The scale of the natural disaster which has hit the southern Appalachian Mountains – especially in North Carolina – is almost incomprehensible.
We are used to hurricanes in large coastal cities with relatively flat lands. We are now seeing small towns in narrow valleys dealing with flooded mountain rivers, fallen bridges, and washed-out roads. The level of isolation makes helping people, getting medical care to the needy, and recovery operations extraordinarily challenging.
The first fact of the Hurricane Helene disaster in the mountains of North Carolina (and in some of the neighboring mountainous states) is virtually no one was prepared for its size and intensity. All the planning and preparation for normal hurricanes were irrelevant.
Faced with this enormous challenge, the federal government failed dramatically.
Part of that failure may have begun when Vice President Kamala Harris apparently skipped four consecutive annual briefings on hurricane preparation. These were key briefings to which President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence paid great attention.
It has been painful, frustrating, and infuriating to watch the Biden-Harris administration and its bureaucrats fail those who have been devastated by Hurricane Helene.
As Bradley Delvin pointed out in the Signal on Oct. 4, the Biden-Harris administration’s failures mirror the George W. Bush White House’s failures managing Hurricane Katrina, which crippled New Orleans in 2005:
“Harris, however, didn’t return to Washington until Monday. The vice president was busy fundraising and campaigning on the West Coast when Helene struck. At fundraisers in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Harris hobnobbed with megadonors, some of whom spent nearly $1 million for a ticket to meet the vice president. She raised $55 million for her campaign while the Southeast suffered.”
As I talked with friends in North Carolina, it became clear that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is too small, slow, and bureaucratic to be effective.
This is nothing new. In 2007, I served on the Business Executives for National Security project called “Getting Down to Business: An Action Plan for Public-Private Disaster Response Coordination.”
We reviewed the Hurricane Katrina response and its devastating impact on New Orleans. We concluded that there needed to be profound changes in the federal government’s approach to hurricanes – in preparation and response.
As former Bell South Chairman and CEO F. Duane Ackerman, who led the BENS task force, testified to Congress:
“Continuity of community is a key concept for officials charged with preparing the federal emergency response to consider. In a disaster, which always begins in a locality, support from the private sector is typically automatic, not only because businesses are citizens of their own communities, but also because without continuity of community no business can be done. In thinking about the Task Force’s aims, it soon became clear that a key goal was determining how to scale effective local responses up to a true national response capability. Our surveys revealed nine main themes that must be satisfied.”
Sadly, virtually none of the reforms were adopted by the FEMA bureaucracy, which remains to this day unable to meet the speed and scale required by modern disasters.
Fortunately, private volunteers, local churches, and a remarkable gathering of privately owned helicopters filled much of the vacuum left by federal bureaucratic incompetence. Franklin Graham and Samaritan’s Purse played a significant role. Graham himself lives in the impacted area in the mountains. Callista and I had strong memories of Samaritans Purse flying a 68-bed mobile hospital into Bergamo, Italy at the height of the COVID-19 disaster. As U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Callista helped get permission from the Italian government. The Minister of Public Health said later that Samaritans Purse saved many lives and helped keep the Italian health system from breaking down.
Beyond Graham’s efforts, virtually every church in the region spontaneously went to work helping people. My good friend fellow co-author Bill Forstchen, who lives in the heart of the mountains, told me there were churches with food and other supplies helping entire regions while FEMA was nowhere in sight.
The even more amazing effort by volunteers who own helicopters was a genuine lifesaving intervention. While the federal government’s FEMA and military bureaucracies were too slow and distant, volunteers spontaneously attracted about 90 privately owned helicopters. They created a helicopter relief center in Hickory, North Carolina. The group, called “Operation Helo” reported it had flown 2,000 missions in seven days. Pilots delivered 2 million pounds of supplies, made 350 evacuations, and delivered 512 Starlink systems sent by Elon Musk. These people brought their own helicopters, paid for their own fuel, and spontaneously organized. Many of them had military experience in mountainous terrain in places such as Afghanistan. They filled the gap while the Harris-Biden administration grudgingly engaged the military (the United States has roughly 5,500 military helicopters).
Gov. Ron DeSantis provided a remarkable contrast in leadership to the failure of Vice President Harris and her administration. He created Operation Blue Ridge, to “answer the call for Americans when the federal government fails to act.”
Gov. DeSantis deployed rescue and relief teams from the guardsmen under his authority and from the Florida departments of emergency management, law enforcement, and fish and wildlife to participate in the relief effort.
The contrast between Florida and the feds was amazing. As one Florida guard member told Fox News’s Bill Hemmer: “There is a complete failure of leadership here in North Carolina and from the federal government… And it takes …strong leadership in Florida to send us up here.”
Days after DeSantis’s order, the Biden White House announced that President Joe Biden ordered the deployment of up to 1,000 active-duty soldiers to aid in the disaster response, including distributing food and water to the impacted communities.
When you watch the human suffering from Hurricane Helene just remember much of it was avoidable. The Biden-Harris administration failed, and Americans paid the price.
As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, we pray these failures are not repeated.
For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.
