Victims of Hurricane Helene’s devastation are voicing their frustration with the federal government’s response to the storm that wiped out communities and claimed the lives of more than 200 people.
The western portion of North Carolina appears to have been hit the worst, with the towns of Asheville, Chimney Rock, Swannanoa, and Biltmore Village among the most damaged by flash flooding.
When asked by an NBC News anchor if she had any “faith” in getting aid from the government, one Asheville woman replied, “No. No.”
“Nobody’s going to help us… I don’t know what we’re going to do,” the resident said from a pile of debris.
Jordan Lanning, another Asheville resident who lost a friend to the floods, told Fox News’ Jesse Watters that the response took “too long”:
“It took five days for Biden to come here, and he didn’t think we were worth coming down to see us himself. He had to fly over on his way to Raleigh,” he said during a Thursday interview.
“It’s disgraceful… I mean, they keep saying ‘We the people.’ No, there is no ‘We the people.’ It is them versus us,” Lanning continued. “Like, they’re not for us. It’s all about them — they tell us what we need instead of listening to us.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has received nationwide backlash for announcing just $750 in immediate Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) aid for Helene victims, just days after her and President Joe Biden’s administration pledged another $8 billion to Ukraine.
When Watters asked if $750 — just $50 more than what the victims of the 2023 Maui fires received — was enough, Lanning said it was not.
“There’s people that have lost everything… I’m not expecting [them] to give us thousands of dollars, but they can do more than that,” the disgruntled Asheville man said.
Since the $750 in aid has garnered negative attention from locals and others from all over the United States, FEMA put out a “fact-check” saying that victims may get “other forms of assistance” if they “qualify.”
Another North Carolina woman told Newsmax’s Wake Up America audience that she felt a sense of “abandonment” from the Biden-Harris administration:
“We heard that Biden was just, ya know, gonna be flying around — it kind of just made us feel like, as our president, where is the guidance?” she asked. “You’re supposed to be here helping us with this … almost a sense of abandonment. … It’s mainly just the community coming together and helping each other out with all this.”
“How could the government do us like this and how could the whole country just forget about us?” a TikTok user by the name of Yeehaw Jace asked through tears:
@yeehawjace @Kamala HQ you broke my heart. #wnc #westernnorthcarolina #appalachia
“Where is our f*cking government?,” he continued, before clarifying that he was an “avid supporter” of Harris before this event.
“You can’t do anymore? You can’t send anymore support, any help? F*ck you!”
In a letter sent Friday to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said whistleblowers told his office that service members and emergency responders from the federal, state, and local government have sat idle in North Carolina while waiting on orders from FEMA:
“As reported and further confirmed by my office, hundreds, if not thousands of service members were deployed by the Department of Defense to North Carolina and have sat idle, waiting for FEMA,” Gaetz wrote.
“We have confirmed FEMA employees deployed, on the clock, awaiting orders in hotels. FEMA pre-disaster aid was withheld, exacerbating the emergency,” the Florida congressman added.
