Ed Note: This post was originally published on the official blog of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
FEMA currently has more than 5,100 personnel working alongside our state and local partners. We are supporting disaster response and recovery operations throughout the areas impacted by Hurricane Sandy. We’re also standing ready to deploy additional resources if needed to respond to the Nor’easter that is forecasted to impact the region in the coming days. This new coastal storm is predicted to impact the region beginning after midnight Tuesday with impacts continuing Wednesday and into Thursday.
We have senior-level emergency management experts in operations, logistics, and recovery embedded, side-by-side with state and local emergency managers throughout New York and New Jersey to ensure clear lines of communication and immediately bring to bear the full resources of the federal government, as needed to respond to the Nor’easter or continue to the recovery efforts from Sandy.
FEMA personnel are on the ground (we call them community relations teams), going door to door, letting individuals know how to register with FEMA for financial assistance. We have already had over 277,000 people apply for financial assistance, and over $250 million in approved.
At the requests of New York and New Jersey, FEMA is delivering commodities such as food, water, blankets, and generators to distribution points across the region impacted by Sandy, and as those commodities are distributed, we are pre-positioning additional resources and supplies to ensure they are in place if needed by our state and local partners to respond to the Nor’easter.