Posted on 10/07/2024 10:32:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The official death toll from Hurricane Helene rose yesterday to 227 across six states, with about half of the victims being in North Carolina. But sources on the ground in North Carolina tell The Spectator that the true scope of the death and devastation wrought by the storm is not even close to being understood. In addition, the rescue and recovery efforts have been largely undertaken by private citizens, as the state and federal responses have been hamstrung by incompetent public officials.
“It’s so much worse than they’re saying,” said one individual who was in Asheville when Helene hit. “I think there’s a massive cover-up.”
A North Carolina official and former federal official confirmed that deaths have been severely undercounted thus far, partially because many bodies have not been recovered, but also because there are literally piles of the deceased who haven’t been identified and are being transported around the state to find open morgue space. Some North Carolinians have become so desperate that they are burying their own family members in their yards.
“According to folks on the ground — fire, medical, law enforcement officials — they’re way underreporting the numbers. All the morgues are full and they’ve hauled a ton [of bodies] to Greensboro,” the state official said. “People are starting to bury them in their yards because they have no place to put them.”
Locals are “pissed” at the seemingly lackadaisical response from state and federal officials, and many are pointing the finger at General Major Todd Hunt, director of the North Carolina National Guard. According to social media posts from the North Carolina National Guard, troops were not activated until the Sunday after the storm hit. There were 5,500 national guardsmen deployed to the area; only 500 came from North Carolina’s guard.
“That’s why you saw the Florida National Guard and other units out there — and why private citizens stepped in, even as state and federal officials tried to shut down their efforts,” a source briefed on the situation in North Carolina explained.
There were six confirmed tornados across southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina on the morning of September 27, two days before the guard was deployed.
The director of the North Carolina National Guard is appointed by the governor, and sources think it should be a no-brainer for Governor Roy Cooper to fire and replace Hunt. That has not happened. The Biden administration can also supersede the state response and federalize operations. That also has not happened.
President Joe Biden was at his beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware the weekend the storm hit and did not return to the White House until late Sunday night. He nonetheless defended his response, snarking to the press, “It’s called a telephone.”
Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned in Las Vegas late Sunday night and decided to tape an episode of Call Her Daddy , a podcast that gained popularity for its unfiltered and graphic discussions about casual sex, before returning to the White House on Monday for an in-person briefing.
While Biden and Harris were returning to the White House, former president Donald Trump visited a hurricane-ravaged town in Georgia.
“A certain president, I will not name him, destroyed his reputation with Katrina,” Trump said during a rally in Michigan later in the week. “And this is going even worse. She’s doing even worse than he did.”
Kanye West infamously claimed George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people” due to his response to Katrina; now, some North Carolinians feel Hurricane Helene is an example of rural whites being left behind. More than 1,800 people were killed during Katrina; sources in North Carolina speculated that the death toll could be even higher from Helene when all is said and done. Harris announced affected families would receive just $750, far below the stimulus checks awarded during the Covid-19 pandemic and debit cards and housing vouchers distributed to illegal migrants in some states.
Conservatives have criticized the Biden administration and FEMA for distributing $640 million through the Shelter and Services Program (SSP) to illegal migrants. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that FEMA will likely not have enough money to make it through hurricane season, but the administration rejects the idea that the funding shortage has anything to do with the migrant assistance. They argue that the SSP is funded through Customs and Border Patrol and that the resources are merely distributed by FEMA; however, migrants received assistance from FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP), the predecessor to SSP, through fiscal year 2023. In 2023, the EFSP awarded $425 million.
Mayorkas was also spotted Saturday afternoon at Sid Mashburn, an upscale men’s clothing store in Washington, DC, by Washington Free Beacon reporter Joe Simonson. “For context about all the FEMA stuff, I saw Alejandro Mayorkas this afternoon at Sid Mashburn, which is the second time I’ve seen him there on a Saturday afternoon in about a month. So, suffice to say, the guy isn’t working around the clock,” Simonson wrote on X.
For comparison, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was excoriated for shoe shopping at a department store in New York City after Katrina ripped through New Orleans.
The North Carolina official noted, “I went to ten different counties ... FEMA was very limited, mostly to local and state agency resources.”
North Carolinians were further slapped in the face when during the vice-presidential debate, the candidates were asked about the storm, but in the context of climate change rather than the emergency response. And, as The Spectator reported last week, as private citizens have reported being denied landing requests for rescue operations or having their medical and supplies tents shut down, progressive groups are busy fielding donations for abortion services for Hurricane Helene victims.
Many are wondering how the Biden administration was capable of scraping together $320 million to build a pier to deliver aid in Gaza earlier this year and $157 million for Lebanon as FEMA is supposedly at risk of running low on funds; the Biden administration just announced that federal assistance for Helene victims has only surpassed $137 million, in comparison.
As the people of North Carolina and surrounding states work to recover from this mass tragedy, they will not soon forget how they were treated by their government.
that was probably the norm a few generations ago.
Bookmark
Mark Dice
10/7/24
Stunning Internal FEMA Videos Reveal Agency’s ACTUAL Top Priorities
https://youtu.be/og34LK5uNWA?feature=shared
Newly resurfaced videos of FEMA executives, including the director, reveal what the agency’s top priorities are, and while they seem like satire, they’re actually real, and this is what they’re doing. Media analyst Mark Dice has the story.
Yep, an old settlement community near our house in suburban Atlanta posed quite a problem for developers when they started finding random burials all over the place! In those days folks just buried Aunt Minnie out back . . . .
Some areas were hit with 1000-year floods. Given the topography, there’s not a government on this planet that can fix things like this in two weeks.
Not fix things, make contact and bring water and food. Basic rescue work.
Yep. There are a lot more helicopters in the air today than yesterday. That’s how they’ll doing it.
There’s plenty of truth in the article, I’m sure. But it blames “General Major” Todd Hunt for not activating the North Carolina National Guard sooner.
That doesn’t make sense. It’s my understanding that the National Guard is not activated by a general, but by a governor.
(The governor of North Carolina is a Democrat, by the way).
There was a similar flood ~100 years ago, 1916.
While I do believe that some government agencies do not perform to their potential, I also do not believe there is any conspiracy to purposely undercount the dead.
I do believe that there may be more dead than officially reported, but that is due to poor communication between EOC and the rural areas. Those that are dead are dead and the living take priority. Are dead being buried in yards, etc. Probably. It is expedient as the bodies begin to bloat and turn nasty.
Today’s count is upwards of 260 and I expect when it is all said and done that that number will double if not triple and some deaths will never been known.
But frankly, I do not think there is any conspiracy to hide the numbers—its just that they just don’t know. Local Sheriffs have a rough idea of what’s happening in their counties, but even then...
It is a horrrendous event all the way around and in a few days all will be foregotten—oh there will be anniversaries—like three months later to see how the bakery in Ashville is doing. The obligatory trip to Chimney Rock, etc....its how these things play out in the media.
But for the folks living it—it will be hell for the next several years. Some had little damage and only have to wait for city lights and city water to come back—but for others up there in the hollers and all....in some cases their land is gone....how do you rebuild if your land is now downstream? That is a nightmare.
We here in Butte County faced the same thing when the Paradise Fire ripped through and actually destroyed a town...not much left...only now can something almost normal be declared...but still its not the same number of houses, nor the same number of trees (of course)...the landscape and psyche has changed in Paradise and it will in WNC too....
If anything positive might have come out of it...is that the meth heads and the opiod users might have gotten a wake up call and decided to be part of the solution instead of a problem.
We once had two five-hundred-year floods in less than ten years here in NC.
Buring the dead in the yard will become the norm, maybe even mass graves as well if things go the way thing are heading.
There are some first-person reports on YouTube made by people who have hiked or used their own offroad vehicles to go into the affected areas, and I would trust their reports much more than second hand reporting.
Well, given that it’s Major General and not “General Major”, I’m not sure how much of the article is garbage or not. https://ng.nc.gov/major-general-todd-hunt
It will take at least 40 years to "fix" this disaster.
But immediate aid to survivors is well within government capabilities. It is clear from their official website that FEMA has other priorities. It is even clearer from accounts of FEMA activities.
The pittance of resources deployed and slow walked into the disaster area compares most unfavorably with the billions of dollars being used to resettle illegal immigrants in red States and support the war in Ukraine.
One comes to the unavoidable conclusion that the government controlled by Democrats simply does not want to help people in a region with a large population of Republicans.
There is a systemic incentive to undercount the dead. More dead makes the government look worse. Government officials do not want to look worse. That is not quite the stuff of a conspiracy, but it only takes a small nudge to get there.
With limited resources, it makes good sense to focus on rescue and supply efforts as the first priority rather than counting and identifying the dead. I cannot fault the FEMA or private teams for doing that.
Fatality counts will always be low for a mixture of reasons and will be revised later. Upwards. That is just how disasters work. What matters right now is preventing deaths of survivors who are without shelter, food, water, and mobility.
That last part is where FEMA and the Federal government are doing badly.
Lady is a nurse. Says that she is talking to people at the Yancy county fire department and they have 4 refrigerator trucks at their facuility filled with body bags and describes other things that are going on. (I note that she did not say that their were bodies in the bags or give a total number of dead. Someone said in comments that each truck can hold 90 bodies, but again, speculation.)
If there is a lack of morgue space this would make sense. This is one of those "A friend told me that..." so viewers can make up their own minds whether to believe this. Posting, but I would say that this requires independent confirmation, just not certain from whom.
Here is a link to Yancy County website:
I do not see a county Fire Department, but I do see EMS services https://yanceycountync.gov/173/EMS---Emergency-Medical-Services
Nothing that addresses this issue.
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