NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Since the beginning of 2020, Tennessee has declared a disaster 18 times, with two of those instances being related to COVID-19.
In 16 of those disasters, Tennessee has received nearly $299,843,580.93 in federal disaster aid, and that doesn’t include the tornadoes from this past weekend.
“As much growth and as much recovery has happened, for many, their recovery continues today,” TEMA Director Patrick Sheehan said. “You can go to neighborhoods in Putnam County just outside of Cookeville and see that homes are just now being rebuilt. New housing stock is coming up but there’s still the foundation where homes were destroyed.”
Factor in COVID-19, and that total amount of aid balloons to $752,154,476.44.
“Having to build ground-up again when you’ve just everything, that’s hard,” House Minority Leader Karen Camper said. “That’s traumatic.”
To declare a disaster, the state first identifies a disaster and estimates the cost. If it can’t cover that cost, the governor then requests assistance from the federal government.
The president then decides to approve or not approve the request, and a disaster is declared and money goes into recovery.
The costliest disaster in the past three years was back in 2020 with tornadoes that tore up Middle Tennessee. That was followed up a month later by flooding and more tornadoes in East Tennessee.
The third and fourth highest were the deadly Waverly flood in 2021 and the West Tennessee ice and snow storm in 2022.
“Those Tennesseans are continuing to recover even today,” Sheehan said. “Recovery is a long, long game for lots of reasons.”
Those reasons include things like bureaucracy – it often takes time to get money into the hands that need it.
Tennessee has yet to declare a disaster for the past weekend’s tornadoes, but that’s pretty standard. Typically, a state will wait to declare so it can properly assess how much money it needs.
