When Samantha Montano rushed to Houston in April 2016 during some of the city’s worst floods, she saw untrained volunteers running kitchens, handing out supplies and managing mountains of donated clothing—most of it unneeded. The volunteers, not the Red Cross or the federal government, shouldered the frontline workload.
By the end of the next year, a record series of U.S. hurricanes and wildfires had prompted the leader of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to describe his agency in testimony to Congress as “tapped out.”
