how well is FEMA doing with the Helene disaster response?

Image Courtesy: FEMA "Senior FEMA Official Willie Nunn visits Greenville, South Carolina, to examine the impact of Hurricane Helene and the resulting damage to the area."

I just watched one national news cast that was critical of the federal government’s disaster response to Hurricane Helene, especially in North Carolina.

In reality I don’t have “on the ground information” but I do know what is being done to respond from an organizational and priority perspective. To start with, Hurricane Katrina and the reforms enacted turned the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) around. They got the resources and then professional emergency management leadership at the Administrator level that had not existed before.

Since then, the mantra of FEMA has been, “Go Big, Go Fast” in responding to large scale disasters. I can assure you that in a presidential election year with the deadline to vote only 31 days at this writing, the Feds are pulling out all the stops, this is a maximum of maximum effort by all federal agencies. There is no doubt in my mind about that. No one is dragging their feet in making the best possible effort to help people.

The problem of North Carolina’s situation is logistics. I wrote about that in another earlier blog post Disaster Response to Helene and Logistics In this case, there is no ability to have “mind over matter.” With the damages to the road and bridge networks in that state, the response and help coming will be slowed considerably. It is a fact of life. You cannot snap your fingers and magically transport supplies, people or even disaster relief funds without a functional critical infrastructure.

In another Disaster Zone blog post, hurricanes and 3-day disaster preparedness I shared about the issue of a regional response taking more than three days and people need to be thinking longer term. Here on the West Coast, both Oregon and Washington tell their citizens that they need to be prepared to be on their own for a minimum of two weeks. Hurricane Helene validates my thinking on that subject.

Lastly, I have to say that I’m sick and tired of political commentators trying to make political hay on topics that they don’t know anything about and only have the intent of running down the actions of the “other party” because it is politically expedient and that is what their audiences want them to do. That is not news…it is just plain divisive, deceptive, and wrong.