From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: Puerto Rico Hurricane Recovery Description: We look at FEMA’s efforts as Puerto Rico continues to recover and rebuild after hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. Related GAO Work: GAO-19-256: Puerto Rico Hurricanes: Status of FEMA Funding, Oversight, and Recovery Challenges Released: March 2019 [ Background Music ] [ Chris Currie ] With most of the recovery work still to come, close oversight of the spending and goals is going to be critical. [ Matt Oldham: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. I'm Matt Oldham. Two major hurricanes, Irma and Maria, hit Puerto Rico in 2017 causing extensive damage with repair and reconstruction costs coming to an estimated $132 billion. I'm with Chris Currie, a Homeland Security and Justice director at GAO and he led a report reviewing the federal government's recovery efforts in Puerto Rico as they continue to go on. Chris, it's been nearly a year and a half since Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. How close are they to a full recovery? [ Chris Currie ] Unfortunately Puerto Rico is a very long way from making a full recovery. In fact most of the actions that we've seen today in recovery dollars that have been spent are for emergency work that's already happened. This is things like debris removal, power restoration and things like that. The longer term infrastructure rebuilding repairs are still in the really early stages and are going to continue for years and maybe even decades. Just to put some numbers around this from our report, Congress required Puerto Rico to develop an economic and disaster recovery plan. They estimated they needed about 130 billion dollars as you mentioned to fully recover. So this includes rebuilding roads, the entire power grid, the water systems, schools, many other things. Just to scale this, it's about three times what Puerto Rico spends in a year in its annual budget so it's just massive. And what we found so far is FEMA's obligated about four billion in federal recovery funding so far to Puerto Rico, so which is really just the down payment. [ Matt Oldham ] So who's involved in these recovery efforts? You mentioned FEMA. Are they sort of leading the charge on this? [ Chris Currie ] FEMA leads the charge at the federal level but the number of players involved that the commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the local level is one of the many things that makes this recovery so complicated. At the commonwealth of Puerto Rico level, they've established a central recovery office to manage all of this federal money across the entire island. You also have public corporations like Prepa, the power company and others. You also have 78 municipales or cities across the island that are managing their own recovery projects. So it's a lot of people, a lot of cooks in the kitchen. [ Matt Oldham ] Is there anything different in how the federal government has responded to these hurricanes and natural disasters that have occurred in other places? [ Chris Currie ] Well, I think first it's important to say that unlike other large disasters in the US, Hurricane Maria particularly destroyed the entire island and its public infrastructure. Even in other disasters certain states may have had bad damage in certain places but their entire systems or infrastructure weren't destroyed. So this has really required a top to bottom plan for recovery and rebuilding. FEMA and Puerto Rico are using what's called public assistance alternative procedures to try and tackle this —I know listeners are probably like well what is that? The traditional PA or Public Assistance Program, the way it worked was that it would reimburse grantees or localities for each piece of damaged infrastructure separately as the repairs went on. What alternative procedures do is it allows them, FEMA to provide all the money up front. The caveat is that FEMA and the locality or Puerto Rico have to agree on all of the damage estimates at some point and that has not been done yet. They don't expect to do that until the end of this year which will be over two years since the storm hit. A lot of the permanent work or the bigger projects can't progress until that happens. And these alternative procedures have never been used on this scale in this country. [ Background Music ] [ Matt Oldham ] So it sounds like FEMA has faced some challenges as they've led the federal response to Puerto Rico's hurricane relief including how to work with changes to their public assistance program. So Chris, what can FEMA do to improve things? [ Chris Currie ] Well, FEMA is eager to speed up recovery too, and it's working to do that. Shortly after Maria, FEMA implemented a manual review and approval process for all of these reimbursements to Puerto Rico. It did this as an internal control to prevent improper payments. While Puerto Rico built its capacity to manage, like I said before, these billions of dollars in recovery funds. So FEMA plans to remove this process once Puerto Rico has developed an internal control plan and they feel confident that it's able to manage these funds. And when they do hopefully that will be one of many things that'll help speed up recovery. [ Matt Oldham ] So finally what do you believe is the bottom line of the report? [ Chris Currie ] The bottom line is that recovery in Puerto Rico is going to be a long and difficult process; however, it's also an incredible opportunity to rebuild the entire infrastructure systems of the commonwealth and the island. Further, it's an incredible opportunity to rebuild in a resilient way to withstand future storms. However with most the recovery work still to come, close oversight of the spending and goals is going to be critical. So from a GAO perspective, we're going to be continuing to look at this and monitoring this probably for years to come. [ Matt Oldham ] Chris Currie is a Homeland Security and Justice director at GAO and we were talking about his report on the federal government's efforts to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Thank you for your time, Chris. [ Chris Currie ] Thank you. [ Background Music ] [ Matt Oldham: ] And thank you for listening to the Watchdog Report. To hear more podcasts, subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts. [ Background Music ] [ Matt Oldham: ] For more from the congressional watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, visit us as gao.gov.