Kenneth Tingman, Federal Coordinating Officer for FEMA in American Samoa, summarizes the recovery status since the South pacific Islands were ravaged by both an earthquake and a tsunami on September 20, 2009.

We've made some really excellent progress here in American Samoa for the last week.  One of the most amazing initiatives has been that the governor has asked all the government workers to come out in force, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and the holiday on Monday to help with the debris removal.

One of the other things we have going on is that we opened a Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) yesterday and we're targeting today and tomorrow the population of Pago Pago, the area I'm in right now.  We've also continued our operations to open our Joint Field Office, which opened up as of yesterday.  We're bring in more people and crews to fill it out.  

We're ending our emergency medical team support as of this weekend.  One of biggest things we did with them is to process and identify all the bodies of the dead from this terrible tsunami. 

In the DRCs we have Other Needs Assistance, Disaster Unemployment as well as funeral costs.  We have a long-term housing committee that is meeting and we are beginning to implement those things.  We also have on our Public Assistance side, the effort to restore power across the entire island.  The water is connected with the power, so water pressure goes along with that.  Not only restore power, but to come up with a long-term solution to the power problem that was created by this tsunami.

I would like to say to the people of American Samoa that our hearts go out to their losses and prayers to their families as they not only begin the recovery process, but as they bring in families from around the world and have their own personal funeral ceremonies.  We see how this has affected them and we want to help them as much as we can.  Which is why the entire federal team is here, not just FEMA, but other federal agencies.