Although the work to rebuild western North Carolina since it was shattered by a storm last fall has been shadowed by complications, disaster relief groups are hoping for change now that President Donald Trump has assumed office.
The sprawling bureaucracy at multiple levels of government has handicapped rebuilding efforts since Hurricane Helene struck last September, private aid organizations told the Washington Examiner. However, they hope Trump’s promises surrounding regulatory reform and overhauling the Federal Emergency Management Agency could turn the tide in the fractured region’s favor.
The challenges
The permit process
As the president of Samaritan’s Purse, a group that has emerged as the leader in shepherding WNC through Helene, Franklin Graham said it’s been “tough” dealing with bureaucracies whose regulations vary across localities.
“You have to have a permit process,” he told the Washington Examiner during an interview this week. “Even though you own your house and you lost your house, and there’s your land, you just can’t build back on it. It has to be re-surveyed. It has to see if you’re in the flood plain or floodway, if your septic tank got underwater, then you have to make a new septic tank and that has to have a permit. Then you have to get to come out and be surveyed again.”
Adam Smith, who spearheads Savage Freedoms Relief Operations in WNC, warned there will be a backlog of permit requests “as we go into building new homes.” The permit process also posed a “challenge early on in order for us to get power or temporary housing in place because the majority of counties weren’t providing permits because they were considering them permanent structures, not temporary structures,” Smith said.
Promised executive orders from the new president could salve concerns.
During a visit to North Carolina on Friday, Trump previewed actions to slash all “bureaucratic barriers and permits to ensure the rapid reconstruction of the roads” and backed “a permitting process that’s called no permitting.”
FEMA
Smith said FEMA’s zoning requirements present “the biggest challenge of all” to rebuilding because of the federal agency’s rules about floodplain designations.
“Places like lower Beacon Village and Swannanoa were never technically in a defined floodplain, and after this last flood, it’s very likely that they will be in a floodplain,” Smith said. “When the zone changes, that will pose an entirely different list of challenges to residents and homeowners.”
Graham struck a more positive note on FEMA, noting they have a “very tough job.”
“We need some new leadership in there, but FEMA, I think, has done overall a good job,” he said.
North Carolina resident Robin Ollis differed, expressing frustration over how FEMA has wielded power. Due to its regulations, “we are at a standstill with building any bridges back in western North Carolina right now,” she told the Washington Examiner.
Ollis’s aid group, Bridges for Avery, built emergency footbridges and culverts for rural survivors after Helene. Now, Ollis is eying the work ahead to rebuild permanent large-span bridges, 315 of which she said had been damaged or destroyed in Avery County alone.
But FEMA’s No-rise Certification engineering analysis requirement for bridges, Ollis said, raises an obstacle to efforts to rebuild bridges.
“There are zero engineering firms in our county,” Ollis worried, later adding that she was told by county officials that the engineering study could take three to five years to complete. FEMA told relief groups the certification was required prior to building a bridge, meaning that in many cases, it could be years before vital infrastructure is built, Ollis said.
The certification costs between $10,000 and $50,000, officials told Ollis, news which poses a particular challenge for the impoverished area. Many residents affected the most by Helene have incomes well under the national average salary. In Avery County, the average income was under $41,000 in 2023.
FEMA’s promises to allot up to $40,000 to residents hoping to repair bridges could have helped alleviate the hurdle. But Ollis said, “No one here even knows how to get that money.”
“Our county manager doesn’t know how to get that money,” she said.
The president
Western North Carolina is sanguine Trump can turn their region around, according to Ollis, who praised him for making WNC the site of his first trip as president on Friday.
“There was no hope for them with Biden,” she said. “It’s just a new sense of hope here now that Trump’s in office. I mean, he has shown that we are a priority.”
Smith likewise said he believed that Trump’s actions “are speaking very loudly.” He pointed to the president’s mention of the region during his inaugural speech, Vice President JD Vance’s visit to WNC in December, and Trump’s visit this week as causes for optimism.
Smith also suggested that FEMA’s last-minute extension of the Transitional Sheltering Assistance Program, which currently provides free temporary housing to roughly 2,777 North Carolina households, was a result of Trump coming to power.
Optimism rides on hopes Trump will follow through on his pledges Friday to reform the permitting process, surge “housing solutions,” and overhaul FEMA, “rooting out the corruption, the incompetence, and the bureaucracy” in the federal agency.
“That’s really what has to happen,” Ollis said of Trump’s pledge to do away with permit regulations.
When pressed on Trump’s vow to restructure FEMA and have states lead their own disaster relief operations, Smith backed the plan because it could eliminate “red tape” and make recovery efforts “more effective.”
“FEMA was never designed to be a first-response organization,” he said. Trump’s proposal to overhaul the agency could provide states an opportunity to deliver a “more real-time and effective response monetarily so that they have the ability to take that capital and reinject it back into the local economy in a more efficient manner,” Smith added.
The plan
Samaritan’s Purse
Thirty-five thousand volunteers with the ministry have already helped 4,200 homes.
Now, its rebuilding program is going full-throttle, with plans to complete 1,000 homes in WNC. Five hundred, 57 of which are already completed, will be mobile homes built to a higher standard than typical units. Another 500 will be homes built from the ground up. The organization has also donated hundreds of thousands to build bridges.
Graham believes rebuilding efforts could take up to three years because of the extent of the damage the storm wrecked on the region.
“There’s one particular man. He was a plumber, and he had all his tools, his livelihood, in his truck, and his truck went down the river, and so now he doesn’t just have his tools, but he doesn’t have a way to get to work,” he remembered. “See, this storm didn’t just take away their house, but livelihoods.”
Savage Freedom Relief Operations
Smith has the goal of constructing 1,000 homes over the course of its 24-month rebuilding stage. His organization is breaking ground on the first two homes in early February.
Smith believes the rebuilding phase could take up to five years. Business rehabilitation, he said, is going to take longer than that.
“We’re going into month five, and a lot of the region still looks like the day after the storm,” he said. “66,000 miles of road in the western North Carolina region damaged or destroyed. Over 100,000 homes damaged or destroyed. 50,000 small businesses went out of business or had dramatic damage done.”
Baptists on Mission
The ministry oversaw major emergency relief operations in Helene’s wake, with 13,000 volunteers helping survivors rebound from the beginning of the storm through Dec. 21.
The organization is now focusing rebuilding efforts in Boone, East Flat Rock, Weaverville, Swannanoa, Burnsville, Canton, and Spruce Pine.
Tom Beam, the group’s disaster relief coordinator, told the Washington Examiner volunteers have rebuilt roughly 200 homes so far, with the goal of completing 500 homes by the end of February. The ministry currently has an average of 100 to 150 volunteers a week completing Essential Rapid Repairs to make homes livable.
Unusually harsh winter weather has stalled rebuilding operations for Baptists on Mission and other leading disaster response initiatives.
“We’re not able to pour concrete. A lot of people just can’t work outside when it’s five degrees,” Graham said, adding that Samaritan’s Purse expects to be slowed down until the end of February.
The future
A decline in media coverage has spurred worries that WNC’s struggle with Helene is being forgotten as time passes, which could be detrimental to rebuilding efforts, aid groups say.
“We have to have volunteers … And the further you get away from the storm, the less it’s in a person’s thought process,” Graham warned.
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Yet, despite the long road ahead, WNC has maintained a stubbornly optimistic spirit, galvanized by the spirit of volunteerism that has driven recovery efforts thus far.
“The United States citizens are what have saved us, not our government,” Ollis said. “They didn’t sit around and wait for the government to come in and, you know, fix their driveways and build bridges and put their homes back together. We all just started doing it and and not just by ourselves. Citizens from all over the United States came here to help us.”