When emergency situations arise in Hillsborough or Rockingham County, we take our mission of helping people and changing lives a few steps further. The last several years have included significant weather events such as the Mother’s Day Flood of 2006, April Nor’easter Flood of 2007, tornadoes, and an ice storm in December of 2009 causing a great deal of property destruction. In 2020 we were met with a global pandemic and state-wide shutdown causing a heavy burden on our economy with thousands of lay-offs costing families and businesses months of income. All of these events have had long-lasting impacts on the lives of New Hampshire residents and immediate assistance was required in the aftermath to strengthen area-wide recovery.
Our Long-Term Disaster Recovery Team provides case management by sharing information, simplifying resident access to services & fiscal resources, and helping to resolve cases of those affected by disasters. We are proud to be part of the statewide network of Community Action Agencies assisting families through their struggles as we recover from these disasters.
The Long-Term Disaster Recovery program came about when the Mother's Day Flood happened in 2006. All five New Hampshire Community Action Agencies continued to assist families where FEMA and SBA (Small Business Administration) ended. At the time, Governor Lynch decided that the Community Action Agencies were the best fit to handle the long-term recovery because we were already active in the community.
The money we used was raised from a tele-a-thon that WMUR held to assist families that were impacted by the 100-year flood. FEMA and SBA were only able to cover a percentage of what people needed, and we stepped in to bridge the gap and help families get closer to where they were before the flood. Once they had gone through the process with FEMA and SBA, we would meet with the families and do site visits before bringing up the requests for additional money to a panel at National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (NVOAD) in Concord to determine if a financial award could be made available. Sometimes the panel would want additional information from the family, or collectively we would try to get what they needed a different way so we could allocate the money to something else the family needed.
Normally families would go through FEMA and SBA and then come to us if they were still in need of additional monies to make the home livable. The families that live in Danis Park in Goffstown were probably the most effected and a lot of people needed to raise their foundations to 9 feet as well as add flood gates in the event there was another flood. Some people simply decided to walk away from their losses and start over.
We partnered with Somersworth High School and There's No Place Like Home based out of Grace Community Church in Rochester who donated a modular home to a family in Goffstown that lost their home. The TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition also rebuilt a home on the Westside of Manchester for a family that had lost everything. The family had four young boys and were actually paying a mortgage for a home that no longer existed while renting an apartment next door to their vacant lot.
We also partnered with NHVOAD and the Lutheran Church who provided us with some software needed at the time to help process the long-term recovery applications. We assisted with dumpsters for cleanup as well as additional materials that FEMA and SBA didn't cover.
When the COVID-19 crisis struck in 2020 bringing months of businesses being shut down and paychecks dwindling, the worries of rent, mortgage and utility payments going unpaid started to rise – as did the fears of eviction and shut-off notices. Through funding provided by the CARES Act and allocated by Governor Sununu, New Hampshire Community Action Agencies once again were called in to help facilitate the New Hampshire Housing Relief Program. This program would help those in need of rent, mortgage or utility assistance due to lost income or increased household expenses as a result of COVID-19 by paying past-due bills from April through December 2020. Eligible applicants received the financial help they needed to get through to the new year.