Slow Pace of Disaster Aid Criticized : Relief: A congressional audit finds thousands of low-income residents had not been helped a year after the Bay Area quake and Hurricane Hugo.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, beset by severe staffing problems as it coped with back-to-back catastrophes in 1989, experienced excessive delays in helping low-income victims of the Loma Prieta earthquake, congressional auditors reported Friday.

Of about 4,000 low-income housing units destroyed or severely damaged by the Bay Area quake, only 114 units had been approved for funding by the agency more than a year later, according to auditors for the General Accounting Office, a branch of Congress.

In calling for broad improvements in FEMA operations based on the agency’s response to both the earthquake and to Hurricane Hugo’s devastation on the East Coast a month earlier, the GAO singled out the tardy action in the Bay Area for special criticism.

At the same time, the GAO report noted that the twin disasters in September and October, 1989, had sorely strained the resources of the small relief agency, which is charged with coordinating federal disaster assistance.

“At the peak of recovery operations, FEMA employed about 3,350 people in disaster relief activities in the five (affected) states, compared with approximately 230 staff normally assigned,” the report said.

FEMA officials declined immediate comment on the report, saying they wanted to study it in detail.

The General Accounting Office noted that FEMA recently has sought to speed up its procedures in response to criticism by tenant advocacy groups. Last December, FEMA signed an agreement with Bay Area groups to fund replacement of 2,070 low-income units made uninhabitable by the quake, it said.

FEMA’s performance in California, the GAO report said, paralleled that in the Caribbean, where low-income families also were slow to receive aid. Ten months after Hugo devastated that area, 400 families in the Virgin Islands had not received housing assistance for which they qualified, the report said.

“Agencies at all levels of government involved in disaster assistance have recognized, after these two disasters, the need for improvements in all phases of disaster operations,” the GAO report said.

The report said FEMA “is currently modifying its training to more fully assess recovery needs . . . is considering streamlining the process for providing individual assistance and has increased its reservist force.”

The GAO report gave good marks to the state of California for its response to the earthquake. “The extent of preparedness ranged from a high level in California, which contributed to its ability to respond to the earthquake, to a relatively low level of preparedness in the Virgin Islands,” it said.

The report cited the speedy action of Red Cross chapters in California, which it said provided emergency food and housing to 69,000 victims in 45 Red Cross shelters and furnished 2,000 families with rental housing assistance and 2,100 individuals with hotel vouchers.

In the long-term, the report said, Congress “should consider authorizing FEMA to institute approaches that provide permanent rather than temporary housing for disaster victims.” Doing so, it said, would require legislative changes affecting the Department of Housing and Urban Development.