How Helene gave way to ‘Hurricane snafu’ in the Carolinas

It wasn’t as if the Tar Heel state didn’t see Hurricane Helene coming. On Sept. 25, one day before Helene stormed ashore, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency as the storm’s path showed it churning northward toward Appalachia after making landfall in Florida.

Yet that advance declaration was not followed by any state evacuation orders, and the population largely sheltered in place as Helene hit the steep, wooded hills of western North Carolina, squatting over the area, unleashing more than an inch of water an hour for more than a day. The unprecedented, relentless downpour, falling on ground already saturated by rain the week before, tore old pines and hardwoods out by the roots, creating arboreal torpedoes that rocketed down the steep inclines; water that turned photogenic stony creeks into whitewater torrents, lifting ancient streambed boulders and tossing them like chips on to roads and into homes and buildings. The once-in-a-millennium storm left 225 people dead, nearly half of them in North Carolina, with dozens still missing as of early November.

As residents in Asheville, Chimney Creek, and other smaller communities continue to pick up from the carnage, after-action reports indicate government agencies at the federal and state levels were slow to react. Interviews with several private relief groups that sprang into action after Helene, along with statistics provided by congressional sources, indicate that Cooper’s office and the Biden administration were slow to activate military personnel and assets like helicopters that were critical in the days after the storm. In addition, budgetary moves and internal communications have also drawn questions about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency is spending its money and how it envisioned its purpose in a Biden administration suffused with “diversity, equity and inclusion” mandates.

FEMA is also wrestling with revelations that politics had influenced some of its relief efforts. The agency fired a staffer who told crews to avoid houses in storm-damaged parts of Florida that displayed Donald Trump campaign signs. The dismissed worker said this week her orders were not an isolated incident and that FEMA avoided “politically hostile” zones in the Carolinas, too.

“There seems to have been a priority shift, period,” said Eric Eggers, the vice president of the conservative Government Accountability Institute. “It seems impossible to separate its mission creep and its ideological pursuit of an agenda when its duties are to fix that bridge or clear that road.”

As devastating and increasingly expensive natural disasters continue to be a fact of life in the United States, FEMA’s halting response, especially in the early days after Helene, when lives were in jeopardy, suggests both the capabilities and limits of state and federal responses.

In the first days, survivors told RCI that the impact of governments’ slow-footed efforts was countered by the heroic efforts of private citizens and groups who rushed to provide help. As FEMA and others began to assert themselves, some conflicts arose between government representatives and volunteers, although everyone RCI spoke with agreed that such disasters inevitably spawn chaos. There is no such thing as a “perfect response,” but many people said the one following Helene teaches important lessons.

Helene didn’t slam into western North Carolina the way hurricanes typically do, but instead squatted like an angry demon over the region in which the economically important fall tourist season was just swinging into gear.

In Avery County, a parks and recreation gymnasium had been set up as a shelter with approximately 40 beds and generators for backup power, according to Jamie Shell, the editor of the weekly Avery Journal-Times and a lifelong Tar Heel.

“On the day prior to the storm, we were in touch with the county emergency management office and county manager to get a feel for where they were in terms of initial response,” he said. “I remember a number of generated auto-calls and emails from the county to the county residents informing them of the historic and potentially devastating nature of the event, warning people to make plans to seek higher ground and evacuate as needed due to the torrential rains and damaging winds that would arrive.”

By Friday morning, Shell said people were fending off the elements as best they could.

“It was a case where most everyone who were not necessary (emergency) personnel were pretty much sheltering in place, as roads were being littered with fallen trees and high water, with the worst damage along creeks and rivers,” he said.

Power soon went out, making communication difficult for both survivors and potential rescue efforts, and creeks crested, complicating overland travel. Shell said some roads remained passable, but without power or an aerial view, it was impossible for people to find shelter if their homes were damaged or lost, and for relief efforts that didn’t have small planes or helicopters to get to wrecked spots, and even then potential landing zones were unclear.

Here, too, politics has emerged to cloud the relief picture. Shell said he relied on a Starlink hookup, the satellite company launched and owned by Elon Musk, and that county officials were also reliant on Musk’s system. Private relief agencies told RCI that Starlink provided thousands of Starlinks, which they distributed via helicopter after Helene, offering torn-up zones their only method of communication.

Between them, the United Cajun Navy and Operation Helo, two of the private groups that operated rescue and relief operations with helicopters, distributed nearly 1,000 Starlink hookups to powerless homes. Musk trumpeted the fact that Starlink’s services would be free in the remainder of 2024 for Helene and Hurricane Milton victims, although there are reports users are still being hit with hardware starter costs.

Such assistance from Starlink might have been greater, according to some congressional sources, had the Federal Communications Commission not canceled an $885.5 million deal with Starlink to expand rural broadband access. Instead, the Biden administration sunk $42 billion into a rural broadband access program that has not hooked up any customers – a failure that dogged Vice President Kamala Harris in her failed presidential campaign – as Harris was the point person on that project.

Some Republican officials in Washington have grumbled that Cooper and the Biden administration moved too slowly in terms of activating the National Guard or the huge U.S. Army assets at Fort Liberty, formerly Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. Information provided by the state to Congress and shared with RCI shows the state’s “rotor and fixed-wing aircraft” made available rose from fewer than 10 in the storm’s initial 48 hours to 20 by Sept. 30, but it stayed at that number for three full days. North Carolina Highway Patrol provided fewer than five helicopters through Oct. 9.

Congressional sources also provided information showing there were fewer than 1,000 troops available for relief efforts until Oct. 3.

Private relief agencies, untangled by orders, swung into action more quickly.

“When I got there, all I heard was, ‘Where’s FEMA? Where’s FEMA?” said Brian Trascher, a leader of the United Cajun Navy, a private disaster relief outfit that formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “In fact, FEMA moves fairly quickly once they know where the problem is but otherwise everything was a cluster-f___. They didn’t have anything prepositioned and so for about four or five days, most of the search and rescue was done by private people.”

But Trascher offered praise to FEMA, too. He had been meeting with FEMA officials in Washington as Helene approached, part of an ongoing effort by the feds and the Cajun Navy to cooperate better in response to disasters. It is not true that FEMA was invisible in Helene’s immediate aftermath – Trascher said he ran into a top official he knows within hours of his arrival in North Carolina – and FEMA staff on the ground were committed and hard-working, he said.

That take was echoed by others deeply involved in the first few days of Helene’s response. Of the four private relief groups that discussed the situation with RCI, all agreed FEMA officials in western North Carolina were earnest, but said both the federal bureaucracy and the military response proved creaky.

The air over the Helene-ravaged landscape was wide open in the first few days, and the private helicopters were free to go wherever they could. That began to change once federal agencies came into the picture. The Federal Aviation Agency did give out some “squawk codes” to the flyers working with private groups, Trascher said, but more codes and a better-coordinated response with the FAA are needed going forward, according to Trascher and Eric Robinson, a co-founder of Operation Helo.

The private relief executives also expressed doubts that FEMA had the most experienced hands on deck. In addition, although many National Guardsmen in the area are native Tar Heels and were champing at the bit to help, they were repeatedly snarled by delays in orders, according to several people familiar with the first days of response.

“We ran it like a military op,” Robinson said of Operation Helo, a group based in North Carolina that was born in Helene’s aftermath. “But the strength of the storm, the amount of water, I don’t think anyone anticipated that.”

Robinson described whole towns annihilated, saying there were lakes “that it looked like you could walk across, there was so much debris floating.” His team distributed more than 517 Starlinks and was also assisted personally by Ivanka Trump in the week after Helene struck.

At one point, Robinson said there were people marooned on a hilltop, and his group asked the National Guard to handle the job. Though more than willing, the guardsmen had to wait more than three hours for their orders. “We just went and got them in the meantime,” he said.

Another group distributing emergency aid and Starlinks was Samaritan’s Purse, the international relief agency whose Boone headquarters left it literally at Helene’s ground zero.

“We all knew the storm was coming and we were ready,” said Franklin Graham, the group’s president and chief executive. “But none of us were prepared for the infrastructure’s collapse.”

Like other private officials involved in relief efforts, Graham was far from biting in his criticism of FEMA and North Carolina agencies. Similarly, he acknowledged, as Trascher and Robinson did, that private groups enjoyed freedom from the red tape that customarily snarls government bureaucracies.

“I do think FEMA might be better if it wasn’t run by a political appointee,” Graham said. “It was working in our favor initially that there were no rules, and what we saw was a true example of neighbors helping neighbors.”

As of early November, FEMA said it had spent “approximately $4.3 billion on Hurricane Helene response and recovery.” Of that total, some $213 million went in direct assistance to 126,000 North Carolina households, with another $202 million “for debris removal and reimbursement of emergency protective measures for the state.”

Helene also brought new attention to FEMA’s budgeting. Even as they pushed money out to storm victims, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who oversees FEMA, and other Biden administration officials began raising alarms that the agency could run short on hurricane relief money.

But along with those calls came revelations from Homeland Security’s watchdog Inspector General that the agency was sitting on $73 billion in unliquidated funds committed to previous disasters – including  $8.3 billion for those declared in 2012 or earlier. The agency has also spent nearly $4 billion on COVID relief in September, the same month as Helene – including for funeral expenses, vaccination and testing sites, and personal protective equipment. That spending was paused in September to shift money to its Immediate Needs Funding, FEMA said, but it acknowledged $3.8 billion was “obligated” for the virus that peaked in 2021.

Gov. Cooper’s office also pushed back against reports it may have been tardy in calling up the National Guard or responding to hard-hit zones.

“The North Carolina National Guard was activated and on the ground before, during and after the storm and we believe this was the fastest and largest integration of active-duty military soldiers under Title 10 working with the National Guard in North Carolina history,” said Jordan Monaghan, a spokesman for the governor. “Immediately following the storm, staged equipment and personnel began moving into western NC, using Asheville’s airport as a staging area where supplies were flown in, loaded onto helicopters and flown into counties that couldn’t be reached by road. Where roads were passable, supplies were delivered by truck.”

On Sept. 30, Cooper asked Biden to “make all necessary federal resources available,” and that so-called “Title 10” request was approved by the Defense Department on Oct. 2, according to Monaghan. At that point, helicopters and other key assets took to wing.

Both FEMA and Cooper’s office stressed the unprecedented nature of Helene, and that view was echoed by Trascher, who said some of the areas the Cajun Navy serviced were “the worst I’d seen since Katrina.”

As of early November, power outages had fallen from more than 1 million to fewer than 900, while roughly 1,000 of the 1,300 closed roads have been opened, according to Cooper’s office. All told, there have been “2,024 FEMA workers and thousands of Department of Transportation workers, utility workers, law enforcement officers and volunteers on the ground.”

Yet under the Biden administration’s “whole of government” emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion, there are indications FEMA has moved away from a broad-based relief template.

In the past two weeks, FEMA also became embroiled in the scandal surrounding the orders of the now-dismissed staffer that Hurricane Milton relief crews should bypass homes displaying Trump campaign signs. The former supervisor, Marn’i Washington, told The Black Star Group’s digital platform that her orders were not an isolated incident. Instead, they reflected long-standing agency policy that calls for avoidance of areas or homes it considers “politically hostile.”

“FEMA always preaches avoidance first and then de-escalation, so this is not isolated,” she said. “This is a colossal event of avoidance not just in the state of Florida, but you will find avoidance in the Carolinas.”

In an in-house 2023 Zoom meeting that has received renewed attention, FEMA and other federal officers focused on how disasters allegedly hit the LGBTQ community with special fury. In that meeting, FEMA Emergency Management Specialist Tyler Atkins said LGBTQ people and others who have been disadvantaged “already are struggling,” and natural disasters compound their struggles.

Maggie Jarry, a Senior Emergency Management Specialist with the Department of Health and Human Services, then chimed in, saying emergency management in the U.S. must shift from prioritizing “the greatest good for the greatest amount of people” to “disaster equity.”

“We have to look at policies and understand to what extent they have disadvantaged communities that have less assets, communities that have pre-existing vulnerabilities in accessing disaster-related recovery supports,” Jarry said.

A FEMA spokesperson told RCI that any notion the agency has lost touch with its core mission is false.

“FEMA’s mission remains clear and unchanged – to help people before, during, and after disasters,” he said. “We are fully committed to ensuring that all communities have the support they need to prepare for and recover from disasters. FEMA’s disaster response efforts and recovery programs are funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”

FEMA’s Helene response enjoyed considerably better coverage than it received during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when media accounts blistered the agency and the Bush administration for weeks. This time around, there were many stories outlining what FEMA does and does not do, with the former primarily involving reimbursement to state and local projects for debris removal, reconstruction, and the like. It also provides cash to survivors in the immediate aftermath of declared disasters.

Many media outlets also magnified FEMA’s attempt to combat “misinformation,” and these reports frequently blamed the Trump campaign for spreading unfounded rumors. At one point, FEMA even paused relief operations in parts of North Carolina over unfounded rumors that vigilantes were “hunting” FEMA workers.

Those pro-FEMA slants lost considerable traction last week, however, when the story broke about FEMA relief teams in Florida deliberately bypassing homes that displayed support for Trump’s campaign.

All of these threads – the Biden administration’s “Justice40” for diversity, equity, and inclusion; the spending on matters unrelated to natural disasters or tied up in endless projects going nowhere; federal contracts to help rural America canceled – add up to an unsavory “politics of disaster relief,” according to the Government Accountability Institute.

Eggers and Peter Schweizer, the Institute’s leader, examined the problem in a recent podcast by that name. What happened after Helene is further evidence of that problem, Eggers said.

“In some ways, it’s a triumph of the human and American spirit, but in other ways, it seems like a failure of the American government,” he said.

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