The hundreds of FEMA staff on the ground in Western North Carolina will remain and will not be redeployed to Florida in preparation for the devastation expected there from Hurricane Milton, an agency spokesman said.
“FEMA is not taking any resources away from ongoing operations here in North Carolina,” spokesman Darrell Habisch told Asheville Watchdog. “We’re providing additional available resources to Florida.”
The federal government has launched a massive deployment in Florida ahead of Milton, a Category 4 hurricane aimed at the populated west coast, where more than 3 million people live along the coastline and on vulnerable barrier islands.
The federal presence in Florida includes six FEMA incident management teams, five FEMA search and rescue teams, three U.S. Coast Guard Swift Water Rescue teams, four HealthCare System Assessment Teams, two U.S Army Corps of Engineers temporary power teams, environmental and wastewater experts, 300 ambulances and 30 Department of Defense highwater vehicles, according to a news release Monday.
FEMA has two incident staging bases, 20 million meals and 40 million liters of water “in the pipeline…to address ongoing Helene and Milton response efforts with capacity to expand as needed,” the release said.
The preparedness in Florida is in contrast to Western North Carolina before Helene struck. It took days for federal crews to be fully functioning and for drinking water to be widely distributed in Buncombe after Helene caused catastrophic damage that far exceeded predictions. Tens of thousands residents were without running water.
“We’ve been asking for water, and we’re just getting water, and it’s still in low quantities,” Buncombe County Manager Avril Pinder said at a briefing Sept. 30, three days after the storm. “There’s a large need in our community, and we would like to see a different response from our state partners, a better response from our state partners,” who funnel aid requests to FEMA.
FEMA prepositioned teams ahead of Helene in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, but “these efforts focused on the Big Bend area of Florida,” Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall said at a Sept. 30 White House briefing. Helene made landfall there Sept. 26 before drenching Georgia and the Carolinas with record-breaking rain.
Sherwood-Randall said the federal response pivoted to western North Carolina as the devastating impact on the region became clear.
U.S. Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Emergency Management and Technology, cited Pinder’s water complaint in a letter Saturday to the FEMA administrator.
The unexpected damage to Western North Carolina “highlighted the unique challenges to emergency response operations in rural, mountainous regions, where cellular service is spotty, and residents are unprepared for historic flooding and severe weather events like that of Hurricane Helene,” wrote D’Esposito, a New York Republican. “As you know, community resiliency depends on accurate forecasting and the pre-positioning of resources in advance of a natural disaster.”
The committee asked for “information regarding FEMA’s advanced forecasting models, its pre-positioning of resources, and its coordination with federal, state, and local partners in response to Hurricane Helene,” according to the letter. It asked FEMA to respond by Oct. 18.
“I can’t comment on or even speculate on the size of the preparations that were in place,” Habisch said. “It was unexpected to be so large of an area this far inland in the continental United States… I think the severity or just the sheer size of Helene was shocking to a number of people.”
FEMA currently has more than 800 staff in North Carolina, “with more arriving daily,” and 1,200 Urban Search and Rescue personnel, who have “rescued or supported over 3,200 survivors,” according to the Monday news release.
FEMA had approved more than $32 million in housing and other assistance to more than 27,000 households in the state, the release said.
On Sunday, President Joseph Biden ordered an additional 500 active-duty troops to North Carolina, bringing the total to 1,500 military personnel.
The back-to-back major catastrophes of Helene and Milton less than two weeks apart and affecting millions of people across the southeast are straining FEMA.
Just 9% of FEMA’s personnel, or 1,217 people, were available to respond to Milton or other disasters, the New York Times reported Monday.
“Staffing is, has always been a multi-agency effort,” Habisch said. “When the need arises, we can ask for additional resources and personnel from other agencies within the federal government to respond, and in fact, that is happening.”
The White House said Monday that “FEMA has sufficient funding to both support the response to Hurricane Milton and continue to support the response to Hurricane Helene.”
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Sally Kestin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. Email skestin@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.
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