Now, don't forget, if you are a 'prepper', FEMA will take your stuff and hand out some of it to those who didn't prep one bit and didn't have so much as a can of beans in their cupboards.
I was in Grand Forks during the big flood.
I had friends who owned the largest construction company in the area (it wasn’t very large) and as the water receded they went to work-—moving mud, shoring up dikes, digging trenches for draining and so on.
Some days in FEMA arrived and told them to shut down immediately, because only FEMA could review the damage, survey the terrain and prescribe necessary remedies. This, of course, would take several weeks (at least) to complete.
My buddy and his family (and everyone else with a tractor, a backhoe, a blade, a shovel) shrugged their shoulders and went back to work. They had most of the basic dams and dikes and ditches completed when FEMA returned to begin their assessments.
MUCH of their fundamental work remains in place today.