Under-reported and under-served: Disparities in US disaster federal aid-to-damage ratios after hurricanes

Abstract

The level of outlays that individuals and communities receive following disasters influences the rapidity by and the degree to which they recover. While there is no prescribed formula for the level of aggregate federal aid a county receives, one might expect it to be proportional to the damage sustained. In actuality, the fraction of damages that are covered by disaster aid (which we call “federal disaster coverage”) is highly variable. In this work, we investigate the county-level correlates of federal disaster coverage using hurricanes that received Presidential Disaster Declarations from 2008 to 2017 by asking (1) What county and hazard characteristics are important predictors of counties that receive aid but that do not incur damage? and (2) Where damage is reported, what county and hazard characteristics influence federal disaster coverage? We find that counties that receive aid but have no reported damage are more likely to experience greater storm intensity and have more hazard exposure than observations that do not receive aid, suggesting that these counties’ damages are unreported. Concerningly, these counties also exhibit greater social vulnerability. Among counties that report damage, we find that federal disaster coverage decreases as hazard intensity and per capita damage increase, suggesting that more severe disasters receive less marginal aid than less severe disasters. Higher local capacity increases the likelihood of aid and the level of coverage. Overall, our findings suggest disparities in how disaster damages are reported in major comprehensive disaster datasets and in how federal aid is disbursed among counties.