Above photo: Survivors giving testimonies about the impact of the hurricane on their communities. PSL.
As the death toll from the storm climbs to 204, Congress has made no efforts to secure more disaster relief funding
At least 204 people are dead as a result of Hurricane Helene, which has devastated some of the more impoverished regions of the United States. Hundreds are still missing as survivors lose hope of finding their loved ones. Despite the unprecedented level of devastation, the federal money to deal with disaster relief appears to have run out. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on October 2 that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) does not have enough money to make it through hurricane season.
Thanks to the efforts of conservative lawmakers, a recently passed funding bill did not allocate additional funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) despite knowing that the agency’s funds had run low before the peak of hurricane season. Congress is now in recess until November 12, and while Biden had considered calling Congress back into session early to approve more FEMA funding, there has been no progress.
Yet, somehow, conservative leaders and media are attempting to pin the blame of lack of FEMA funding on migrants crossing the US-Mexico border to seek asylum. “Feds say there’s no money left to respond to hurricanes — after FEMA spent $640M on migrants,” read a headline in conservative paper the New York Post following Mayorkas’ announcement.
Communities in the southeast of the country, across the Gulf Coast and from Florida all the way to Virginia, have been forced to fend for themselves with grassroots and mutual aid organizations filling in for the state in terms of relief and aid efforts.
For the last week, socialist organizers with the Party for Socialism and Liberation are some of the grassroots volunteers picking up FEMA’s slack as people struggle to secure basic needs such as clean drinking water. Volunteers have been distributing goods across the country, as well as collecting testimonies from Helene survivors, many of whom are unhappy with what they see as misplaced priorities by the federal government which recently sent a USD 8.7 billion military aid package to Israel. According to a recent study published by Global South Insights, the United States currently accounts for 53.6% of military spending across the entire world. It is followed by China which accounts for just 10.2% of global military spending.
Hurricane Victims Demand Change
Joseph Canady, a 44-year-old man from St. Petersburg, Florida, told organizers that in all his life in Florida he’s never seen a storm like Helene. “I’ve done survived some hurricanes, but nothing like this,” he said. “I lost everything I had, my truck is down, everything in the apartment is destroyed, I don’t know when I’m available to get back to work due to transportation issues.”
“I believe that something has to be done, the money needs to be put in the right places to benefit the ones that’s unfortunate,” he said. “We all hard workers, tax payers, and the only thing that’s gonna change…is when the government changes and does what they need to do, and put the money in the right places, instead of building condos and making everyone else’s pockets fat.”
25-year-old mother TyKerria from Asheville, North Carolina, one of the worst hit cities, said that braving the storm with kids is all the more stressful. “Then just not knowing where you’re gonna go for different things, and know if you’re going to be able to have gas to make it there, or if you’ll actually get what you came there for after waiting in hours and hours of lines, and it’s just very stressful, and it’s terrifying,” she said. “We have a lot of family members who we have not been able to get in contact with, there’s people who have not been able to get in contact with us, and we’ve just been without water. We have power, we just don’t have water.”
Dennis, who lives in the Erskine Apartments in South Asheville, NC, detailed his conditions to volunteers. “No lights, no water, powerless, nobody to come by, government, nobody to check on us,” he described. “We still constantly waiting for help, we need water, we need food, we need the government to respond.”
“We would like to see [the government provide] food and gas and water,” said a young woman also at the Erskine Apartments. “We’re waiting in lines for hours at a time to get gas. We’re waiting in lines for hours at a time to get food, we have no dairy, we have no meat. We have no power. Here in this neighborhood we’ve had no power for the last five days and still are not gonna see power until Friday, pretty much midnight. We can’t even be found on the map in this neighborhood but surrounding areas have power… just clean water at all, it’s been a very hard time out here just trying to figure it out. And all of us don’t have the means to transport or evacuate this area.”
A man in Swannanoa, North Carolina, told volunteers that “If I would talk to [North Carolina Governor] Roy Cooper face to face, I would tell him that there is a lot more damage than what is being shown all around the news and everything.”
“We need a lot more help,” he said. “Some of these families are working paycheck to paycheck, and can’t really fund the damage that was done to their homes, and they don’t really have places to go. So it would be nice to have a little bit more assistance.”
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Sarah Brummet, an organizer based out of Pensacola, Florida, who has been coordinating volunteer disaster relief efforts throughout Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. She explained that these teams have been bringing in water, cleaning supplies, baby formula, diapers and anything else that can fit in their vehicles. “We expect that, especially in the southern Appalachia region, that the need will be really great for a long time and that it will be a long term struggle around the conditions there,” Brummet said.
“None of our government are willing to step up,” said another Helene survivor in Swannanoa. “FEMA has not helped, we have no centers for showers, clothes, et cetera. We’ve been offered no help by either government, federal or state…we are having to fend for ourselves basically.”
“They’re saying that FEMA is here, but FEMA has not been here,” the man continued. “They’re saying that the people that have been evacuated are in the local shelters, but a lot of people are still asking about their loved ones because they’re missing. We’re missing people that we don’t even know if they’re still alive or not.”
The total damages and economic losses from Hurricane Helene could total as much as USD 160 billion according to estimates.