As Los Angeles firefighters push into their sixth day battling the still-raging wildfires, thousands of residents are beginning to survey the damage left behind in their communities.
Hundreds of homes have been destroyed, and more than 150,000 residents are under evacuation orders as the city braces for more powerful winds which threaten to exacerbate the already devastating fires.
Last week, President Biden declared a major disaster in the area, opening up federal funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The White House says the funding is being used to provide people with services such as grants for temporary housing and low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses.
In an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition, Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, spoke with host Ayesha Rascoe about how this assistance is being used to help LA County residents affected by the wildfires.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
You've seen a lot of disasters. What stands out about this one?
People have lost everything. When you look at a hurricane and a tornado, people have something that they can come sift through and try to find their memories. But here, they've lost the physical structure. But they've also lost so many of their memories, which makes this journey that they're going to have to go through that much more difficult in the coming weeks and months.
What sort of financial assistance is FEMA offering people who've lost their properties and possessions?
FEMA has a program called individual assistance, and it's designed to jump start the individual or family's recovery process. If they haven't registered already, they should register for assistance, and they can go to disasterassistance.gov.
And what they need to do too is contact their insurance company, because while our programs jump start the recovery process, we're not going to rebuild their home for them. So the insurance company is the biggest piece that may help with that. If they still have needs, we're going to work with our other partners, like the Small Business Administration or our philanthropic and our nonprofit partners, to help each of these families as they're trying to figure out what they're going to have to do next.
Do you know how many people have applied for FEMA assistance so far?
Over 24,000 have applied already, but we know that that number is going to continue to rise.
You talked about people trying to go to their insurance companies, but we know that a lot of people may not have insurance policies that cover fires. Is there anything that FEMA can do about that?
There's nothing that we can do as far as requiring the insurance company to stay in. What we want to be able to do is work with these communities as they rebuild and rebuild them in a way that makes them more resilient to future disasters so the insurance industry wants to stay there, but I just want to emphasize that we need people to still go to their insurance company and get something that shows that they're either underinsured or uninsured. If they are, it opens up their ability to access the other programs, and so it's a really important step to still reach out to them.
What about people who have evacuated but can't stay with friends or family? Are there temporary shelters?
There are a number of shelters around the area. But one of the programs that FEMA also has is we can reimburse them if they've been staying in a hotel. If you've stayed in a hotel, keep your receipts. Register for that assistance, and then we can help them get reimbursed for the costs that they've had in these initial days of just trying to stay safe and stay out of harm's way.
FEMA money also goes to local governments for recovery efforts. What's the top priority there right now?
For the rebuilding, the first thing that we're going to have to do is remove all of the damaged debris, right, all of the structures that have been destroyed. And so before we can start rebuilding roads and rebuilding homes, rebuilding businesses, we have to get that debris out of the way. That's one of the big steps that needs to start, which is why President Biden gave 100% of cost reimbursement to California for debris removal, as well as covering all of their emergency costs that they've had during the response to this. And then we're going to work with the state of California with what their priorities are to help them in their recovery process.
President-elect Donald Trump is claiming FEMA doesn't have enough money to respond to these fires. Is that true?
That is absolutely false. We had bipartisan support with the supplemental and we got an additional $27 billion to support the response and the recovery from these fires, as well as the ongoing recovery that we're doing in North Carolina and Georgia and Florida from hurricanes Helene and Milton.
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