The Federal Money Meant to Prepare for the Next Flood Is Stuck in Court
Federal money meant to prepare for floods like August's was cut, then ordered back by a judge.
A wire story late last month described how flood early-warning work in the Himalaya lost its U.S. funding in 2025, leaving mountain villages with less notice before the water comes. It is a long way from Confluence, but the lesson travels. The cheapest help is the kind that arrives before the flood, and it tends to be the first kind cut.
We know what the other kind looks like. When the Casselman, Laurel Hill Creek and the Youghiogheny rose on August 10 and 11, damage in southern Somerset County fell short of the roughly $24 million that Pennsylvania’s emergency agency (PEMA) requires before federal disaster aid opens up. County emergency management coordinator Harvey Wetzler’s crews kept counting anyway, and Rep. Carl Metzgar and Sen. Pat Stefano are folding Somerset and Fayette damage into a single report. As far as we can tell, no declaration has come. Without one, even the new federal casualty-loss tax break is out of reach for flooded households here.
The federal program built to make the next flood cost less is called BRIC, short for Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. It pays local governments to harden what water keeps breaking. FEMA terminated it in April 2025. On December 11, a federal judge in Massachusetts, Richard Stearns, ruled that termination unlawful in a suit brought by 20 state attorneys general, and on March 6 he ordered FEMA to restart it. FEMA then announced a $1 billion round, and PEMA took letters of interest through April 24 and applications through June 19.
Communities of 3,000 people or fewer that meet an income test can have the federal government pay 90 percent of a project instead of 75. That describes a lot of the Turkeyfoot Valley. Whether any borough, township or the county itself applied, I could not find. If one did, tell us and we will report it.
FEMA’s other mitigation money, the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, generally opens only after a presidential disaster declaration, which is exactly what this flood has not produced. So BRIC may be the one door left.
If you sit on a council, authority or planning board, it is worth asking at the next meeting what was filed and what the plan is for the next round.