The 4-day deluge first filled creeks and saturated the soil with 10 to 30 inches of rain, increasing in power before the worst part of the hurricane reached the region at Category 4 strength, culminating in an atmospheric river, forty to a hundred mile per hour winds, and tornadoes that residents say passed over the mountains making a "snap, snap, snap" sound as they broke trees like matchsticks.
The worst part of the storm hit between 4am and 7am, when people were fast asleep.
The Cane, Toe, French Broad, Swannanoa and Green Rivers inhaled communities, and by the time they reached inhabited areas, the rivers were cresting as much as 25 to 35 feet above ordinary levels. Floodwaters literally submerged towns Marshall, gutted Biltmore Village, and totally destroyed the River Arts District in Asheville. Elsewhere, thousands of mudslides took out homes and communities.
Places like Swannanoa and Pensacola are now often described by locals as a war-zone, and following the storm, long swaths of the riverbanks there were said to have reeked with an unbearable stench of death. Bee Tree, Bat Cave, Burnsville, Spruce Pine, Barnardsville, Chimney Rock and many other beloved towns and special places are gone or changed forever.
"I'm saying well over 5,000 bodies have already come out of here." ~ Deborah Bare, President / Make a Vet ShineOn its path, the deluge subsumed the North Fork Water Treatment Plant, a PVC factory, the Baxter North Cove manufacturing site, lumber-yards, gas stations and some 40 miles of railroad. It unearthed cemeteries and septic systems and in the end, the floodwaters dumped into lower-lying areas like the iconic Lake Lure, featured in the film Dirty Dancing. A lake which, the rumor mill has it, is now full of bodies.
Local and state officials have asked people not to say that publicly, and to unshare or take down posts - even those that contain substantial first-hand evidence about the storm.
The North Carolina Department of Public Safety warned online that "nefarious actors and those with ill-intent may be taking advantage of this situation by spreading false information."
And at an online press briefing hosted by Buncombe County spokeswoman Lillian Govus on Oct 17, Govus said that rumors of mass casualty events caused by the storm "hurt" relief efforts and lead emergency personnel to "redivert resources" and double-back on areas they have already checked.
"It takes away time and resources from us being able to do those critical life-saving maneuvers in our community," Govus said.
On the other hand, on-the-ground civilian reports can be helpful in a disaster that spans across so many hollers and communities, and in which civilians have played such an essential role in relief efforts.
The vast majority of civilians this reporter asked in hard-hit areas of Western North Carolina said they believe the storm killed more people than the state's official count, which, considering the extent of the damage, may not be surprising.
While the true body count may never be known, 26 civilian sources interviewed believe the true number killed by the storm is being under-reported, and some go so far as to say there is a cover-up.
As of Oct. 31, the state's Chief Medical Examiner's Office had reported 101 verified storm-related fatalities in North Carolina distributed across 22 counties, and on Oct. 21 the NC Department of Health and Human Services put the total number of people who remain missing at 26.
"All of these towns that I've been through, everything that I've seen," the death toll has "got to be in the thousands," said Tim Murray, owner of Murray Motorsports in Winston-Salem, NC. "They had nowhere to go, and little to no warning."
A day after the storm hit, Murray brought seven off-road side-by-sides to help local officials and search and rescue crews access areas where roads had washed away. Working with a local fire department in a small city in Western NC, Murray helped cadaver teams pick through debris piles and personally saw "several" bodies.
A week after the storm, the local fire chief told Murray's team that he had tallied 148 dead and 600 missing just in that area. After that, Murray said FEMA came and took over the operation, asking everyone to leave.
"I mean, why, why, why would you stop looking for people?" Murray said FEMA also turned away a truckload of supplies that had been requested by the chief.
"These were goods that were specifically needed by that fire department, and they were turned away by FEMA," said Murray, whose claims could not be verified.
Murray declined to name the city or the chief out of concern for the firefighter's job security, but said he was stationed close to the center of the storm's impact in NC.
Local suspicions about the true body count from the storm have been fueled in part by the Eastern TN/NC Hurricane Helene People Finder, an excel spreadsheet of unverified, community-sourced information that, as of Oct. 29, showed the names of some 115 dead and 514 people listed as missing in NC - an alarming 20 times higher than the state's current tally.
Due to the vast extent of the storm's damage, finding the dead and missing has been a daunting task for the many responders, including neighbors, volunteer search and rescue teams, local fire and police departments, and scattered semblances of military.
Damage from Helene could cost anywhere between $35 billion according to Moody's Analytics and up to $250 billion according to AccuWeather, which - adjusting for inflation - would make Helene the costliest storm in American history. By comparison, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has put the value of damage done by Katrina - which hit a far more urbanized area — at about $170 billion.
Questions on the ground
Steve Slepcevic, a disaster planning consultant and owner of Strategic Response Partners, joined the relief efforts soon after the storm hit.
"One of the medical directors that showed up in our EOC and said we've run out of body bags... that was over 750 body bags," said Slepcevic, who has worked in "just about" every major disaster in the United States over the past 35 years.
"The fact that they're claiming there's 98 people dead in that area couldn't be a bigger lie. Everybody in the community that has lost many, many loved ones can attest that that number is far greater than that."
Caitlyn Renee Frederick, founder of Camp K-9, brought six certified cadaver dogs to NC from West Virginia and over the course of a few days, her team flagged nine spots as potentially containing human remains in the Pensacola area of Yancey County.
As of Oct. 25., the state's total body count for Yancey County was 11.
Since her dogs are trained to bark if they smell a single drop of blood, Frederick said she could not be sure if what was in the piles she marked were body parts or whole cadavers.
At Burnsville City Park near Rose's Store on Reservoir Rd., Frederick spoke with a large cadaver recovery group that "were actually going through piles and they did verify there were 400 bodies found in two days that were bagged and carried out." She did not recall the name of the group or where they had searched, but remarked they "laughed in her face" when hearing her team had marked only nine piles.
"There's no way there's only 96 people dead in the whole state of North Carolina," Frederick said. "There's gotta be thousands out there."
Asked about both K-9 teams' finds, Yancey County's Burnsville Fire Chief Niles Howell said, "All of the above are falsehoods to my knowledge."
Swannanoa Deputy Fire Chief Larry Pierson said that many K-9 teams that swarmed around in the days after the storm were uncertified and never funneled through the fire departments, so their reports may be unreliable.
Wendy McNulty-Clements, an RN at Asheville's Mission Hospital who spoke with firefighters, EMS, and EMT professionals as they arrived at the hospital during her shifts from Thursday — the day before the storm hit — through Monday, said she counted "hundreds" of bodies come into the hospital during that 5-day span.
"I was there the whole time, and what I was hearing from first responders was not matching what... was being delivered in the news," McNulty-Clements said on Oct. 8. "We all knew the destruction. We could see it."
"There's lots of bodies that are still waterlogged and underneath right now. I had a friend of mine who... pulled out 36 on his own." ~ Lionel Monroe, Volunteer / Red Truck MenA Yancey County resident who helped with cadaver recovery believes there are more than the state's total for storm-related fatalities in Yancey County alone. The man, who works for the local government and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of losing his job, said on Oct. 23 that he spoke to K-9 cadaver recovery teams from Texas in Pensacola around Oct. 12 and was told they had "picked up 47 bodies just that one day."
That same day, at the scene of a car wreck off Cox's Creek in Burnsville, he spoke with paratroopers who had picked up 18 bodies.
"That's 65 in one day and we've been dealing with this for three weeks now," the man said. His neighbors, a Ukrainian family of four - not the widely-reported Segen family - were all washed away by the storm.
"One was a 9-year old child. They found those bodies this week, nothing's been reported."
Debora L. Bare, president of the nonprofit Help A Vet Shine and a volunteer at Place Community Baptist Church, one of the main supply distribution centers in Fairview, estimates "well over 5,000" people have died in the state as a result of the storm.
"I've had locals tell me 20, 30, they pull out in one spot up in the trees," Bare said. Families who come to get free supplies at the church have told her they are "missing 12, 15, 20 people, and you're only saying there's 100 or 200? Well, I got six families right here that are already beating your numbers."
Josh Hensley, founder of A Bridge Home, a non-profit rebuilding bridges destroyed by the storm who worked with cadaver search and rescue teams in communities all over Western NC, said he saw bodies and body parts while operating an excavator in the Swannanoa River's bed.
Hensley recalls seeing bodies and body parts while operating an excavator in the Swannanoa River's bed.
"In just Swannanoa I was hearing 145 bodies," Hensley said. "At that point they were saying 11 in the state of North Carolina. That was when I was like, 'Something weird's going on here.'"
In flood zones like East Asheville and Swannanoa, where homeless and illegal immigrants used to camp, he fears many deaths will never be counted.
Asked about the possibility of 145 dead in Swannanoa, one of the hardest hit towns in the state, Pierson said, "I have never heard those kind of numbers from any one of the people involved in our operations."
Unlike local and state officials, Hensley lamented that the scope of the damage in Western NC is receiving too little national coverage compared to Hurricane Katrina. Without more media attention or "executive orders to get things rebuilt," he believes some areas will need a decade before people can return to their homes.
"It's that serious."
Lionel Monroe, a volunteer with the Red Truck Men at the Rail Yard in Black Mountain got to town about a week after the storm and has handed out supplies, run chainsaws in Chimney Rock and Bat Cave, and helped dredge Lake Lure, where he said he saw flip-flops and a croc float up from underneath the water.
"I've heard 1,800 from multiple sources," he said of the death toll in NC. "I've heard of a child who was found underneath the lake and impaled," Monroe said. "There's lots of bodies that are still waterlogged and underneath right now. I had a friend of mine who was out there helping dredging, and he pulled out 36 on his own."
"We are up to about 695 body bags delivered." ~ Andrew Fancher, Journalist / FITSNewsCrystal Magnano, a nurse from Charlotte who volunteered in Western NC after the storm, worked with a K-9 cadaver team run by the non-profit Christian Rangers for one day.
They began in Cane River Park in Yancey County, where she watched the team mark two spots the dogs barked at. Her team then turned off Hwy 19 near Rose's Store where they marked one more debris pile. She later learned via a Christian Ranger social media post that the team flagged three more after she left, bringing the day's total to six spots potentially containing human remains. Magnano said the team's dogs did not bark at animal remains.
"I just don't believe the body count," Magnano said on Oct. 17.
Derek Lewis from Beaufort, South Carolina, a marine vet assisting in field missions for the West Yancey Fire Department, started sawing wood with a K-9 cadaver team sent to Pensacola a couple days after the storm hit.
He said the team he worked with "were coming back talking about 60, 68 a day."
Allegedly, relief helicopter pilots have also seen evidence of mass casualties.
Clint Harris, a Western NC native and mission operations volunteer at nonprofit running 80-100 aircraft rescue missions and supply drops per day across the affected area, debriefed with pilots after each mission. Harris said he received feedback on more than one occasion that pilots had seen enough bodies in a single day to exceed the official totals for the state.
On Oct. 16, Andrew Fancher, a journalist with FITSNews in Columbia, SC, posted on Facebook a list of 142 dead bodies and 640 body bags distributed by first responders in Buncombe County alone.
If they sent out 640 body bags, Pierson said, Swannanoa "got none of them."
Fancher, who worked closely with members of WCEN on the tally, said he has spoken with law enforcement officers, morticians, nurses, and first responders to gather his data. He also claims to have obtained photos of body bags in transit, as well as some email chains from the "myriad agencies" requesting them.
"We are up to about 695 body bags delivered," he said, providing an update to his post.
Fancher also posted an interview with relief worker Trey O'Hara on X in which O'Hara claimed to have seen "stacks, chest high, of body bags. Forty-five, maybe even 50 feet long."
"What is my confidence in the count on the state's website? My confidence is high." ~ Larry Pierson, Deputy Fire Chief / Swannanoa Fire DeptMason Hardgrove, a college student from Phoenix City, AL, was trapped in Saluda, NC until Saturday after the storm, when he paddled with a friend down the Green River through class 5 rapids to Green River Cove. Their kayaks were loaded with "probably" 150 pounds of supplies.
After distributing goods to residents on the lower Green River, he hiked four miles into the Cove carrying a 100 pounds on his back and a five gallon gas tank strapped around his neck. Hardgrove spent more than a month in the area transporting people by kayak or sawing trees in Chimney Rock, Banner Elk, and Bat Cave.
Hardrove believes that many cadavers were reported to small volunteer fire departments and that, in part because of communication outages, those bodies may have never made it up the chain to become part of the state's official tally.
Pierson acknowledged that some missing persons or cadaver reports may not have gone through "the system."
Matthew Donegan, a veteran from Virginia who spent weeks volunteering out of a private distribution center at Pole Creek Baptist Church in Candler, said he worked closely with a military intelligence veteran in many of the hardest hit areas in the days following the storm who estimated that at least 3,700 people have expired in the state.
Donegan hopes there is a good explanation for the state's undercount, but fears officials don't want to seem liable for their lack of response to the storm.
"If they're being negligent in any way and it cost one life, that's tremendous."
Suspicions of a cover-up
A significant number of civilians believe FEMA or other agencies have been suppressing body recovery efforts and called off searches for the missing too early in order to keep the death count down.
"We were picking through, looking for people daily and stuff. When FEMA showed up, that stopped," Murray said. "There are so many piles around here and so many people that I know that are in the fire departments that have told me they just stopped picking through everything," he said.
Murray recalled being in the room when a clash broke out between a FEMA official and another unnamed local fire chief about how to report the body count in that area.
"FEMA showed up and there was a captain that was arguing with them about dumbing his numbers down," Murray said. "I don't know what his numbers were, but he wasn't happy about what they were telling him that his numbers were going to be. He was telling them that he couldn't say what they were saying because he knows his people of his own town. And he was really upset about it. That's all I can say."
"They tell everybody there've been eight fatalities in Yancey County....there's no way." ~ Shane CannonAccording to the anonymous government employee in Yancey County, a pilot told him that Chinook helicopters were being used to fly corpses out of state, "and that they was sticking them in there like firewood."
In an Oct. 19 Facebook post, Pierson pushed back against those who claim there is a cover-up and begged people on social media not to share "misleading, inflated, or sensationalized information from uninformed sources."
"Nobody is 'hiding numbers'. There are inflated numbers of body bags ordered, insinuating there are that many more that the public isn't being told about. Untrue," Pierson wrote.
In a disaster that wrecked so much havoc on communication systems and roads, "You know there is going to be something off somewhere," Pierson admitted.
Myra Brown, a volunteer at Piney Hill Freewill Baptist Church distribution center in Yancey County, thinks reporting about the dead should be left to the local sheriff's department.
"I'd say that would be the most reliable source. There's many rumors, but I don't think that's always all that useful."
"They tell everybody there've been eight fatalities in Yancey County... there's no way," said Shane Cannon, a resident of Ramsey Town Community, a heavy-hit community situated along the Cane River on Piney Hill Rd. in Burnsville, where flood waters are said to have risen 40 feet.
Cannon said he knows of 4 people missing in his community since the storm hit and that his good friend and work colleague, Mitch Haney, who lives close to Cruso, has 11 family members missing.
Cannon said he and other locals "have been up and down these rivers countless times, and we have never actually seen anyone on foot combing these rivers, banks, trying to find people... They're always in vehicles. We've seen a lot of helicopters and a lot of people on ATVs and side-by-sides running the road, but nobody getting off and looking."
"I feel like they're trying to hide everything they can hide," Cannon said. "A lot of these bodies is never going to be found. I can't imagine going through that kind of torture."
Christy Thrift, Outdoor Adventures founder and a swift water rescue and ropes technician expert who lives on Toe River, said she saw about 100 piles containing the stench of human decay marked by the National Guard along a six mile stretch of the Toe river in Mitchell County.
"I'm seeing bulldozers everywhere," Thrift said. "The National Guard and squads marked where bodies are, but piles are bulldozed to make roads," which she called "surprising."
Thrift, who watched her neighbor's house wash away, said "they had 6 seconds before being eaten alive." She believes the true total in the state to be around 1,700 dead from Helene. "Those still missing unfortunately are probably dead," Thrift said on Oct. 10, echoing a sentiment widely-held by recovery teams.
How dead and missing persons are being counted
State officials say identifying the dead is a process which takes time.
The state medical examiner is working with hospitals and a mortuary response team to move the dead to Asheville - or in more complex cases, to Raleigh - where they can be examined, identified, and the cause of death determined using a protocol for certifying deaths during natural disasters laid out by the CDC, said NC Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Hannah Jones.
While the Examiner's goal is "to ensure that those lost to the storm are quickly reunited to families left behind," Jones acknowledged that medical examiners are given several weeks to turn in their paperwork.
In addition, according to North Carolina's statutes on the estates of missing persons, seven years must elapse before a missing person is officially considered dead. On Oct. 21, NCDHHS reported 26 people remain missing in the state.
As to the discrepancy between the death toll reported by residents, relief workers, and other civilians with the state examiner's tally, Jones said her department has no information indicating such on-the-ground accounts are true.
The state's death count includes unidentified bodies as well as "indirect" deaths - or those who did not die directly from the storm, but as a result of it, Jones said, adding that, as of Oct. 21, four bodies remained unidentified.
What is not included in the state's tally are missing persons, bodies that were washed into other states, and those with an "unknown" cause of death.
On October 17, the examiner had some 34 cadavers labeled "unknown." In terms of bodies that floodwaters carried out of state, Jones said the deceased are tallied where they are found. Just how many bodies washed into TN or other states is unclear.
In many places, the search for the missing has been called off.
As of Oct 24, Buncombe County had reported "less than 10 active" missing persons cases, according to the Sheriff's department, which is not actively seeking out missing persons, but rather waits for reports to come from the public before investigating, Marshall said.
Pierson said on Oct. 29 that in Swannanoa, the active search for missing persons is now over — although his department will still come out and investigate if a citizen calls in a bad smell or sees a body or body part.
In Mitchell County, where just two people have been declared dead and one remains missing, Sheriff Donald Street said on Oct. 25 that he is "afraid in months to come there will probably be more bodies found."
Chris Pitman, the funeral home director at Webb Funeral Home, said the national guard left Mitchell county on Oct. 19 - as laid out in National Guard protocols - after not making any cadaver recoveries or finding any missing persons for 7 days straight.
The funeral director said it is possible some deaths were never reported as he has heard stories of family members burying the dead on their own property, which is illegal, he added.
Dara Cody feels certain more people are buried in debris just down-river from her home on the banks of the Swannanoa River, which was washed away when the river rose some 20 feet.
"If they continue to go and get to the bottom of this mud and silt... they'll find more."
Elias Polanco, a volunteer firefighter at West Yancey Volunteer Fire Department, a central relief center for the county, said on Oct. 10 that he believes the death toll is "a lot" higher than what has been reported, and fellow firefighter Don Crane said that over the past week and a half, "Eli's gone through five books of papers, writing down names for people searching."
"When you had the biggest storm in recorded history, there's no preparation for that." ~ Ray Russel, CEO Raysweather.comPondering motives
While none of the sources cited in this story claimed to know the reasons for an alleged cover-up of the real body count, many pointed to economic or political motives.
"Because of elections coming up, if they are messing with the number of deceased, it's because they don't want it to get out that they were negligent, and because that would look bad for this administration, which could possibly follow on to the next administration," Donegan said, referring to the would-be administration of sitting Vice President Kamala Harris.
"I have no idea what the end game is on this," Murry admitted. "I don't know if it's political... but it's not right," he said. "These people need help and they need it now."
Other skeptics cite a land-grab for rare earth minerals or prime real estate, while some think local, state, or federal officials - including FEMA - may have been negligent in their response to the storm and don't want a high death toll reported as it might increase scrutiny on those failures.
Like many other residents of the region, Jeff Auletta, a homesteader in Ramsey Town Community on Piney Hill Rd., complained that he received no evacuation warning.
"They had a huge siren down there at one of the fire stations that they say you can hear for like ten miles... We got no siren, nothing like that," Auletta said. "There was just no alert. We thought it was just a rain event again."
Many locals say they lost service during the storm, or shortly after the storm began, which might have made alerts impossible to receive.
In Swannanoa, Fire Chief Anthony Penland said in a press briefing on Oct. 8 that his department drove fire trucks around the city with alarms and bi-lingual evacuation notices for two days before the storm hit.
Rumors about out-of-order river gauges, that the dams on the North Fork Reservoir above Asheville were faulty, or that the reservoirs could have been better drained to prevent flooding prior to the storm have also circulated online and by word of mouth.
Thrift, for one, said she thinks local governments could lose state emergency funding if they acknowledge they were responsible for large losses of life.
Ray Russel, CEO of Raysweather.com based in Boone, NC and a Watauga County commissioner, said officials across the state were simply caught off guard by the unprecedented power of the storm.
"When you had the biggest storm in recorded history there's no preparation for that."
In Watauga county, Russel said no evacuation warning was given because "without flooding nobody would have gone, and if you evacuate people and nothing happened, they would never believe you again."
"To me, that's not good enough," Grant Conner, a tree-worker who lives in Weaverville said of Watauga's approach. "I think it would be better to be wrong and everybody's safe than right."
Russel said that in other counties "maybe somebody didn't do their job," but asked, "what could have been done that really would have made a difference? I know up here the answer is nothing. Nothing was left undone."
"When someone says that they didn't know, that they weren't prepared for this, that's not true," Slepcevic said. "They knew exactly what was happening. It was their failure to act on it, respond and advance teams into that area."
While first responders have shown up in a "huge way," he said the fault "starts from the commander in chief and goes all the way down."
Slepcevic also said he does not understand why the searches for missing people are being called off.
"Why aren't those piles being slowly dug up and cleared and that debris cleared to find every single person that was buried in that debris floor? Why isn't that happening in America?"
Mike Anderson, pastor of Place Community Church in Fairview, who also doesn't believe the official death count is accurate, says he just wants the truth.
"Let's be truthful and honest. They talk about being transparent. I hear that word all the time," Anderson said. "Then let's be transparent with this and let people know the real story."
On Oct. 2, President Biden and Vice President Harris separately flew over the Carolinas to witness the destruction from Hurricane Helene, after which President Biden told the nation that those impacted by the storm are "very happy" with the federal response.
While many civilians in Western North Carolina, the hardest hit region in the state, praise the response of local fire departments, NC Department of Transportation workers who fixed roads, and linesmen who cleared power lines, complaints that various government officials have tried to call the storm response a success while the situation on the ground remains dire are widespread.
"What happened in hurricane Helene was nothing short of a complete government failure from the top down." ~ Steve Slepcevic / Disaster Planning ConsultantA month after the storm, some towns still do not have potable water or power, and many residents cannot return to their communities due to destroyed roads. Others are being told their homes are condemned, yet they have nowhere else to go, said Mason Hardgrove, a professional kayaker from Phoenix City, AL, who spent more than a month volunteering in places like Chimney Rock, Banner Elk, and Bat Cave.
Steve Slepcevic, a disaster planning consultant and owner of Strategic Response Partners in CA, said he has worked in "just about" every major disaster in the United States over the past 35 years, and that FEMA usually shows up on day two.
"The first assets that we started seeing was on day six going into day seven," Slepcevic said of FEMA personnel. "Response time is actually critical in life saving needs because you have a very small window to make sure that all your teams are in place."
"In the past 35 years I've never seen a worse disaster response ever, ever," he said. "The fact that they didn't send out the urban search and rescue teams, the swift water rescue teams, in advance, knowing that this thing was going to unfold... that was just something that I've never seen in my entire life."
While first responders have shown up in a "huge way," he said the fault "starts from the commander-in-chief and goes all the way down."
"FEMA was involved in anticipation for the impact for hurricane Helene... so boots were literally on the ground even before the hurricane made landfall." ~ La-Tanga Hopes, media relations specialist for FEMA"Nobody came here for four days," said Jeff Auletta, resident and homesteader in Ramsey Town Community on Piney Hill Rd., parts of which were washed away by the storm. "The only government that's come out here has tried to scare us off the land."
"Fema didn't show up until day 7," said Tim Murray, owner of Murray Powersports in Winston-Salem, NC, donated off-road vehicles and helped cadaver search teams starting immediately after the storm hit.
In Pensacola there are 55 private bridges down and more that need to be built due to storm damage, but FEMA still hasn't been there or to many other communities, Josh Hensley, founder of A Bridge Home, a non-profit rebuilding bridges destroyed by the storm who worked with cadaver search and rescue teams in communities all over Western NC said on Oct. 25. "There's rumors now that FEMA is going to bring in some temporary bridges, but you're talking 30 days after."
However La-Tanga Hopes, media relations specialist for FEMA, said that federal FEMA personnel were on the ground in NC even before the storm hit on September 27.
"FEMA was involved in anticipation for the impact for hurricane Helene...so boots were literally on the ground even before the hurricane made landfall," Hopes said, adding that her agency issued a declaration for the official disaster on September 25 and officially began relief efforts on September 28.
In the first week after the storm, with no cell signal and hundreds or thousands of small, disparate relief, rescue, and recovery teams combing the region, what was needed was "macro coordination," Hensley said. "From my understanding, that's what FEMA's main role is."
Swannanoa Deputy Fire Chief Larry Pierson, who said he keeps a careful unit log of everything that's happened since the storm hit, checked his notes but could not find the day FEMA arrived on the ground in Swannanoa. "It was not late, I would say," he said.
The deputy chief also said that upon his department's request, some FEMA teams were stationed in Swannanoa before the storm hit.
As the critiques of the state and federal response have gained steam, officials at all levels of government have stepped up efforts to combat what many have called "misinformation" about the storm.
"We have also seen an uptick in untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and hearsay about hurricane response efforts across our mountains," Republican U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards said in an Oct. 8 online statement.
And on October 18, three U.S. representatives from North Carolina requested a national intelligence briefing on the spread of online misinformation hindering efforts to rebuild parts of Western North Carolina. Even Governor Cooper has weighed in, saying on October 15 that misinformation is being wielded by "candidates" as a political weapon.
As of Oct 13, federal disaster assistance for Hurricane Helene survivors has surpassed $474 million - including more than $86 million in housing and other types of assistance for survivors in North Carolina, and as of Oct. 9, the White House reported more than 1,500 active duty troops had been deployed to Western NC. President Biden deployed the first 1,000 active-duty troops on October 2, and by Oct 5 FEMA said more than $45 million had been dispersed to communities impacted by the storm.
By comparison, within four days of Hurricane Katrina's landfall in 2005, President George W. Bush approved a $10.4 billion dollar aid package and 7,200 National Guard troops were ordered to the region. A few days later, Congress and the President approved an additional $51.8 billion in aid.
Hopes said FEMA currently has 14 disaster recovery centers in 39 counties across the state. While those centers don't provide food, shelter, or supplies, they coordinate with other agencies like the SBA and relief organizations like the United Way and The Red Cross to get storm victims through applications for various assistance, she said.
Some $129 million in FEMA Individual Assistance funds so far have been paid directly to people in Western North Carolina affected by the storm, and FEMA has spent approximately $4.3 billion on Hurricane Helene response and recovery overall, including providing temporary housing for 2,000 people in NC, where approximately 1,500 FEMA staff are now deployed.
Early rumors that the $750 cash disbursement FEMA is offering storm victims must be paid back are false, Hopes said.
Numerous follow-up questions were sent to FEMA but after two weeks and repeated emails and phone calls, the agency still has not responded.
Civilians saved the day
"I've been around to a lot of these small communities in the mountains, and they are about as jaded to this federal support as you can be," said Hensley, adding that if locals "weren't so well equipped with chainsaws, tractors, and the know-how to help each other, many people would still be trapped.
"Had it not been for the volunteers filling in before the government arrived, a lot of those people wouldn't have been evacuated in time and could have perished or could have suffered, you know, hypothermia or other problems," said Clint Harris, a Western NC native and mission operations volunteer at nonprofit running 80-100 aircraft rescue missions and supply drops per day across the affected area.
Harris added that due to Biden's flyover on Oct. 3, a critical time for rescue missions, "We weren't able to have operations to that airspace for what I guess would be for 3 to 4 hours."
Relief centers in Spruce Pine, Yancey County, Swannanoa, and Fairview all reported receiving zero state or federal resources, despite being heavily stocked with supplies.
Don Crane, a volunteer firefighter at West Yancey Volunteer Fire Department which has served a supply depot for county residents, on Oct. 10. His department has not received any state or federal donations, Crane said.
Ian Monley, operations manager at Valley Strong Disaster Relief, a large supply depot located on the concert grounds behind Silverado's Bar in Swannanoa, said the center is 100 percent volunteer run and has received "zero government assistance so far."
In his experience, aid efforts across Western NC are "almost all citizen relief." A full month after the storm, Silverado's grounds are packed with relief volunteers who provide supplies to anywhere between 200 to 1,000 cars that drive through per day.
"There may be a small portion that's government, but it'd be very minuscule for sure," Monley said on Oct. 28, adding that he's seen "a couple FEMA tents" for filling out applications, but "nothing" in terms of "boots on the ground assistance, helping people."
"Our phones were ringing off the hook when people found out that we were trying to get in there and help as many people as possible, people with with skid steers and backhoes and, and every kind of equipment that you could think of just stepped forward and said, 'Where do you need me?'" Murray said.
"It wasn't for them, I don't know what these people would do... there's nobody else to help them," Murray said.
On Oct. 4, a week after the storm reached NC, the United States announced that it would send $157 million in new U.S. humanitarian assistance to Lebanon and the region - an announcement that has angered many in Western NC.
"People are living in tents and getting no help and it's ridiculous," Murray said. "We're in America, but we're helping everybody else and not helping ourselves."
About the author
Niko Kyriakou is a resident of western North Carolina and an award-winning print and video journalist whose work has appeared in outlets such as Yahoo! News, Huffington Post, and NBCLX. He has spent the past month investigating the impact of Hurricane Helene on the ground in towns across western North Carolina and has gathered 25+ original sources who believe the death count in North Carolina is higher than the 101 storm-related fatalities and 26 missing persons currently being reported by state officials. Contact him via shareyourhelenestory@gmail.com
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