Three requests for federal major disaster declarations are sitting unanswered in Washington this week, two from West Virginia and one from Kentucky, covering flooding that killed at least six people and damaged more than a thousand homes across the two states in June and July. None of them is overdue. That is rather the point: the federal government’s own register of every disaster it has declared this fiscal year shows the median gap between a governor asking and a president signing was 53 days, and that a quarter of requests waited longer than 77.
West Virginia has asked twice, for two different disasters. On 21 July Governor Patrick Morrisey formally requested a major disaster declaration for the flooding that struck the state’s southern counties on 22 and 23 June, seeking Individual Assistance for Boone and Logan counties and statewide hazard mitigation funding. Joint damage assessments run by FEMA, the state emergency management division, local emergency managers and the Small Business Administration had documented damage to 186 homes across the two counties, twelve of them destroyed and eighteen with major damage.
Four days later he asked again, for a different storm. On the same day he filed the southern West Virginia request, Morrisey declared a statewide state of preparedness for all 55 counties and upgraded it to a state of emergency that evening as severe storms, straight-line winds, tornadoes, flash flooding and landslides crossed the state. His 25 July request seeks both Individual and Public Assistance for Barbour, Doddridge, Harrison, Lewis, Pleasants, Ritchie and Upshur counties, plus statewide mitigation money, and reports more than 950 household damage reports logged through the state’s assessment system by that date.
The National Weather Service’s preliminary storm reports for 21 July place at least four survey-confirmed tornadoes on or into West Virginia ground, two of them in counties on that list. An EF2 tracked an estimated 1.8 miles down a hillside and up the far side north of Grantsville in Ritchie County, snapping mature hardwoods; an EF0 ran three-tenths of a mile along railroad tracks north of Philippi in Barbour County. Two more crossed the Ohio River from Ohio — an EF2 that began northeast of Marietta and ran twelve miles before entering West Virginia at Belmont, and an EF1 that started in the Wayne National Forest and tracked twenty-four miles, crossing at Raven Rock.
Kentucky’s request went in on 23 July, for statewide severe weather and flooding between 17 and 30 June. “Public and Individual Assistance will be essential to help families recover, and we’re working hard to secure this federal support,” Governor Andy Beshear wrote, confirming he had submitted it to the president and FEMA. Six people died in that flooding — three in Madison County, and one each in Hardin, Jackson and Jefferson.
The Fold reported the Kentucky story on 2 July, when Beshear told a news conference in Richmond that damage to roads and bridges made public assistance “a slam dunk” and that the county’s forty significantly damaged homes ought to qualify households for individual aid. Twenty-six days on, the confidence still looks reasonable and the timeline is the part worth examining: FEMA’s register, refreshed on the morning this was written, records no Kentucky major disaster declaration for those floods, and none for either West Virginia event.
What that register does record is how long this normally takes, because FEMA publishes the date a state requested a declaration alongside the date it was signed. Across the 35 major disasters declared since the fiscal year began on 1 October — every one of which carries both dates — the fastest federal decision took three days and the slowest 251. The median was 53; the mean, dragged up by that tail, was 63.
The speed depends on which instrument is being asked for, and the difference is not marginal. When these same two states wanted emergency declarations for January’s winter storm, both got them in a single day: West Virginia requested one on 23 January and had it on the 24th, and Kentucky’s ran on exactly the same clock. Emergency declarations release federal help for immediate protective measures. Major disaster declarations are the ones that pay households to rebuild, and those are the slow ones.
Kentucky’s own most recent major disaster makes the gap concrete. For that same January storm, the state also sought a major disaster declaration, asking on 5 February — thirteen days after the incident began, faster than three-quarters of the states that filed this year. Washington answered on 29 May. That is 113 days, the fourth-longest federal decision of the fiscal year.
The wait is not all federal, and splitting it matters. States took a median 34 days between an incident beginning and a request landing, a stretch that includes the joint preliminary damage assessments FEMA itself takes part in, so it is not simply state delay. By that measure both states have moved quickly: Kentucky filed 36 days after its flooding began, West Virginia 29 days after its June flooding — and just four days after the July storms, which would be the fastest request-filing in this year’s entire set, where the current minimum is six.
Which leaves the expedited request as the open question. Only two of this year’s 35 major disasters were decided within three days of being asked for — Louisiana’s after Tropical Storm Arthur, and Mississippi’s after the January winter storm — so an answer this week would put West Virginia inside the fastest six per cent of the year. One caveat belongs on all of it: FEMA’s open data publishes declarations, not the queue. It can show what has been granted and how long each one took. It cannot show what else is waiting behind these three.