bric is back as a fema grant program

You can thank a federal judge and multiple states that were plaintiffs looking to reverse the cancellation of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program. It looks like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is in the process of issuing new instructions about resuming the grant program. The first communities to be impacted by the resumption will be those which had already been designated to receive BRIC funding via previous awards.

There is a downside to this announcement being made. The only “nonrenewable resource” we have is time. The one year that BRIC was in hiatus cannot be recaptured or made-up for. Those months are long gone, and grantees will have lost likely more than 12 months of time to implement their projects.

Sometimes I use the phrase “the quick and the dead.” Meaning the speed with which we respond to circumstances in a disaster or pivot in our priorities to meet changes in the situation can made all the difference in outcomes. Will one year lost in implementing a mitigation project make any difference at all in a future disaster? We don’t know and will likely never know since we don’t seem capable of measuring that type of impact. I just hope that is not the case for some community and the people they serve.