Helene's Appalachian Hell Another FEMA Failure?

The destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene floods in Georgia, the Carolinas and eastern Tennessee is appalling.

So are the documented complaints and shortcomings (they are more than anecdotal) that federal disaster relief responses have been slow, uncoordinated and ill-planned.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is supposed to "manage" responses to emergencies like hurricanes and earthquakes. In common parlance, that means FEMA is tasked with coordinating responses. That means a credible FEMA should coordinate planning for emergencies like Helene's Appalachian hell.

In the world of common sense, FEMA should coordinate planning with federal, state, local and nongovernmental emergency response organizations. I'll name examples of response organizations. Federal: the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. State: North Carolina Army and Air National Guards. Local: every country sheriff. Nongovernmental: Red Cross, Samaritan's Purse, every church that runs a food pantry.

Scotch the argument that Helene was an unprecedented apocalypse. In July 1916, two unnamed hurricanes (they had no media personas in those days) spawned killer rainstorms in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains. The city of Asheville drowned. Asheville's newspaper reported riverfronts and factories were "submerged and wrecked."

Today we have near-real-time weather predictions that permit quicker response and do save lives. Mandatory evacuations from Florida will lower the death toll from Hurricane Milton. However, predictions don't prevent major property destruction.

Liberal media don't want to compare the poor response to Helene to Hurricane Katrina, which flooded New Orleans in late August 2005 and overwhelmed state and local emergency response capabilities. Subsequent investigation revealed flaws in the city's levees. The levees were poorly maintained. The cause? Poor Corps of Engineers oversight or corrupt Louisiana politicians running construction contracts?

New Orleans is easier to reach than the Blue Ridge Mountains. CNN's Anderson Cooper showed up and urged hurricane survivors he interviewed to "show rage." We don't see Cooper in the Appalachians. We do see videos of devastation, we see people helping their neighbors, and we see FEMA trying to coordinate after the fact.

We also see -- finally -- the Biden administration providing active-duty military assistance, with helicopters and personnel from the 101st Airborne and 82nd Airborne Divisions the most prominent. When roads are washed out, reaching people isolated in mountainous areas requires lots of helicopters. That's not news.

Regular Army activation for disaster response rang a bell. In the aftermath of Katrina, then-President George W. Bush asked a logical, though politically complex, question: "Is there a natural disaster, of a certain size, that would then enable the Defense Department to become the lead agency in coordinating and leading the response effort?"

In other words, could and should the DOD operate as a super FEMA?

In 2005, I wrote this line about Katrina: High winds and high water can devastate as effectively as high explosive. In 2024, Helene left parts of Florida and North Carolina as razed as a combat zone.

However, natural disasters, though leaving war-like results, are not warfare. We will never defeat the weather.

While Bush wasn't suggesting that the Pentagon become a national EMS, police and fire department, "lead agency" language usually means directing plans and -- at some point -- exercising command.

The political case for state and local leadership has a constitutional basis. We not only separate power in our republic into judicial, legislative and executive branches, we divide it among the federal and state authorities. Separation and division deter centralized power, the kind of power that attracts a king or military dictator.

The "proximity case" for local and state lead makes abundant sense. Local and state authorities have both the intimate and institutional knowledge that translates into better crisis planning and better crisis improvisation. Mega-disasters, however, overwhelm the local cops and EMS.

When North Carolinians lost cellphone service, Elon Musk tried to provide Starlink satellite connectivity. He ran into an FCC roadblock. FEMA planners should have cleared that bureaucratic hurdle, but they didn't.

"Disaster response" and "emergency management" are both incomplete descriptions of the actual mission. Multiagency and multijurisdictional efforts are as much about disaster avoidance by prior planning as they are about disaster limitation and recovery by quick and effective response.

FEMA's latest display of inadequate planning and operational clumsiness suggests providing robust, seamless communications systems and coordinating air operations may be the most materially productive and politically wise use of DOD in natural disaster response.

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To find out more about Austin Bay and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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