AUSTIN, Texas — Hundreds of millions of dollars are going to disaster relief aid for Texans impacted by February’s snowstorm. 

FEMA updates its distribution numbers daily on its website. As of April 5, FEMA has approved $127,957,552.41 and 41,017 individual assistance applications. 

So who is getting this money? Right now, only 126 of 254 counties qualify for individual assistance through FEMA. State, city, and nonprofit agencies are providing additional public funding, but many Texans are still being left out, and they are often poor, elderly, rural residents, or people of color. 

Thelma Williams lives in the predominately Black neighborhood of St. John in Northeast Austin.

She’s nearly 80 years old, but has the pep of someone half her age. The artist, writer, community leader, and activist has a house with just as much personality as she does. 

The entire property is covered with signs, pictures, poems, a playground, and even a massive map of the United States.

This place is very special to Williams because it’s where she grew up. 

“My folks gave me my property for $10 and I put a house on it,” she said. 

Williams house is roughly 40 years old, so when Texas froze over, so did her plumbing. 

“This whole thing just busted apart,” she said. “Somebody who don’t know plumbing, they say, 'Oh that little thing?' Yeah, but that little thing, you couldn’t – you didn’t have no water!”

However, she said her repairs were minor compared to most of her neighbors who have outdated plumbing. 

Williams knows plumbing because she used to be a plumber. In fact, she was the only Black, female plumber at her company at the time. 

“A lot of these houses originally have galvanized pipes, and with galvanized pipes, you know, you could have a leak any place they could rust,” she said.

The storm damaged William’s pipes outside, in her kitchen sink, and the toilet. She tried to fix the damages, but she says she didn’t have the resources or the knees to do it herself.

“I called [Austin Area] Urban League, because they put the roof on my house ten years ago, so I knew they did small repairs for seniors,” she said. 

Williams is one of the recipients of the Austin Area Urban League’s storm repair assistance program to help disenfranchised homeowners historically excluded from disaster relief aide.

AAUL President Quincy Dunlap says the storm exacerbated already failing infrastructure in Black and brown households in Texas.

“It failed on a catastrophic level,” Dunlap said. “There’s been a historical mistreatment of the non-white community by the bureaucracy, but they[City of Austin] are doing much better by partnering with agencies like the AAUL.”

The City set aside resources and funding specifically for AAUL so they could better reach vulnerable populations who don’t get the same access to public funds because of digital divides, cultural compentency, and housing and wealth insecurities. 

A 2017 Kaiser Family Foundation study on Hurricane Harvey disaster relief found Black Texans were more likely to say needed help but weren’t getting it. 

In a survey, researchers asked Texans about how the hurricane affected their families and what assistance they received.

Black Texans made up 64% of those who reported they weren’t getting help, and 55% of those who said they needed help applying for disaster assistance, and 38% of Texans in need of home repairs. 

According to a Bloomberg report researchers looked at cities that received FEMA’s individual assistance disaster aide after Hurricane Harvey and found affluent, white communities with little storm damage received more money than cities with greater damage and a higher Black population. Taylor’s Landing is a city of 228 people, not one of them Black, with a $69,000 median household income and it received $1.3-million from FEMA. Port Arthur has 54,000 people, a third of them Black with $32,000 median income and it received $4.1-million from FEMA. That breaks down about $60,000 per affected person in Taylor’s Landing and only $84 per affected person in Port Arthur. 

Dunlap says agencies and government leaders think they know how to address a problem, but don’t ask the community how they can best serve their needs, especially in underserved neighborhoods. 

“We’re going to serve everybody that we can, because this is not necessarily Black or a white or a brown thing, but it dispirately impacted Blacks and browns more than anybody else,” Dunlap said.

As for the reports on the Texas snowstorm, it might be a while before the data comes out. Spectrum News 1 has put in several requests for demographic information on disaster relief applicants at the federal, state and local levels. So far, no one has provided us with this information.

A FEMA spokesperson tells us they don’t collect racial information and claim they don’t provide geographical numbers “because historically they have not been a clear indicator of scope or need.”

The City of Austin has only provided us with total numbers of recipients. The Texas Department of Emergency Management is working on gathering data for state funding numbers. 

Either way, Black Texans like Williams don’t need spreadsheets or statistics to know when their community is hurting. 

A spokesperson with Texas Department of Emergency Management says it’s important for Texans to report damages to them so they can submit claims to FEMA for more individual assistance.  

If you were impacted by the storm, you can fill out a damage report at iStat, or call the hotline at 844-844-3089.