FEMA, HELENE & TRUMP

If you don't apply for FEMA help, FEMA can't help you.

(For readers who don’t know, my home is in Asheville, NC. It was not damaged by Helene but geographically, it is pretty much in the bullseye of the epicenter for Helene’s destruction. So, I have been a very close observer of FEMA in action juxtaposed against FEMA perceptions delivered via the news and social media.)

Heather Cox Richardson wrote specifically about FEMA and North Carolina today...

"The third story is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has denied North Carolina’s request that it honor a commitment made by President Joe Biden to pay for 100% of the costs for removal of debris after Hurricane Helene devastated the western part of the state in September 2024. That storm killed 107 people in western North Carolina and destroyed or damaged 75,000 homes, as well as destroying roads and leaving mounds of debris.

As Zack Colman of Politico reported yesterday, the storm hit in the last weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, and Trump undermined FEMA’s response, lying that it was not present and telling North Carolinians that the Biden administration could not help them because it had taken money from FEMA for undocumented immigrants. None of what he was saying was true, but MAGA mouthpieces picked up his criticisms and exaggerated them, claiming that the federal government intended to steal people’s land, that Biden had directed the storm to western North Carolina, and that 28 babies had frozen to death in FEMA tents—all lies, but lies that slowed recovery as riled-up people who believed them refused assistance, threatened officials, and demanded investigations.

Trump suggested he would respond more effectively to voters in North Carolina, and two of the hardest-hit counties there, Avery and Haywood, backed him in 2024 by margins of 75.7% and 61.8%, respectively, similar to those it had given him in 2016 and 2020.

Once in office, though, Trump began to talk of eliminating FEMA. Now the White House has told North Carolina residents they’re on their own as they try to dig out from Hurricane Helene."

What I can tell you is the FEMA folks were getting applause from local citizens even as the social media buzz was causing well intended people who live far away to send me warnings that “FEMA is not coming to help.”

I don’t know why it is, but we all expect FEMA to fill the role of first responders. What they really are is first documenters of the damage. FEMA’s role is to pay for everything that it’s employees document as damaged and in need of “emergency management.” FEMA does not physically rebuild infrastructure, they document the destruction. Then, local businesses with the right skills deal with a lot of paperwork in order to bid for the rebuilding projects. There are State and County officials who are experts in meeting FEMA compliance who handle the bidding process. Local companies that know how to build roads and bridges, for example, are experienced at the FEMA process because the payoffs are excellent if you get awarded projects.

When actual first responders from out-of-state start rushing in to help, they are a godsend but they are not working for free, their states know exactly how to document their first-responder contributions so that FEMA pays them back after-the-fact.

When a giant contract for tens of millions of dollars to rebuild many miles of highway is on the line, the process takes weeks which is not really a bottle neck because this kind of project cannot begin until much more basic needs (like a food supply, a water supply, and places for people to live) are all sorted out anyway.

Where I live, the Swannanoa river ripped 1.5 miles of a two lane county road to shreds. Literally ripped the asphalt up and away from the rocky earth beneath it. Huge chunks of asphalt were found miles downstream in some cases. Where the river and the road come out to the main road, a bridge allows the river to run under the main road with 10+ feet of clearance. The bridge became a dam as the Helene-driven river (27 feet above the old flood line) pressed logs, trees, cars and big sections of homes up against the underpass. After a couple of hours of pressure, the bridge exploded. It was there and then it was gone. Miles downstream, people who thought the river had already done its worst and were getting out to see what could be done were suddenly assaulted by a new wall of water after the bridge exploded. This type of thing probably explains many of the deaths.

Seven months later, everything mentioned above is repaired. Even the many thousands of sixty foot trees that were stacked like toothpicks along the river bends are gone. Local businesses with great skills and crazy big budgets to work sunup to sundown six days a week did the road work. The Army Corps of Engineers came in and removed everything along the river banks that was “natural” which was mainly the trees. When the Army Corps folks came upon a car compressed into the river bank, they used their huge machines to place stuff like that at the curb for later removal. Unrecognizable cars extracted from intense compression into a river bank was a very common experience.

If you live here, the work has been astoundingly fast and effective. There is still 30% left to rebuild and repair but the progress is far beyond what local people thought was possible. FEMA WROTE THE CHECKS. Public documents show that FEMA wrote checks for about $600 million before Trump shut it down.

It’s unfortunate to have to move on without FEMA help but imagine if Helene was about to happen this coming September instead of last September. This whole area of Western North Carolina would likely be devastated by the financial response from this new version of FEMA under Trump. Deeply red states have already felt the pain from recent natural disasters where the FEMA approved budgets are minimal compared to historical precedents. In this sense, Asheville got lucky.

If the Asheville area (Buncombe County) had to respond on its own without FEMA, it is easy to suggest that the work completed in seven months would have taken seven years.

Here is the most devastating thing: FEMA helps homeowners rebuild with financial support. It’s a complex process because insurance companies are on the hook first and foremost to fulfill their part of the deal and insurance companies try to lowball everything. If your roof is ripped off your home, your insurance company is supposed to repair it. If everybody in the whole neighborhood had their roofs ripped off, FEMA can provide a lot of financial support that complements what the insurance companies pay for. The paperwork process for a homeowner sucks. It’s a lot of work to document your losses when you are emotionally exhausted but FEMA cannot fund repairs for things that got broken if they don’t have documentation for it. Common sense, really.

In the many parts of Western North Carolina where the people get their news from MAGA influenced sources, the people believed all of the lies about FEMA that were spreading wildly - some of the lies are mentioned in the quoted content above but there was plenty more lies and they were brutal. Because of these lies, the people who were lied to did not apply for help from FEMA. Makes sense.

FEMA has models for predicting the percentage of homes in a devastated area that are going to qualify for FEMA support. They go into these areas carrying clipboards with forms to encourage people to fill them out. Sometimes they get spit on by the homeowners, sometimes they are threatened and have to stop wandering through certain neighborhoods. FEMA has said that many rural areas in the epicenter of the damage from HELENE had homeowners applying for FEMA help at just 15% the number that their models told them to expect.

So, what we have here is a self-fulfilling process.

1. People with catastrophic damage to their homes are convinced that FEMA is the enemy.

2. So, they don’t fill out FEMA’s forms.

3. So, FEMA allocates very little money to these areas because they can’t pay for things that were not documented.

4. So, these neighborhoods are under-supported in the coming months which reinforces the feeling that FEMA sucks.

For the Trump era version of FEMA where a heartless response is the goal, scaring people so that they don’t fill out FEMA damage reports validates the government’s heartless response since the people did not fill out the forms so, therefore, they didn’t need help. Twisted logic but there you go.

That’s the most painful observation from my very close lens into this particular disaster. The people most angry with FEMA from the very start of the crisis are the people who got the least help from FEMA. The people who were open-minded about getting help from FEMA went through some rough bureaucratic processes but came away believing that FEMA was far more committed to paying for repairs than were their own insurance companies.

So, anyway, thank to Heather Cox Richardson for her great reporting and for triggering this essay.