It wasn’t as if the Tar Heel State didn’t see Hurricane Helene coming. On Sept. 25, one day before Helene stormed ashore, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency as the storm’s path showed it churning northward toward Appalachia after making landfall in Florida.

Yet that advance declaration was not followed by any state evacuation orders, and the population largely sheltered in place as Helene hit the steep, wooded hills of Western North Carolina, squatting over the area, unleashing more than an inch of water an hour for more than a day.

The unprecedented, relentless downpour, falling on ground already saturated by rain the week before, tore old pines and hardwoods out by the roots, creating arboreal torpedoes that rocketed down the steep inclines; water that turned photogenic stony creeks into whitewater torrents, lifting ancient streambed boulders and tossing them like chips on to roads and into homes and buildings.

The storm left 230 people dead, nearly half of them in North Carolina, with dozens still missing as of early November.

As residents in Asheville, Chimney Creek, and other smaller communities continue to pick up from the carnage, after-action reports indicate government agencies at the federal and state levels were slow to react.

Interviews with several private relief groups that sprang into action after Helene, along with statistics provided by congressional sources, indicate that Cooper’s office and the Biden administration were slow to activate military personnel and assets like helicopters that were critical in the days after the storm.

In addition, budgetary moves and internal communications have also drawn questions about how the Federal Emergency Management Agency is spending its money and how it envisioned its purpose in a Biden administration suffused with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” mandates.

FEMA is also wrestling with revelations that politics had influenced some of its relief efforts. The agency fired a staffer who told crews to avoid houses in storm-damaged parts of Florida that displayed Donald Trump campaign signs. The dismissed worker said this week her orders were not an isolated incident and that FEMA avoided “politically hostile” zones in the Carolinas, too.

“There seems to have been a priority shift, period,” said Eric Eggers, the vice president of the conservative Government Accountability Institute. “It seems impossible to separate its mission creep and its ideological pursuit of an agenda when its duties are to fix that bridge or clear that road.”

As devastating and increasingly expensive natural disasters continue to be a fact of life in the United States, FEMA’s halting response, especially in the early days after Helene, when lives were in jeopardy, suggests both the capabilities and limits of state and federal responses.

In the first days, survivors told RealClearInvestigations that the impact of governments’ slow-footed efforts was countered by the heroic efforts of private citizens and groups who rushed to provide help. As FEMA and others began to assert themselves, some conflicts arose between government representatives and volunteers, although everyone RealClearInvestigations spoke with agreed that such disasters inevitably spawn chaos. There is no such thing as a “perfect response,” but many people said the one following Helene teaches important lessons.

Helene didn’t slam into Western North Carolina the way hurricanes typically do, but instead squatted like an angry demon over the region in which the economically important fall tourist season was just swinging into gear.

In Avery County, a parks and recreation gymnasium had been set up as a shelter with approximately 40 beds and generators for backup power, according to Jamie Shell, the editor of the weekly Avery Journal-Times and a lifelong Tar Heel.

“On the day prior to the storm, we were in touch with the county emergency management office and county manager to get a feel for where they were in terms of initial response,” he said. “I remember a number of generated auto-calls and emails from the county to the county residents informing them of the historic and potentially devastating nature of the event, warning people to make plans to seek higher ground and evacuate as needed due to the torrential rains and damaging winds that would arrive.”

By Friday morning, Shell said people were fending off the elements as best they could.

“It was a case where most everyone who........

© The Daily Signal