ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
One of the more interesting election stories from the midterms was what happened in North Carolina. Trump took that state three times over, but this year, Democrats won the Senate seat and flipped five congressional races. And in addition to the candidates themselves, one of the big names on voters' minds was Helene, Hurricane Helene. That storm rocked North Carolina two years ago, killing more than 100 and costing the state an estimated $60 billion in damages, and the recovery effort remains largely unfinished.
Reporter Gerard Albert III has investigated what many see as a blundered government response to this disaster. His new podcast, A Man-Made Disaster, is a production of Blue Ridge Public Radio and the PBS series "Frontline." Welcome.
GERARD ALBERT III, BYLINE: Thanks for having me.
SCHMITZ: So your podcast begins with the story of a man named Ryan Wiebe. He lives in Yancey County, North Carolina, which was hit very hard by Hurricane Helene two years ago. Tell us about how the hurricane impacted him and how Ryan is doing today.
ALBERT: Yeah, Ryan and his family live along the South Toe River, and he's got a lot of land there. He's been there for about 20 years, and it's land that he used to farm and fish and hunt on. And after the storm, him and I walked it several times over the course of more than a year, and it was just covered with debris, in several places just stacked higher than our heads, and...
SCHMITZ: Wow.
ALBERT: And most of this debris came from a campground nearby. The floodwaters just took everything along with it and kind of just dumped it right on his land.
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RYAN WIEBE: Reclining chairs, plastic picnic chairs, a whole shrapnel body of a camper with windows and glass and griddles and microwaves and picnic tables, mattresses, tables, doors, rugs, refrigerators - just goes on and on.
SCHMITZ: Wow. All of those objects, including people's own homes, are just spread across Ryan's property.
ALBERT: Yeah. And for Ryan and his family, you know, they had lost four family members in the flooding from the storm. So, you know, as Ryan described it to me every time he and his wife would see the debris, it was just kind of a reminder of what they had lost. And, you know, as a reminder, this is a region that President Trump campaigned in, and he took his first trip as president after he was elected and came here and used the backdrop of some destroyed homes for his press conference where he not only pledged, you know, total support for the region and a cutting of bureaucracy in FEMA, but then also pledged to cut FEMA. So it was a confusing kind of time for the area with recovery.
SCHMITZ: So people here in the state are - have been ravaged by this hurricane. President Trump shows up. He promises to help, but then he also promises to cut funds to FEMA. That has to be quite confusing for folks there. What happens next?
ALBERT: So when the Trump administration came in for the second term, he implemented three big things that impacted the way FEMA ran, and those were the Department of Government Efficiency - or as most people know it, DOGE - which was run by Elon Musk.
SCHMITZ: Right.
ALBERT: And that basically doubled the amount of paperwork that states had to file to get FEMA help. The Trump administration also pushed cuts across the federal government, but especially at FEMA, which lost almost 20% of its staff. So they're running with fewer people to help in the administrative roles.
And then of course, the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem implemented a rule where she had to sign off on any spending over $100,000, which may sound like a lot, but when it comes to disaster recovery, there are projects for tens of millions of dollars moving through the pipeline every day. So for Noem to just have this rule and hold things up, it creates this $17 billion backlog across the country, and these are just stacks and stacks and stacks of applications waiting for her signature. And...
SCHMITZ: And I want to go back here because you just mentioned 20% cuts to the staff of FEMA, and we should remind listeners here that this is an agency that, even when it was fully staffed, was having big problems.
ALBERT: That's right. I mean, there - you know, for disaster survivors, there's almost always a complaint about FEMA moving too slow or too bureaucratically. And for this reporting, I spoke to a lot of lawmakers in the state and federally, one of them, Republican North Carolina Senator Ted Budd. And I asked him about the kind of slowness of FEMA overall, but also the backlog that was being created by the Trump administration and specifically Kristi Noem's policy. And he told me he just would call her personal cell phone and plead for the money that North Carolina needed.
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TED BUDD: Every time we would make one of those requests, we would also ask for a process so that it didn't involve phone calls such as the one, you know, we would be having at that moment, and those were either ignored or rebuffed. There was no real process set up.
SCHMITZ: OK, so we have a Republican senator who is being completely ignored by the Secretary of Homeland Security. That brings us to today. I mean, Democrats just had a big victory in the midterms. How much of this do you think can be attributed to the way that the Trump administration handled Hurricane Helene recovery efforts?
ALBERT: It's a little tough to say. You know, after Helene, there was only a few weeks before the election, and the area voted pretty overwhelmingly for President Trump. But in the two years since, you know, that frustration has obviously grown and the finger pointing - while it is varied whether it's the federal government or FEMA or the Trump administration - the frustration is there.
You've seen - you see this area of Western North Carolina, again overwhelmingly voted Republican in 2024. And for these midterms, you know, I think it was almost half of the counties in western North Carolina flipped from Republican to Democrat, voting not only for a Democratic senator to represent the state but also, specifically for the most impacted regions of Western North Carolina, a Democratic congressman take over, and the new congressman from this area campaigned on Helene funding being one of the principal priorities of his campaign, and that's Democrat Jamie Ager.
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JAMIE AGER: We're focused on No. 1, Helene recovery funding for Western North Carolina. Our plan is to push that legislation forward with whoever we have to work with in the leadership of the next Congress. And I feel like we can go push on that and remind people that this community still has a long way to go to recover. And part of my job is to help deliver that funding.
SCHMITZ: So is there light on the horizon for people in Western North Carolina?
ALBERT: That's a tough question. I've spoken with some state officials who have really been advocating for the past two years but pushing especially hard on this kind of lame duck congressional session and the continuing resolution vote that's coming up in December to try and squeeze in some of this Helene funding in there, but their hopes are not very high. So, you know, they'll look ahead to work with Democrats in Congress to try and push some of that funding along.
SCHMITZ: That's Gerard Albert III. He hosts the podcast A Man-Made Disaster from Blue Ridge Public Radio and the PBS series "Frontline." Thank you.
ALBERT: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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