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Two Years After Helene, North Carolina’s Unsettled Recovery

The state has become a testing ground under an eviscerated FEMA and a missing-in-action “recovery czar,” Michael Whatley, with big political ambitions.

Here to help: During a visit to Swannanoa, North Carolina, in January 2025, the newly elected President Trump promised aid to communities devastated by Hurricane Helene.

In late January 2025, President Donald Trump took his first trip outside of Washington, DC, after returning to office for his second term. His destination: North Carolina, which four months earlier had been devastated by Hurricane Helene—the deadliest storm to hit the United States since Hurricane Maria in 2017. Helene battered communities in six states, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands, but western North Carolina was hit the hardest, and in a series of stops in the region, Trump pledged to rebuild after the storm. “I promised that I’d come back to western North Carolina to help the people of the state, and today, here I am to deliver on that promise,” Trump declared in Swannanoa, 10 miles east of Asheville. “Under the Trump administration, the days of betrayal and neglect are over.”

But Trump delivered two other messages during his visit that seized headlines and may have surprised those assembled for the photo ops. Trump had proposed “getting rid of” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) altogether, saying during his stop in the town of Fletcher, “It’s very bureaucratic, very slow.” He doubled down in Swannanoa: “If it was up to me right now, I’d end it right now.”

He also announced that Michael Whatley, a GOP operative and Trump ally, would lead the administration’s recovery effort. “I’d like to put Michael in charge of making sure everything goes well,” Trump said in Fletcher. In Swannanoa, he added, “Michael Whatley is going to be very much in charge.”

But two years after Helene, North Carolina’s recovery remains painfully slow and uneven, hampered by a federal response that has been starved of money and hobbled by turmoil inside Trump’s FEMA. Western North Carolina has become a testing ground for what happens when increasingly destructive disasters collide with a weakened response system—and whether the US government can still deliver when catastrophe strikes.

The troubled recovery after Helene could also become a political reckoning. Whatley, Trump’s handpicked “recovery czar,” is now in a close race for a critical US Senate seat in North Carolina, which has put his record on Helene—and the administration’s handling of disasters more broadly—under new scrutiny.

Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 hurricane on September 26, 2024, and careened through Georgia and into southern Appalachia, unleashing a record rainfall and historic levels of flooding. North Carolina’s western counties took the brunt of the disaster, with 100 deaths occurring there out of Helene’s more than 250.

The storm damaged or destroyed more than 70,000 homes in the state. Water systems in two dozen cities and towns broke down because of flooding and fast-moving debris; Asheville, the biggest city in western North Carolina, didn’t have potable water for almost two months after Helene.

The region’s steep mountain terrain made Helene especially destructive, and recovery especially difficult. More than 2,000 landslides damaged homes and roads; in Fairview, southeast of Asheville, 10 landslides converged, killing 13 people. Entire communities were cut off as 5,000 miles of state-maintained roads and some 8,000 private roads, culverts, and bridges were damaged. The disaster zone also included 138,000 mobile homes, leaving poor and working-class residents especially vulnerable to wind, flooding, and falling rocks.

North Carolina has made remarkable progress in Helene’s aftermath. As of July 2026, the state’s public-recovery dashboard reported that all but one of the 1,588 storm-ravaged public roads have been reopened, and 625 of the 880 damaged public bridges have been fixed. Officials say that 99 percent of public drinking-water and 93 percent of wastewater systems are back online.

Other issues are taking more time. Of more than 3,000 sites targeted by the state’s Private Road and Bridge Program, which was set up to reimburse owners of property damaged by Helene, only 145 had been completed by late July. In a letter to Congress that month, North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Josh Stein said that 1,000 homes have been repaired or rebuilt and another 2,800 are in progress, but some 56,000 homes remain damaged or destroyed.

Part of the slow recovery is simply the challenge of rebuilding after a major disaster. “You’re not going to get back to where you were in three or four years,” Stein said in July. “You have to be committed to this work for the long haul.”

But........

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