“There are several different studies out there that are all over the place when it comes to death," said FEMA Administrator Brock Long. | Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo Hurricane Maria FEMA chief dodges Puerto Rico hurricane death toll

FEMA Administrator Brock Long on Sunday would not say whether he agrees with the Puerto Rican government-backed assessment that credited hurricanes Irma and Maria with nearly 3,000 deaths on the island last year.

“It's hard to tell what's accurate and what's not,” Long said on "Fox News Sunday."


He noted that counting storm deaths is not a part of the purview of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, except for when calculating funeral benefits put forward by the agency. Disagreements over the official death toll in Puerto Rico, he said, may stem from differences in opinion over what constitutes a storm-related death.

“There are several different studies out there that are all over the place when it comes to death. There is a difference between direct deaths and indirect deaths," he said. "One study could have studied the entire year that’s gone by, about the number of indirect deaths over time or whatever, you know, versus a six-month study in George Washington [University]. There’s a lot of issues with numbers being all over the place."

The government response to the pair of hurricanes has been widely panned in the year following the storms, and for months the official death toll accepted by the government was 64. An independent analysis from researchers at George Washington University released in August put that number at 2,975 over the six months following the storm. The Puerto Rican government has since accepted that number as the official death toll.

Long was asked to respond to a series of tweets from President Donald Trump on Thursday in which he dismissed the revised death toll as a partisan ploy manufactured by Democrats to make him look bad and criticized officials in Puerto Rico for their inability to accurately tally the casualties.

The controversy heated up just as Hurricane Florence took aim at the Carolinas last week. The death toll from that storm stands at 14, but Long warned that the region is not out of the woods yet. Flooding has increasingly become a concern.

He said government’s response to Florence was as good as it could be and praised Trump’s involvement in storm preparation.

“I don’t see any holes," Long said. "I think we were as prepositioned from the government standpoint as we could be.”