Gov. Glenn Youngkin is offering help to parts of Southwest Virginia flooded out in February before President Donald Trump is.
The governor held an event Monday to talk about some of the changes he wants to make to the spending plan the General Assembly recently passed. Among those changes: He wants to expand the scope of the $50 million that the legislature wanted to appropriate to help with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene last fall to also cover February’s flooding.
Meanwhile, Southwest Virginia is still waiting for Trump to act on Youngkin’s request to issue a disaster declaration for 11 counties.
It’s a mystery why Trump hasn’t acted yet. The storm hit Feb. 15-16. Kentucky and West Virginia got hit worse than Virginia, and Trump acted on the requests from those governors in a timely fashion: Kentucky was declared a major disaster Feb. 24, West Virginia Feb. 26.
Virginia is still waiting. More than a week ago, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., criticized Trump for inaction. “It’s awful that Trump hasn’t declared a disaster declaration for the communities hard hit,” Warner said. “These were communities that voted 70% to 75% for Donald Trump and he doesn’t even have the concern or care to designate these communities.”
Such a declaration would open up access to federal funding for recovery efforts.
However, while this particular delay is a mystery, it’s also not unusual.
The Federal Emergency Management Administration has a surprisingly helpful database of disaster declarations that allows us to compare the lack of action here with other disasters.
Since taking office, Trump has issued three major disaster declarations. The ones for the February flooding in Kentucky and West Virginia came eight and 10 days after the storm passed through. Earlier this month, Trump issued a third disaster declaration, for a wind storm in Oklahoma. That storm was in early November.
Such delays seem to be the norm. Before he left office on Jan. 20, President Joe Biden issued seven disaster declarations. The quickest response was for wildfires in California; that took a day. The longest was for wildfires in Oregon, where the fires raged from July 10 to Aug. 23. Another was for flooding in Alaska that took place Aug. 16-18. Except for the California wildfires declaration, all the others took more than a month to happen.
Disaster response is increasingly politicized, so it’s easy for critics to complain that a) Trump is being inattentive to Southwest Virginia, or b) Biden was lethargic, or c) both. To get a baseline, I went back to 2020, the final year of Trump’s first term. The result was the same: With the exception of a few high-profile hurricanes, more than a month elapsed between the disaster and the disaster declaration. The more I looked, the more I found that such delays have been the norm, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
Nor can I discern any political pattern in terms of where the disaster happened. In 2020, more than three months went by before Trump declared a disaster in North Dakota, a strong Republican state, after storms there. However, only six days went by before he declared a disaster in California, a strong Democratic state, after wildfires there. I couldn’t find any political pattern to Biden’s declarations, either. These delays seem more to do with paperwork and bureaucracy than any ill intent. Should bureaucracy be able to move faster? That might be a good question. If any politician wants to highlight how long it takes for government to respond to disasters, I’d suggest a visit to Buchanan County.
In July 2022, another storm hit Southwest Virginia hard — not that different from February’s flooding. Two and a half months passed before Biden issued that disaster declaration. Even then, it took a long time for governments to respond. That July 2022 storm washed out the bridge over Dismal Creek in the Big Branch section of Buchanan County. Not until October 2024 was the contract for its replacement issued, according to The Voice, a weekly newspaper covering that community. By early February of this year, the new span was nearly finished. However, a storm passing through washed out that replacement bridge — two weeks before the most recent flooding. That means that two and a half years after the initial storm, the residents of Big Branch are still forced to make a 7-mile detour.
Buchanan County Supervisor Jeff Cooper told The Voice: “This bridge should have been completed two years ago!”
Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter.