Assistance

• 💡 The Disaster Survivor Fairness Act aims to streamline federal assistance for disaster victims and expand FEMA's authority to enhance home resilience.
• 🎯 Removing barriers to funding and resources for underserved and disadvantaged communities is a critical policy goal.
• 🔑 Creating a universal application for individual Disaster Assistance could significantly help in simplifying the process for survivors.

The Impact of Extreme Heat

• 🌡️ Extreme heat, particularly in regions like Las Vegas, poses a significant threat, causing more fatalities than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.
• ⚠️ In Clark County alone, there were over 520 heat-related fatalities in the past year.
• 🏠 The proposed Extreme Weather and Heat Response Modernization Act seeks to enable FEMA to more aggressively include extreme temperatures in its disaster planning and resource allocation.

Challenges in Quantifying Heat Damage

• 📊 FEMA's current system relies on quantifying damage to infrastructure to determine aid eligibility, which is difficult for heat-related impacts.
• ⚡ While heat-related fatalities are a clear impact, acute damage to infrastructure from heat is harder to quantify in the short term compared to events like storms.
• 🚧 Heat can damage infrastructure like roads, bridges, and railroads, but the long-term and cumulative nature of this damage makes it challenging to document for disaster declarations.

Local and State Responses to Heat

• 🏘️ Communities like those in Southeast Florida manage extreme heat situations on a day-to-day, local level, utilizing cooling stations and seeking state assistance when needed.
• 🛠️ Public works departments can identify heat damage to infrastructure, though quantifying it remains a challenge.
• 📈 Naco members have data that can assist in understanding and addressing the issue of extreme heat as a disaster concern.