Can't bother to read the literal thousands of articles about North Carolina? Figures.
When Hurricane Helene struck his home in Hickory, North Carolina, Brock Long lost power for four days. Once his family was safe, he headed into the mountains of western North Carolina to help out. He knows the area well: He graduated from Appalachian State, which is in Boone, one of the hardest-hit places in the state. Long also knows a few things about charging into the breach after a major disaster. A career emergency manager, he led FEMA from 2017 to 2019 and is now the executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, which specializes in emergency response.
Speaking with me by phone yesterday, Long sounded exhausted. But he offered a clear view of the challenges that emergency managers must confront in the aftermath of the storm, including the continued struggle to rebuild communication networks and to reach residents who live in remote, mountainous areas where hurricanes are not a common danger.
Long told me that he has been heartened by ordinary citizens' eagerness to chip in and help, but he warned against "self-deploying" in the middle of such a complex effort.
Long: Thankfully, as FEMA administrator, I practiced what I preached, and we were prepared as a household. But my heart is absolutely broken for a lot of the other communities that really took the brunt of the impact. I've been up in Boone, in Watauga County. I made it to the top of Beech Mountain today. I've been in Asheville, working with local leaders and emergency managers, trying to, from a pro bono standpoint, just say, Hey, listen, this is what you need to be thinking and protecting yourself and gearing up for this long-term recovery that's going to take place over the next few years, and trying to get into some of these communities. It was incredibly rough getting to Beech Mountain. Beech Mountain has been completely cut off. We had to find an old logging road to go up.
Long: The disaster response is never going to move as quickly as people would like. There's a reason we call them catastrophic disasters. Things don't work. They're broken. And you don't just say, Oh, let me flip that switch and turn that back on. You have to set expectations and be honest with people: Listen, we took a catastrophic hit. And it's not just your area; it's multiple states. People tend to see only their localized picture of the whole disaster event. I couldn't tell you what was going on in Florida, South Carolina, or Georgia right now, because I am in my own little world in western North Carolina. There are only so many assets that can be deployed. I never point the blame at anybody. Nobody is at fault for this bad disaster. It's not FEMA's disaster. It's all of our disaster. The whole community has got to come together to solve this problem.
Graham: How does the terrain affect the way this disaster plays out?
Long: The supply chain's cut off. I probably saw no less than 150 collapsed or partially collapsed roadways today in and around Watauga and Avery Counties alone. They're everywhere. If it wasn't rutted out, there was a mudslide and trees down, covering half the road. Some of these communities become inaccessible, so they can't get the fuel they need to run their generators. They can't get the supplies up there to service the staff. There's only so many resources to go around to fix all of the problems that you're seeing, so the difficult task of the emergency managers is trying to figure out which roadway systems do you fix first, at the expense of others, to make sure that you can execute your life-sustaining missions.
www.theatlantic.com
