by Nathan Hohensee, LPNC Communications Intern

The government response to Hurricane Helene has been absurdly deficient. The failure to help people are as similar at the state and federal level as they are devastating to those in dire need. If only we had a similar situation from recent history that could've predicted how badly this would go.

Recovery efforts remain frustratingly slow for the residents of Western North Carolina who saw their homes, towns, families, livelihoods, and more destroyed by Hurricane Helene barely two months ago. As snowfall marks the onset of winter in the Carolina mountains, people who remain without shelter, power, heat, running water, and more are struggling for their very survival while our state and federal government devolve into another round of finger pointing, blaming, and political posturing to cover up egregious failure and ineptitude.

While recovery efforts of this scale are naturally a long process, at this point it seems like we should expect basic response measures - like shelter with heat and potable water, medical supplies, and funding set aside for this exact situation - to have been distributed to those in need as expeditiously as possible. Unfortunately, too many of the victims of Helene remain without stable shelter, basic resources, answers, or any idea of how much the government will prolong their suffering. If previous North Carolina storm relief efforts are any indicator, those waiting for assistance should expect neither the state nor federal government to provide any meaningful relief in the near future.

Helene is the third major storm to affect North Carolina in recent years, following the widespread destruction of Hurricanes Matthew and Florence on the eastern side of the state, and history as an indicator of future actions does not bode well for recovery efforts in the mountains. Rebuild NC, a program founded from Governor Roy Cooper’s installation of the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR) in the wake of Hurricane Florence, is sitting on a $221 million deficit with several victims of that storm still seeking the help they were promised. 

The program and restoration effort was spearheaded by Laura Hogshead, who was removed this week as director of the program, a position which she had held since 2018, following disastrous testimony(pun intended) revealing her grossly incompetent “oversight” of the recovery program. Hogshead took responsibility for the deficit, stating (the painfully obvious) that she had not been "watching the money closely enough." The North Carolina General Assembly was allegedly not notified of the fact that extra funds were needed for eastern NC until October of this year.

The current worst-case scenario is that Rebuild NC needs another $264 million to finish building homes in eastern NC - from the last hurricane six years ago. Not only is there no more money to build future houses, there are currently 57 contractors who have completed jobs for Rebuild NC and have not received any compensation or pay for the work they have already completed. Altogether, there were about 10,000 people who applied for help from Rebuild NC during an application window that was left open for several years. Of those applications, roughly 4,420 applications were withdrawn and around 1,600 were found ineligible. The number of those who have not been helped still exceeds the number of homes that have been built by Rebuilt NC and, again, it has been six years since Hurricane Florence landed in North Carolina.

So far, this program has been its own disaster on a scale greater than those for which it is supposed to provide relief. In fact, $150 million is needed to keep NC Rebuild afloat for ongoing projects. Meanwhile, reports are that the houses that have been built are subpar and often fall into disrepair as soon as families move in. Complaints ranging from doors falling off of their hinges to broken windows and floors caving in are the hallmarks of a program that continues to spend around $2.1 million a month for displaced eastern NC families. In fact, the program has spent around $76.5 million on temporary housing which might have gone towards giving 270-280 families new homes, except it is taking Rebuild NC between 600 and 800 days to build a modular home. Normally, a typical modular home takes anywhere from 60 to 120 days to fully construct. NC Rebuild is working at about 10 percent of expected speed, which is actually surprisingly good for a government entity built on a pattern of abject failure. 

The NC government has been consistently ineffective when it comes to helping its people bounce back from these horrendous storms and the devastation they have caused. Pryor Gibson, who previously served in the NC House - District 69, has been tapped as interim director of the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency. In his joint testimony with Hogshead, he stated that bureaucratic issues can make it difficult for people to bounce back from a storm. While finger pointing and the political blame game is the prominent narrative in the news cycle, people continue to suffer serious consequences from the inability of the government to help its citizens. Even Hogshead acknowledged that efforts are different in western NC depending on where governments “allow” building, and the news that continues to find its way through the smokescreens is increasingly horrifying. 

FEMA apparently had an unofficial policy to not help people with Trump signs, but what they do have is a backlog of trailers that has been sitting for weeks because FEMA will not place them where they are needed, based on an arbitrary “floodplain” designation. Instead of providing people with the shelter and protection they are supposed to receive in return for dutifully complying with the theft we call “taxes,” FEMA is offering buyouts to the residents who have lost everything and are facing utter desperation, which would provide immediate relief but often result in substantial loss against the overall value of their property and possessions. 

There is a lot happening here in NC following these hurricanes that just does not add up - or maybe it does when taking the inherent inefficiencies of government into account. The great Thomas Sowell said, “You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” Rebuild NC has seven or eight accountants among the many employees who make upwards of above $100,000 a year, and yet they still could not keep up with all of their budget problems. Leave it to government officials to somehow profit during a crisis while NC residents, who have paid their taxes believing that would ensure the government would be there when they were in need, are learning a hard truth. 

The government is, on its best day, grievously inadequate at most everything except spying on us and creating bureaucratic nightmares. If people are paying into a system expecting responsiveness when they are at their greatest need, and that expectation is proven to be false hope time and again, it begs the question of why do we keep paying into the system. This is not a political game to win elections. People’s lives are in the balance. 

If you want to help with disaster recovery efforts, a number of people and organizations are providing real help to those in need in WNC, including Samaritan's Purse.

If you want to let your local representative know what you think of the disaster recovery efforts and demand better, instructions are here. 

This article was derived from reporting by Cassie Clark, NC historian, culture preservationist, and founder and steward of the Where the Dogwood Blooms blog and podcast.