The Small Business Administration spent the first day of hurricane season putting the final touches on a comprehensive disaster response plan and delivering it to Congress.
“It will be up there by the end of the day,” SBA Administrator Steven Preston said June 1.
Three weeks earlier, more than 30 SBA employees gathered together to work through a hypothetical disaster larger than Hurricane Katrina. The point of the exercise was to make sure the agency’s revamped disaster loan processes could handle a major catastrophe — even one that forced the agency to evacuate its own Washington, D.C. headquarters.
“We fared well,” Preston said.
That stands in sharp contrast to the agency’s performance following Katrina, when Gulf Coast homeowners and businesses faced long delays in receiving disaster loans from the SBA. The agency offers low-interest loans to disaster victims for damages that aren’t covered by insurance.
The SBA received more than 420,000 disaster loan applications following Katrina and 2005’s other Gulf Coast hurricanes. The agency couldn’t handle this record demand — loan applicants had to wait months for the SBA to process their requests, and thousands of hurricane victims gave up and withdrew their applications.
Photo by worldproutassembly.org.
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