Cooper: FEMA a time-consuming part of tornado follow-up

Adair and Guthrie County Emergency Management Coordinator Jeremy Cooper says that his job continues to be a juggling act as the Greenfield and rural Adair County areas recover and rebuild from the tornado May 21, but many aspects of the process give him encouragement for the future.

The bulk of Cooper’s time right now has been focused toward the public assistance program through FEMA. It is FEMA’s largest grant program, existing to provide funding to help communities respond to or recover from emergencies or natural disasters, as declared by the President. This is an arm of FEMA that is different than what helps individual property owners.

Usually the public assistance takes longer to roll out than it did for Greenfield, but the severity of the disaster here necessitated a quicker turnaround.

“When we get to May 2025 and are sitting there at the one-year anniversary date — even now, you sit in Greenfield and think ‘what a difference’ — Greenfield’s going to look so much different,” Cooper said. “There are going to be so many things that will continue to happen over this next six-month period, whether it’s on the individual side of the public side.”

At least one positive sign Cooper points to are the full restoration of full services at Adair County Health System, which occurred Monday, Nov. 11. A celebration will be held Dec. 4.

“That’s no small undertaking,” Cooper said. “There was and millions of dollars of damage to that facility.”

Cooper said the EMS garage may take longer to build, but FEMA could be a player in paying for that new facility. Work is also being done on moving toward rebuilding Greenfield Fire Department’s station, which was razed this fall after it was damaged.

“FEMA moves at their own pace, which citizens have probably experienced on the individual assistance side. The public assistance side is probably even harder,” Cooper said. “There’s more paperwork, more scrutinizing and questions of who is liable. There are so many things that come into play. That’s probably my biggest time consumption at this point in time.”

While volunteer contributions to the community have waned over time, a group is coming later this month to build a house in Greenfield. One component of Cooper’s time throughout the summer was keeping track of volunteer hours, as they can be tied to FEMA reimbursements later.

Cooper said that the amount of homes that will be in progress of being built by the end of 2025 is more along the line of what he thought would be in progress by the end of next year.

“When you see the houses, the rebuilding that’s going on even in the rural areas, that’s all very promising for the future as well,” he said. “On the other side, there are still people who are working through their insurance issues and trying to get to that point of rebuilding. We have many people on many ends of the spectrum of the recovery part.”