We’ve repeatedly chronicled increasingly visible and consequential examples of failures in organizational capabilities. The degree of institutional brain rot has become disconcertingly visible in recent years, particularly among top national officials and international institutions (we’re looking at you, Ursula). These shortcomings are set to become a critical lapse as climate change related disasters become more frequent and severe.
Now admittedly, the effects on communities can be blunted by preparation, such as relocating away from vulnerable area and requiring buildings to be more flood and wind resistant, as well as better infrastructure, like micro-grids to allow for faster restoration of electricity in an emergency. But then we’ve had utterly bone-headed action, like allowing telcos to end copper-wire phone service so they could escape common carrier rules, aka regulation. That copper wire had its own power and so worked when power lines were down. Citizens now are on their own, dependent on cell phones with limited battery life during disasters. They might as well have semaphores. I recall during Hurricane Sandy how residents of the dark zone in Manhattan roughly below 40th Street, where power was out for days, would walk (sometimes long distances) to where the lights were on to power their phones and make calls.
A more extreme version of lack of preparedness is Valencia. Even though the rainfall was extreme, the impact was made much worse by the lack of storm drains:
The scale of the flooding currently unfolding in Valencia, Spain is unfathomable. This is footage from Chiva, where a jaw-dropping 343 mm of rain was recorded in just 4 hours earlier today, between 4:30 PM and 8:30 PM.
Video credit: Nalabcer pic.twitter.com/WdCgUifavQ
— Nahel Belgherze (@WxNB_) October 29, 2024
@juneslater17 Why was Valencia was under water? A part of the city is built on ground without drainage. Also 100
000ends of trees were chopped and roots removed. All for new high-rises. The (artificial) rainwater has nowhere to go. Here the sky 1 day before the rain disaster. pic.twitter.com/g6j6e1wasu— Th.R. (80+) 🇳🇱🇩🇪🇫🇴🇪🇦 (@trebergen) November 2, 2024
This flood does appear to be poor design.
Valencia city had no flooding – all of the floods were in the southern suburbs. So why did this happen? I have seen no breach in the storm-drain levies as yet.
— ralph ellis (@ralfellis) November 2, 2024
In other words, the flooding did not have to be this bad.
Another vector of failure was the lack of official warnings:1
🚨Angry residents in Valencia, throw mud at the Spanish king after it became known that residents were warned too late about flood by civil authorities which lead to kill more than 150 people#Valencia #SpanishPM #Spain pic.twitter.com/Vxr0SAxD0I
— GOGINENI (@gogineni_X) November 3, 2024
And this level of citizen action is gratifying, but not sufficient on its own:
Today is public holiday in Spain and literally thousands of people in Valencia came out to help the victims of the October 29 disaster armed with shovels and brooms.
A flood of people against the flood of water.pic.twitter.com/7WsTT8CbuT
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 1, 2024
It may seem strained to discuss the poor long-term planning and emergency responses in Valencia to official performance in the US after Helene. But we are going to see more and more instances of climate disasters meeting infrastructure that either didn’t or inadequately contemplated severe floods and winds. Keeping tabs on them, particularly across countries, can help develop lessons.
To turn to FEMA and Helene, it would be nice to perform a Lambertian deep dive and assemble clips across a wide range of sources. However, I am not confident of how informative it would really be, since the reporting on the official responses to this disaster has a “dog that didn’t bark” quality to it. So I will instead use Helene as a point of departure for examining higher-level issues.
The reasons to question the caliber of government responses are the paucity of stories either giving favorable coverage of FEMA’s action, either overall or heart-warming anecdata. An obvious reason is the geographic remoteness of many of the hard-hit areas in a generally media-poor part of the US. Contrast that with Katrina, which took place in a major metropolitan/commercial center, familiar to most reporters, with a large airport and many highways. 2005 was also early in the hollowing-out of newsrooms.
By all accounts, Asheville, NC, which was particularly hard hit and more accessible by result of being a relatively large city, is still in recovery mode more than a month after the storm hit. Notice how the House Majority Leader Steve Scalise visited North Carolina on November 1 with a North Carolina representative and representatives from other states. Further notice the lack of mention, let alone praise, for FEMA. From his press release:
Yesterday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) visited Asheville, North Carolina with Congressman Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) alongside Congressman Jason Smith (R-Mo.), Congressman Mark Alford (R-Mo.), and Congressman Mike Collins (R-Ga.) to tour communities devastated by Hurricane Helene. Leader Scalise met with local officials, volunteers, and small business owners working to rebuild and released the following statement:
“Hurricane Helene had a devastating impact across western North Carolina. But I saw in Asheville today what I saw in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: resilient people coming together in the face of destruction and tragedy to lend helping hands to their neighbors and rebuild their vibrant community. I’m thankful to have been here to see the challenges firsthand and to meet many of the incredible volunteers, restaurateurs, and business owners already working to restore what was lost. My friend Congressman Chuck Edwards is working tirelessly in the wake of this storm to help these hard-hit areas and aid them on their road to recovery. North Carolina is not alone in this fight.”
Even though this recent local account (five days old) does praise FEMA, it seems to unintentionally reveal shortcomings in official responses to disasters of this scale:
It has been a month since the storm, and there are still many roads closed and homes without power. The city water is unfit to drink; we have to boil it even to wash dishes, and what flows from the tap is a cloudy, rust-colored fluid. It has been so bad and left so many people stranded or homeless that Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen has come to feed those in need.
At our house, we were otherwise lucky. Our neighborhood had fewer fallen trees than others, and we were high enough in elevation that we avoided the flooding. Beyond our little neighborhood, though, it looked very, very much like the devastation of Katrina.
The first week after the storm was hellacious. No power; no water; no phone; no wifi; no cable; no air conditioning. Dark at 7:00 p.m., and no lights anywhere. The fridge and freezer sat silent. On the fourth day, we had to throw out all the food in both and scrub the interiors with bleach to kill the faint smell of mold. With no water, we could not flush the toilets and, being unable to stop the physiology of the human body, we had to go somewhere. The commodes were becoming rank….
And it was a huge military operation: National Guard and Marines; search-and-rescue operations looking for people cut off from roads or stranded on roofs; dog teams looking for bodies in the debris. I have since heard ignorant people spout conspiracy theories about the failures of FEMA or the government in general, but those trolls weren’t there. I have never been so impressed at the seriousness and effectiveness of everyone, government or civilian working, to recover. The lies being spouted are reprehensible. Evil, actually.
The Asheville airport was covered with military planes and scores of copters. The only way into the area for the first days was by air. I-40, the main highway, was cut off on both ends by landslides. The bridges along I-26 were washed out. All roads in and out of Buncombe County were blocked and closed. If we had wanted to leave, we couldn’t.
This article is not at all clear on the military operation was about, but it seems to have been concentrated on the mentioned search and rescue. While that is critically important, one has to wonder why the official disaster response did not encompass other predictable needs, such as for clean water and food (why is World Central Kitchen the lead actor?)
A patchwork approach is a feature, not a bug. As FEMA defenders and readers have pointed out, it was never designed to be a first responder. But in a world where ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) is a central component of military operations, why are those capabilities not being applied to large scale disasters? Why are localities and states required to go through the game of escalation based on fragmented on-the-ground demands before drone fleets are deployed to report back the scale and nature of destruction and identify humans who seem to be in trouble? Given the storm path and widely anticipated severity, why were they not pre-positioned?
One can argue that this approach is the result of America’s federal structure. I don’t buy it for a second. In banking, the Federal government has pre-empted nearly all banking oversight that formerly fell to state authority. For instance would be possible to have a mandate for Federal action once a hurricane was predicted to exceed certain levels (say severity of predicted winds and rain and size of exposed population). But that would put the Feds more in charge and therefore more accountable. Can’t have that, now can we?
Instead, we have this sort of thing. I personally find it weird that the not just the Vox interviewer but more important, interviewee Claire Connolly Knox, founder of the Emergency and Crisis Management program at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, depicts a balkanized and therefore cumbersome response to big disasters as hunky-dory and even worse, inevitable.
Mind you, a great deal of ad-hocracy, overlapping roles and just plain scrambling are inevitable when confronted with a big emergency. But there should be an effort to establish backbones quickly, most of all of gathering and dissemination of information. I don’t see that here. Instead, the piece starts with sanctimoniousness about not spreading disinformation, which has the effect of tamping down reports of real problems and shortcomings. It’s as if not harming Team Biden-Harris was more important than improving disaster relief efforts over time.
From interviewer Umair Irfan at Vox in Is FEMA messing up? An expert weighs in:
Umair Irfan
How would you evaluate their [FEMA’s] response? Are they graded on a curve when it comes to a disaster like this? And should FEMA have seen this coming and done more?
Claire Connolly Knox
Every disaster starts and ends locally, so every disaster response starts at the local level, and it ends at the local level. A lot of people don’t realize that. They think immediately of FEMA. FEMA has the purse strings, they help pay for a lot of this.
But the response is local. It goes to the state if locals can’t handle it. The state then does an emergency declaration to release additional funds. If it’s going to be more than they can handle, they go to their FEMA region. That then goes up to FEMA national, and then to the president for an emergency declaration or disaster declaration depending on which is needed.
Every state adheres to the same standards set forth by FEMA to have a comprehensive emergency management plan to train their local emergency managers to have the capacity to respond to a disaster.
Knox does dutifully cite how the Federal Stafford Act dictates how emergency aid operates, and how states have also set up mutual aid arrangements to supplement that. And she explains how FEMA has tried to become more pro-active in the wake of Katrina, with some arguable success in Hurricane Sandy, despite conservative and state/local pushback.2
Contrast this “‘just-so’ story” with some contrasting accounts. From We Are The Relief: How Queer Appalachian Mutual Aid Showed Up After Helene:
As the image circulated widely, I soon discovered that the five DJs — only two of whom are actually DJs — are part of the queer mutual aid organization Pansy Collective. Within 48 hours of the storm, they had partnered with the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief network, which was formed after Hurricane Sandy. Alongside The Pinhook in Durham, NC, they gathered physical donations and purchased additional supplies with the funds they raised. Long before FEMA had any presence in Western North Carolina, Pansy Collective distributed six truckloads, two trailers, and a box truck filled with non-perishable food, water, cleaning supplies, diapers, gas and gas cans, toiletries, batteries, and hygiene products to various hubs, including remote mountain locations where residents were unable to leave….
Ri, a Pansy Collective organizer, says that the collective’s remarkable ability to respond so quickly to devastation caused by Helene came from experience gained during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The framework of community care became a central concern across the country when COVID hit, and COVID kind of radicalized people too, Ri told Them. “The networks of mutual aid have grown and continue to have a strong presence in Asheville because Covid just happened.”
Moving forward, the collective wants to continue being a lifeline for as many types of people affected by the storm as possible. With funds from the influx of support that came after Helene, the group will keep redistributing aid as they simultaneously launch a bailout initiative for people arrested during the crisis of the storm, as well as a service worker and sex worker microgrant program for those left out of work.
From the other end of the ideological spectrum, Unherd provides data that suggests that Helene was a bigger disaster than Katrina yet received fewer Federal resources:
My sources have no reason to lie. Perhaps some exaggeration but it all seems too likely to me.Bush’s response to Katrina was criticised at the time for being lumberingly slow and ineffective. But the relief effort being mounted now is a pale shadow of what was done a mere 19 years ago, and that makes the silence around this disaster even more ominous.
In 2005, significant planning and resourcing was being carried out days before the storm even made landfall. Ten thousand members of the National Guard had gathered from several states to deal with the damage Katrina was about to cause. The final number who helped with the effort measured closer to 20,000. But those guardsmen did not stand alone: the US Army was preparing to assume overall command of the entire rescue effort through US Northern Command, where its battle staff coordinated response forces over various state lines. The regular Army helped too, including forces from the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army Corps of Engineers…..
This time, things are very different. At the time of writing, fewer than 7,000 guardsmen are helping with Helene disaster relief, and there was no equivalent preparation before the storm actually hit. US Northern Command, which can only assume responsibility if it is asked to do so by other government authorities, is not coordinating the overall effort. During Katrina, more than 350 military helicopters were involved with the rescue efforts. This time, in a mountain disaster zone where many more helicopters are needed than in a coastal area, well below 100 helicopters have currently been committed……
Appalachia has always been forgotten; the people there are used to being treated like dirt. Talking to locals whose families were still stuck in the disaster area, the common refrain was that the help wasn’t arriving because the elites simply hate the people now in need of help. Talking to people in D.C., however, quickly dispelled that notion. What is going on right now isn’t malice, it’s somehow even worse: it’s senility. People weren’t enjoying the suffering of fellow Americans; they were simply so oblivious and zoned out that they couldn’t even notice a problem.
Currently, a hurricane disaster that is significantly more challenging than Katrina is being serviced by something like a third of the resources that Louisiana called upon. And yet few people in Washington even think this is a problem. At the same time as Congress has borrowed another 10 or 20 billion dollars to hand over to Ukraine and Israel, presidential candidate Kamala Harris has announced that the victims of Helene will be able to apply for $750 in relief assistance to help them get back on their feet.
FEMA is a charlie foxtrot, whatever its apologists and administrators say. Almost every person who applies for the $750 is denied. For example, if you have insurance, no $750 because your benevolent insurance company will pay. Yeah, but for many, only after being dragged kicking and screaming to cut the check. An assistant rents her house in rural Georgia. Her losses are real but because she is a renter, no $200 to replace the farm produce and meat lost in her freezer due to a week without electricity. That’s all she asked for. $200B or whatever for Ukraine but no $200 for her. Some areas still do not know when power will be restored. Compared to the mountains of North Carolina, these are the fortunate. This is the message the people are getting.
And GM weighed in, pointing out that the USSR’s response to the far more dangerous Chernobyl, contrary to Western denigration, showed the weakness our neoliberal approach:
If you recall in the mid-00s collapse was a popular topic. Strangely, it isn’t now, even though we are much closer to it — presumably because very high oil prices back then made it palpable, while now it is some combination of them not being so high and everyone having become just numb to it all after everything that has happened recently.
Anyway, back then a consensus opinion emerged that when the USSR collapsed it was much better prepared for it than the US was and would ever be. Because the USSR was a non-market economy, with a strong centralized state, strong relationships between people, a vast social safety net to cushion the fall, the infrastructure was built rationally and much better prepared for a shrinking resource usage, etc. etc.
Well, we see it now. The disasters in the USSR in the late 1980s — Chernobyl, the Armenian earthquake, etc. — were in retrospect quite expertly handled. Especially Chernobyl, if you look at it without the ideological bias lenses, was a systemic screw up in terms of what caused it, but once it happened, it was very well handled — the scientists and engineers were put in charge, the necessary resources and the whole state machinery were mobilized, no questions asked about the cost, and the situation was brought under control.
Meanwhile in the US we had Katrina first and the Great Financial Crisis as harbingers, then the Puerto Rico hurricane, the Hawaii fires, the toxic spill in Ohio, now these hurricanes, and the state has just largely abandoned regular people affected by the disasters to their fate. Plus, of course, the biggest such issue of them all — COVID. And surely there is more to come…
Related to this — there appear to be absolutely no plans to evacuate the population in any kind of shelters in case of a nuclear exchange. They have those in Russia and the other “enemy” countries, but in the West nobody is going to bother. The implications are clear. The elite will board their private jets and set off towards the southern hemisphere, and abandon the plebs to their fate. Continuation of current policies. Or rather, current policies being an indicator of what the plans for the future…
The lack of media and official acknowledgement FEMA’s underperformance in Helene means there are not enough press clips to serve as a basis for demanding better funding and even more important, structural changes.3 Instead, we are all expected to form our own Pansy Collectives and otherwise hope for the best.
_____
1 A system called AEMET issued a warning at 8 AM but Valencia authorities did not alert citizens until 8 PM which was too late.
2 I have reservations about claims about FEMA regarding Hurricane Sandy from my vantage in New York City at the time. It was evident that Occupy Sandy, which was entirely outside any formal Federal/state/city relief structure, ran rings around official efforts.
3 Claire Connolly Knox, in the Vox interview cited above, blandly said that the worst disasters wound up being omitted from official post-mortems:
That’s where my research comes in. I study after-action reports, or things that went well and things that did not go well during a disaster. They frequently include an implementation plan, so taking those lessons learned, who is the lead to implement this lesson, if there’s any funding needed, and a timeline of when to expect that particular lesson to be implemented.
Unfortunately, an after-action report is not required after every disaster. What I have found is that in areas that tend to be heavily destroyed — looking at Asheville, North Carolina — I would not anticipate an after-action report coming from them.
Knox seems wonderfully blind to the fact that unless she supplemens her research with other information, it’s a garbage-in, garbage-out exercise .
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I CAN’T FLUSH THE POTTY
(melody borrowed from I Ain’t Got Nobody first recorded in 1915 by Marion Harris)
(Here in Asheville and in surrounding counties, many thousands of people are still without water, and will be for a month or more. It matters. A lot.)
Near a month ago lots of rain came down
Then a Hurricane blew through
It ruined life for everyone
There’s still a lot of work to do
Helene knocked my house apart
The flood came through I nearly drowned
Now it’s bottled water only
That a chopper brought from town
I can’t flush the potty since Hurricane Helene
It’s bottled water only—myself and my house are none too clean
Mud doesn’t belong, neither does slime
It can’t be cleaned—Lord knows I’ve been tryin’
I can’t flush the potty since Hurricane Helene
These floors must be redone but there’s no working phone
The wind blows through back to front—I can’t find a comb!
Tell me why I even try—my cat I cannot find
If heaven’s still above me then help me find the wine!
I can’t flush the potty since Hurricane Helene
It’s bottled water only—myself and my house are none too clean
Tossed out the freezer, my venison shrine
That’s expensive for my bottom line!
I can’t flush the potty since Hurricane Helene
https://www.wspa.com/news/asheville-residents-have-running-water-but-still-cant-drink-it/
GM’s quote is meaty. This, “….the state has just largely abandoned regular people affected by the disasters to their fate.” Hard to argue with that.
The state budget office of North Carolina calculated that it’s going to take $53 billion (PBS, Oct 23) to clean up Helene’s wake. That’s not going to happen. Never. Another rummage sale for the investor class. (Hope you all didn’t blow through your bankroll at that fabulous town wide Lahaina estate sale.)
As George Carlin put it, They don’t give a fuck about you.
“…the state has just largely abandoned regular people affected by the disasters to their fate.” Well, it’s mighty rude and self entitled for The Little People to put themselves in harms way of global warming natural disasters when The Ruling Class and billionaire oligarchs are up to their necks trying to get back Russian natural resources they stole from Russia fair and square back in the 90’s. That’s trillions – not billions but trillions – of their wealth at stake that rightfully belongs to them. Americans need to stop so selfish and look at the bigger picture. Maybe you should try for 1 minute to put yourself in Blackrocks shoes and the like, and think all their investments in Ukraine going down the drain and that’s probably the smallest tip of a much larger iceberg.
The Ruling Class and billionaire oligarchs should pay attention to headlines like this; BBC reporter in Valencia: ‘The fury is extraordinary to see’, (BBC), the lede;
The BBC’s Mark Lowen reports from Paiporta, the worst hit suburb of Valencia, where the king and queen faced fury from the crowds, who threw objects and mud at them.
At least 217 people have died in the flash floods, with many more feared missing.
The information vacuum pretty much drains what we used to call public opinion of any potential political power. Katrina, well-reported and contrasted with Clinton’s FEMA, created a remarkable if short-lived consensus in American public opinion. I had strongly conservative friends express unalloyed disgust at the fecklessness of W’s effort. But, events were well-reported during and long after. The ambivalence of politics was there, of course, but not amplified by branded partisan narratives based on an absence of objective facts to the extent events in NC have been. We see the TikTok clips, but not much more.
I appreciate the valiant effort to assemble a balanced and founded view.
IMHO – the article is very good and, I have the chicken or egg first issue only.
“They think immediately of FEMA. FEMA has the purse strings, they help pay for a lot of this.”
They think that but, after 911 FEMA was knee-capped and subsumed into the vast fusion that is Department of Homeland Security who treated the Katrina disaster and the people displaced, like attacks by a terrorist organization, a security operation. Same thing with Haiti or even general policing as military operations against an enemy. It’s DHS that has the purse strings.
Sorry for changing below
Meanwhile in the US we had The institution of DHS (your either for us or against us) first, Katrina, and the Great Financial Crisis, Deepwater Horizon oil spill with captured government oversight as harbingers, then the Puerto Rico hurricane, the Hawaii fires, the toxic spill in Ohio, now these hurricanes, and the state has just largely abandoned regular people affected by the disasters to their fate.
It’s treating a thirsty community by demanding they use a federally mandated eyedropper to slake their thirst and rejects or kneecaps the more efficient support of on the ground self organization by the citizens (who, by DHS, are treated like helpless third world non-americans)
I mean no offense to the substantive part of the article and the state of affairs it points to. Just wanted to give a shout out to DHS
If you want FEMA to be able to respond adequately, then you have to fund FEMA adequately and you have to take FEMA out of DHS and make it a standalone entity ( Agency? Department?) as it was during the Clinton Administration. And give it the respect Clinton gave it and someone to head it of Jamie Lee Whitt quality to head it.
That might be something for a wannabe new political party to run on.
According to local news and Georgia Public Radio, FEMA has just opened a Recovery Center in Emmanuel County, Georgia (pop. 23,000), a full month after the storm. Progress!
It is my opinion that Helene is America’s Chernobyl which Gorbachev believed caused the collapse of the USSR. Chernobyl was the disaster wherein the citizens of the USSR completely lost faith in their leadership and could no longer support the incompetence and corruption of the government.
I strongly urge watching Adam Curtis’ BBC documentary Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone. The parallels between what happened then in the Soviet Union and is happening now in the USA are frightening.
I bought an inexpensive, mini portable solar charger designed to recharge a cell phone (subsequently installed solar+ battery storage).
In addition to surveillance drones, state emergency services might look into drone delivery options to get aid out to areas isolated by the storm. They could look at some of the ways China has used them.
Yes, yours and Yves’ comments about drones are spot on. Seeing film of drone swarms in Ukraine on Dima’s Military Summary Chanel shows how effective they could be. Those drones in Ukraine are bigger than your living room and cary bombs that are likely 50 lbs. or more. Imagine, 50, 100, 1,000 drones parked, loaded and ready to go after a storm blows through and dropping 50 Lb. “Care Packages” hour after hour. In addition, they would have cameras to geo-locate people waving from roofs so that the next drone can drop supplies as accurately as a drone bombs Ukrainian or Russian soldiers in a trench that’s 4′ wide.
It’s true that the media coverage of Helene has been very poor and thanks for giving it some attention here. However I’m not sure the “predictable needs” premise applies this time in the same way it did for Katrina. Below the flood table New Orleans, like Valencia, had always been a disaster waiting to happen whereas a hurricane in the Appalachians was not high on the probability scale although perhaps it is now. A similar event happened in 1916 so it was always a possibility but not exactly predictable. The toll on our natural environment has been epic with a recent article estimating that timber loss and removal here in SC alone may total 200 million. Since I love trees I find the damage to my favorite nature places distressing.
But life in my town is mostly back to normal and the response of Duke Energy as well as our country government has been praise worthy. In Asheville running water has widely been restored via the reservoir in Black Mountain although they say the “turbidity”–dirt–in the water still prevents use of the filters that will enable it to be drinkable. FEMA is helping to pay for all this including the removal of downed wood which in my neighborhood has already happened.
Perhaps the takeaway is that even in very unlikely places we are all under some threat from the new climate–some far more than others. Clearly we need better preparation but the story here is mixed and not all grim.
At least in the very local paper, the most praise was reserved for local volunteers and organizations, FEMA is always praised for their support, as well, but accumulating and distributing needed supplies seems to have fallen to local organizations, both government and faith-based organizations. There’s been no shortage of locals volunteering their time and resources to distribute supplies.
But that definitely doesn’t deal with telecommunications issues or other infrastructure. The Spectrum COO did finally send out a mea culpa email a few weeks ago:
There was literally no communication at all of any kind of Spectrum for like the first 3 weeks. Given the flooding, I don’t know that copper in this case might have helped.
I don’t have cause to ever drive into Asheville, so I have no idea what’s happening there. The lack of potable water is a result of the treatment plant being damaged, and both the primary and backup pipelines having been destroyed as well. A true kill shot.
The local papers and the local responders that they quote might not want to antagonize FEMA during relief efforts, so I don’t have a window into what’s happening outside of that.
I do know what debris from the flooding around here have been ready for pickup by the county for 4 weeks now, and so far this operation has not yet begun. It still looks like the remnants of a disaster zone here.
I have to disagree somewhat with Yves on this one. She posted my report from Black Mountain a week after Helene hit us, and I appreciate the support. My perspective is informed by my stint working as a volunteer attorney with FEMA in Biloxi after Katrina, three years of work as a volunteer with the Georgia Senior Legal Hotline as I transitioned into retirement, and my work with Pisgah Legal Services the last few weeks here in Western North Carolina. I have been to Burnsville (home to the famous cat Ricardo Blanco who survived being washed away on top of a shed), Morganton, and Pisgah View Apartments in Asheville, as well as handling numerous in person and telephone consultations.
In my humble opinion, FEMA has done as well as could be expected under the circumstances. It didn’t take drones flying around Bat Cave, Lake Lure and Gerton to know that trees were down all over the roads, that bridges were washed out and that landslides had occurred in over a thousand locations. Deanne Criswell was here in Black Mountain within a couple of days. World Central Kitchen was here, as our minister put it, “almost before the rain stopped.” We grew accustomed to the sound of helicopters, with some Army veterans telling me that the sound almost made them experience PTSD. I encountered one school principal whose cafeteria was overflowing with donated food and whose parking lot was filled with pallets of water, stating that she absolutely had to get rid of all that stuff so that the school could reopen.
No, this time around, compared to the days of Katrina, FEMA is light years ahead in its preparation and response. Of course, there are plenty of individual stories where there were problems with applications, but there are far more success stories that go unreported.
I think the real story lies with several societal shortcomings. Start with affordable housing. This area had been experiencing a crisis, as home prices escalated even as interest rates rose. That left those on the margins priced out and even more insecure. Many of those people experienced the most severe damage to their homes, simply because they were built in vulnerable areas and priced accordingly. Where do those folks go now, and what is society willing to do to turn this situation around?
A related problem is property insurance. I have dealt with exactly one person–in Bat Cave–who had flood insurance, and he needed it because his home was totally washed away. Florida teeters on the edge of disaster with its insurance markets with each hurricane that hits. Superstorm Sandy should have taught the country that we are all vulnerable as the intensity of storms increases, and perhaps Helene will drive that message home to more people.
A third problem we have been ignoring is the pitiful state of our infrastructure, about which the civil engineers have been warning us regularly with their Report Card. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/ In my work with public pensions, I tried to convince states to get their plans to full funding and then dedicate part of their assets to low interest, bond-like loans to water systems. Asheville has needed to upgrade its water system for years, and Helene has really forced the issue for us. Everywhere around the country, the water systems built in the fifties were built to last 50 years, and now the billed water ratios are way down, reflecting the leaks and lack of repairs/upgrades.
I could go on, but I think the readers of Naked Capitalism understand that the problems exposed by Hurricane Helene run far deeper than just FEMA. Thanks for indulging me.
Thanks. I believe the antiquity of our water systems not to mention many bridges is a nationwide problem. Here in my town they are replacing old and leaky water pipes–but slowly. If the story here is the misallocation of resources–particularly the giant sums we spend on the military and our misguided foreign policy–then who can disagree?
But the new Appalachia is a bit different from the old in its southern portion. The increasing prosperity from in migration and new industries have given local governments an incentive to make this problem go away as soon as possible. And at least where I live–a limited perspective–it is happening.
Stafford Act funds can only be used to replace infrastructure, not upgrade it. There are narrow exceptions to this rule, and I can only hope that Asheville jumped through the flaming hoops to meet the requirements that will allow the needed upgrade.
Many of the problems in planning and response to disasters are systemic, such as prohibiting recovery funds from being used for upgrades, even when the existing systems were functionally inadequate (I’d imagine that at least 1/4 of the damaged bridges fall into this hole). In addition, individuals and small businesses are not eligible for FEMA funds. They have to go through the SBA. My own MS thesis research (Response to Disasters That Damage Critical Infrastructure, 2005*) indicated that individual and business recovery from a disaster after 5 years had no correlation to the amount of State and Federal funds allocated to the response. Nearly every success story was due to individual and community determination, and nearly every business or homestead that waited for Federal or State funds failed to recover. We as a nation should expect better, and all of the wasted money handed out to Ukraine and Israel to be literally blown up instead of necessary and valuable things like public works is utterly and infuriatingly ridiculous.
*- I wish I knew where my research was located- i think my class was one of the last, if not The Last, to have to turn in physical copies of our work instead of (or in addition to) digital.
Contact the school’s library staff. Your thesis is likely archived as microfilm, if not as a searchable digital copy (PDF file). Mine still survives. (And it’s over 40 years old.)
Thanks!
Flood Insurance is a rip off. It is based on a National Market, so I pay the same rate in the Rocky Mountains as someone on the Gulf Coast. Worse, it only kicks in if 4 homes in your immediate area also file Flood Insurance claims. I highly doubt that most people in the Appalachians buy into the Flood Insurance, it doesn’t make sense to double (or more) your home insurance for the possibility of a 1000 year (as described by the media) flood.
It will be interesting (or would be if it there is actually news coverage) what the insurance companies actually pay out.
One thing I’d argue with insurance adjusters regarding flood damage is that not all of the flooding was caused directly by water. A good portion of it was caused by landslides, which then mixed with floodwaters, causing flooding in places that shouldn’t have experienced any.
If you watch videos from the Helene floods, you’ll notice that the first day or so the water looks like water, but after that the water looks like mud.
This interpretation would probably bankrupt insurers if successful, but there is a hydrological difference if it can be worked out of the policy details to get the victims (even partial) compensation.
That is going to have to be parsed out … what damage was from flood and what damage was from mudslides? If the insurance policy even covers mudslides. If the land collapsed because the river/creek changed course, is that flood damage? I don’t know, and it will be interesting to see how it works out. I wish we had the local media to dive into that and see what insurance actually covers.
Thank you. I subscribe to my FEMA regional emails. They do their best to engage us in preparedness on top of their regular job. Not like they have access to the best tech. Yes, landline was the most reliable, but the infrastructure was driven by free market tech to make that generally not servicable. My land land is not connected by wired infrastructure beyond a nearby connection. Text, at least will queue up to resend.
What FEMA brings to preparedness is more about what we need to be banging on our local and state governments to track, report and improve than anything FEMA can implement. I can see all the risks where I live because we demand it of our local government, means overcoming political resistance about getting real. Wired and cabled redundancy should have been mandated by regulators. But, the FCC and FTC and Congress has been asleep at the wheel, making deals for private-public (private takes it) infrastructure.
I’m seriously considering getting a ham radio and license. Expect the capitalists to try and turn that to their profit making purposes without consideration of reliable universal social value.
I had two nagging questions about this.
First was why isn’t the Biden administration not in front of this? They have been background lurkers for the East Palestine rail disaster, and for strikes like the rail union, longshoremen union, and Boeing machinists. The word senility has come to mind, but also as Matt Stoller has pointed out, the Democratic leadership doesn’t want to run on governance, be it anti-trust, other regulatory enforcement, etc.
Second question is why aren’t local governments making a bigger stink if FEMA is not up to task? Town, city, county, state, etc. Florida’s governor isn’t shy about picking fights with Biden administration, as Milton has been extremely destructive too. Nor would I the region’s Republican congress critters to be shy either.
Like Yves, I see many of the issues as features, not bugs. Updating flood maps, wetlands, land use, etc. for the new normal is going to be a drag.
” Second question is why aren’t local governments making a bigger stink if FEMA is not up to task?”
Perhaps because getting FEMA up to task would require higher taxes and redirecting the tax money taken in away from Israel, Ukraine, MICCIMAT, etc. and towards getting FEMA up to task. Which would have to be paid for. And that would require money.
Perhaps a new wannabe political party could run on that concept. More better taxes for more better government.
And yes, updating flood maps etc. for the new normal is going to be a drag. Especially since the new normal is going to be a moving target for decades to come.
Yes. Regardless of the efficacy of FEMA’s response, can the Democrats honestly answer whether they are interested in truly helping people or solving real problems? If FEMA needs to be set free of the Department of Homeland Insecurity, then DO IT. Can’t America do anything anymore except genocide?
Example. What’s the plan for when — not if — a Cat 5+ monster roars ashore in Houston, turns petrochemical plants upside down, guts and floods the city in a toxic stew, creating an environmental disaster the national severity of which we can scarcely imagine? Facing up to current and future disasters is monumentally difficult, expensive work, and given the duct-tape-and-baling-wire nature of the nation’s disaster preparedness, will require a mandate the size of the Manhattan Project. *This* is the politically agnostic, life-and-death issue we confront today, the one that can bring us together as a people, or left undone, kill us individually and as a nation. *Why not start now*? Plan. Fortify. Move to higher ground. Build resilience. We don’t exactly lack for land, or manpower, or resources, and if we’ve lost know-how, let’s get some back. Forget about Ukraine and the rest of the neocon/neolib wet dreams. Cut Nuttinyahoo off at the knees. Start spending the billions — the trillions — where it will count, where it will make a real difference in people’s lives. Harris/Trump/Congress/DeepState/RichState/WallStreet/KStreet doesn’t wanna pay and play? F— ’em, *force them to*. We know it will just get worse, much worse, with flooding, storm surges, fires, drought, killing heat waves, calamities that *spare no one*. Look at Asheville. Look at Valencia. America is utterly unprepared for what is baked into our near future.
Having been involved in disaster response (specifically bridge collapses and tornadoes), local governments have their hands full with the situation at hand. Making a stink is far down on the priority list. The bigger the disaster, the longer the list. They’ll make a stink, but it’s probably still a ways away.
The New Mexico Fire should be added to the near history accountability review of FEMA, as well. I have some friends in New Mexico where the Feds set what would become the largest fire in New Mexico history (against locals wishes) and have been absolutely horrible in paying out claims. –
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/13/g-s1-9206/new-mexico-wildfire-victims-fema
https://www.propublica.org/article/life-in-limbo-victims-of-new-mexicos-biggest-wildfire-wait-for-checks-from-the-federal-government-to-rebuild?fbclid=IwY2xjawGWJT5leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHRrVVdKqqOa7H8zgFqXZM0xgsmVOpEXwZu0ajIFRM1YqlF1SxsX6r9X58A_aem_GKshTTKCsSVEJnNl_TU2bA
Thank you for mentioning the murder of landline telephone service in the US. I thought I was the only one who noticed the implications of that.
My mother finally gave up her traditional landline from Verizon years ago when the monthly bill had gone well over $100–shockong for a service whose basic infrastructure was laid down before she was born. Cable added on phone service for essentially no extra money, but of course it goes down whenever cable internet goes down, which is often.
I would feel safer if my mother still had the old phone service, but how can she justify paying more than $1500 a year?
Add to the list the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that gutted local radio. Local radio still exists, but not to the extent that it did before Clinton allowed decimation by ClearChannel et al.
Local radio is especially critical in local emergencies, and has a long reach (although spotty in the Appalachians).
Copper phone lines are strung on the same poles that get swept away if floods/hurricanes/mud slides. The power in the copper wire is insufficient for any other purpose than carrying the voice signal; no charging a cell phone battery. Having an emergency back-up battery for one’s cellular service is now essential. Those cell towers probably get overwhelmed with calls in an emergency.
The more these disasters occur the more the ‘Preppers’ look prescient.
The landline phone service never went down throughout all the bad weather events of my life, hurricanes, blizzards, etc. Cable can go out during a bad rain. And as you noted, cell service is prone to oversaturation, not to mention the cell towers being damaged.
Of course the current in landline telephone cables is only suitable for carrying a voice signal, that’s the point. Lower energy use=more resilient. Just by design it prioritized energy use for a basic function of civil preparedness.
Alabama has power outages all the time, mainly due to blown transformers and trees taking down power lines. Never never never lost the phone dial tone.
I still have landline. It costs around a hundred dollars a month. I think they are trying to price-torture me into giving up landline. They keep mailing me mailings about how much cheaper cellphone would be. I just tell them that cellphones cause cancer and I like being backwards.
I will give up my telephone when they peel my cold dead landline from out of the wall.
Here’s a story that makes some points about the dangers posed by the dams in Western NC although it is a bit shaky on the facts. The town of Chimney Rock was upstream from Lake Lure not below the dam. While people below the dam were told to evacuate I’m not aware of tragedies taking place there because of the overflow.
Also the degree to which water releases made flooding worse is hard to assess given that any threathening to overtop would be coming down the hill regardless.
https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/04/ellen-brown-our-fragile-infrastructure-lessons-from-hurricane-helene/
Now that I think about it, this might be the most appropriate thread for this item about Tucker Carlson opining that the recent hurricanes might be so destructive because of abortion.
(Tucker Carlson fans would certainly be invited to explain what value Tucker Carlson would bring to this, or any other, weather disaster related conversation.)
https://www.the-express.com/news/politics/153627/tucker-carlson-abortion-hurricanes-election-day
Capitalist ‘planning’ is an oxymoron. Building standards are negotiated and you can guess who the most influential voices are at the table. Oops, that was a bad place to build? Oops, that is an older (30 year old) building)? FEMA will be happy to consult on worst case scenarios, as do all municipal services, make the budgets, and so on. State and municipalities are merely a form of corporation that controls most land use and purse strings. They negotiate what capital is willing to do.
FEMA responds and mostly we are told to prepare to be on our own for two weeks. So you might want to understand the geology and infrastructure history of the place you think you want to live, or are forced to live. Demand robust emergency preparedness measures, necessary infrastructure and demand your right to a safe place NOW with infrastructure improvements without displacement of current residents. OR, take the actions to move folks fairly and keep that land unavailable for exploitation by capital. Be prepared (not as a survivalist) with your neighbors because THEY WILL BE YOUR FIRST RESPONDERS. People getting swept away or buried on mud? Whelp that is the worst case scenario. Ham radio is proved out the best means of communications.
Risk to life has a monetary value assigned. A number on a spreadsheet. I expect capitalists are perfectly happy that the area is cleared out so they can rebuild new for people who will pay more. There is not socially mandated overarching regulation for safety of people beyond the minimal that capital has agreed at all levels of governance. We individuals really do not matter. That is evident due to displacement caused by up zoning and poverty without any plan for impacts. Disasters are merely a convenient developers opportunity. Build our way out of all problems is the mantra of development finance.