Government Disaster Relief is a Predictable Disaster

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.