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$40 Billion for Disaster Recovery

This is the number in the omnibus budget bill.

The final federal budget bill is posed to pass in the House of Representatives today, Friday. The Senate passed it yesterday.

There are of course thousands of pages of detail in the bill, financing this and that, from social programs to the military and, yes — disasters.

Congress has earmarked $40 billion in this bill for disaster recovery to be administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). While $40 billion is not chump change, it is indicative of the physical impact of damages that are happening with every federally declared disaster.

I'm still waiting for the $1 trillion dollar Cascadia earthquake disaster to happen. It will at some point, and that one will cause people to sit up and take notice of the ever-increasing cost of disasters.
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.