New Helene documentary provides another wake-up call
Repair vehicles from the North Carolina Department of Transportation repair a partially cratered road in western North Carolina amid the recovery from Hurricane Helene. (Photo: NCDOT)
North Carolina hardly needs any more wake-up calls about the devastating impacts of climate change, but a new, must-see PBS/NPR documentary provides another powerful reminder on the subject of dealing with the extreme weather that climate change is spawning.
The documentary is entitled 'Hurricane Helene's Deadly Warning,' and in it, NPR's Laura Sullivan exposes a wasteful and vicious cycle that has come to dominate how our state and nation deal with natural disasters. It's one in which the federal government spends more than $50 billion every year to help communities recover from disasters, but that frequently includes properties that have already flooded repeatedly.
This cycle is now on full display in western North Carolina where politicians and the construction industry are resisting common sense rules that would govern how new buildings are sited and constructed.
The bottom line: 'Hurricane Helene's Deadly Warning,' should be required viewing and listening for all elected leaders and average Americans. Look for it online at PBS or NPR.
For NC Newsline, I'm Rob Schofield.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Should Tennesseans get flood insurance amid hurricane season?
KNOXVILLE, Tenn., (WATE) — It has been a little over eight months since remnants of Hurricane Helene devastated parts of East Tennessee, and now hurricane season is back until November. The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance is urging people to be prepared. They suggest having a plan in place if severe weather were to hit your area, and stress the importance of protecting your home with flood insurance. Between hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes, Josh Witt with The Insurance Group said now is a good time look into protecting your home. Tellico Plains families fighting to regain full access to historic cemetery 'Especially as weather patterns are changing, we're starting to see like Tornado Alley used to be through Oklahoma and Texas, It's shifted almost actually in Middle Tennessee, Middle and West Tennessee,' said Witt. 'So as weather patterns shift, rain starts happening more. We saw with Hurricane Helene, that was all flood insurance and it's just not covered by homeowner's policy.' He said both flood and earthquake insurance is not covered by general home insurance but nearly everyone in Knoxville and the greater East Tennessee area should have it. 'There are tons of floodplains around Knoxville, obviously, with all the lakes and rivers that we have. And one of the one of the big misconceptions is just because I'm not in a floodplain doesn't that doesn't mean you don't need flood insurance. As a matter of fact, 40% of flood claims actually occur outside of high-risk floodplains,' said Witt. He said if you live in a floodplain, you're probably already paying for flood insurance as part of your mortgage. If you're not, it could pay off to invest in your home. Locals, tourists recall major Gatlinburg crash that injured seven 'Your average subdivision, it can happen. The people who went through, unfortunately, Hurricane Helene, they were not in floodplains for the most part,' said Witt. 'That ended up being quite the problem for them, and there'll be some disaster recovery that can help, but there's no substitute for actual flood insurance.' While the probability of your home being impacted by natural disasters are low, he said it is important to have. 'If you don't have flood insurance, or you don't have earthquake insurance, sinkhole is another big coverage in East Tennessee that if you don't have it, you need to add it,' said Witt. 'Most of the time, it's not expensive. Nobody wants to look at it. I get it, we all want to keep costs down. But you don't want to be sitting in the situation of not having that coverage when you actually need it.' ▶ See more top stories on Witt added If you do plan to buy flood insurance sometime soon, most plans do not kick in for up to 30 days after buying it, unless you are currently in the process of buying a home. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Oil Holds Gains With Focus on US Inventories, Canada Wildfires
(Bloomberg) -- Oil steadied after two days of gains as a US industry group signaled a decline in nationwide crude inventories and rain slowed the growth of some blazes that had shut in Canadian production. Where the Wild Children's Museums Are Billionaire Steve Cohen Wants NY to Expand Taxpayer-Backed Ferry The Global Struggle to Build Safer Cars At London's New Design Museum, Visitors Get Hands-On Access LA City Council Passes Budget That Trims Police, Fire Spending West Texas Intermediate traded near $63 a barrel after adding more than 4% in the previous two sessions, while Brent closed above $65. The American Petroleum Institute reported stockpiles fell by 3.28 million barrels last week, according to a person familiar. That would be the biggest draw since March if confirmed by official data later on Wednesday. One Canadian oil sands operator restarted a site on Monday after wildfires that at one point shut about 7% of output in the fourth-largest producer. The blazes have put flows to critical American storage hubs at risk, and limited the impact of OPEC+ supply increases over the weekend. YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It's Coming for the Sitcom Millions of Americans Are Obsessed With This Japanese Barbecue Sauce Trump Considers Deporting Migrants to Rwanda After the UK Decides Not To Mark Zuckerberg Loves MAGA Now. Will MAGA Ever Love Him Back? Is Elon Musk's Political Capital Spent? ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
FEMA Is Not Prepared
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Who manages the disaster if the disaster managers are the disaster? That's a question that the people of the United States may have to answer soon. As hurricane season begins in the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in disarray. Reuters reported yesterday that acting FEMA head David Richardson suggested during a meeting with employees that he was unaware of the very existence of a hurricane season. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security dismissed the report: 'Despite meanspirited attempts to falsely frame a joke as policy, there is no uncertainty about what FEMA will be doing this Hurricane Season.' The spokesperson added, 'FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens.' FEMA employees, and Americans at large, might be forgiven for having doubts. Richardson has only been on the job since early May, when his predecessor was abruptly fired after telling Congress he did not believe that FEMA should be eliminated, as President Donald Trump has contemplated. Richardson is a Marine veteran who had been leading the DHS office that seeks to prevent attacks on the U.S. involving weapons of mass destruction, but he has no experience with disaster management. The Wall Street Journal reported that he had expressed surprise at how broad FEMA's remit is. (The last time FEMA was led by an administrator whose profession was not emergency management was the mid-2000s, under Michael Brown. If you don't know how that turned out, I recommend my colleague Vann R. Newkirk II's award-winning podcast on Hurricane Katrina, Floodlines.) But Richardson surely is aware of hurricane season. In mid-May, CNN obtained an internal document warning that FEMA was badly behind schedule. 'As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready,' it read. (DHS, which oversees FEMA, said the information was 'grossly out of context.') To calm worries at the agency, Richardson held a conference call. 'I would say we're about 80 or 85 percent there,' he told staff, according to ABC News. 'The next week, we will close that gap and get to probably 97 to 98 percent of a plan. We'll never have 100 percent of a plan.' That was not the most reassuring answer, and it looks worse now. The Journal reports that in the same meeting yesterday where Richardson suggested unfamiliarity with hurricane season, he also said the agency would return to its 2024 hurricane-preparedness strategy. How that will work is anyone's guess, given that FEMA has already slashed programs and staff since last year's hurricane season. (FEMA responded to my request for comment with DHS's statement, but did not answer specific questions or make any official available for an interview.) FEMA is not a large part of the federal government by budget or staff, but it is an important one because it directly affects the lives of ordinary Americans in their worst moments. Washington can seem distant and abstract, but disasters are not, and as Hurricane Helene last year demonstrated, even people living in supposed 'climate havens' are susceptible to extreme weather. In the aftermath of Helene, Trump grasped the widespread public fury at FEMA, which storm victims felt was not responsive enough, fast enough. (Major disasters are major, and even the best-managed response is going to be slower than anyone wants, but no one seems to think this was the best-managed response.) As a candidate, he was quick to say that the Biden administration should do more, but since becoming president again, he has taken steps to ensure that FEMA can and will do less. FEMA is also making recovery harder for the victims of past disasters. In April, the agency declined to declare a major disaster in Washington State, which would free up funding for recovery from a bomb cyclone in November 2024; the state's entire congressional delegation pleaded with him to reconsider. DHS also denied North Carolina more funding for cleanup after Helene, which Governor Josh Stein estimated would cost state taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The president also refused individual federal assistance to nine Arkansas counties struck by tornadoes in March, only reversing the decision after Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as press secretary in Trump's first administration, called the president directly. In the post-FEMA future that Trump has floated, states would be responsible for all disaster recovery. Some conservatives have long argued that states need to shoulder more responsibility for smaller disasters, but most states (and territories such as Puerto Rico) simply don't have the resources to respond to large-scale disasters like Helene. This is, after all, one reason the 13 colonies united in the first place: for mutual aid and protection. The federal government has much greater resources and, unlike most states, is not required to balance its budget annually. That makes it a crucial financial backstop. As Brock Long, who led FEMA during Trump's first term, told me last year, 'All disasters are locally executed, state managed, and federally supported.' FEMA has not, generally, been a partisan agency. Administrators may have different political views, but they try to provide help without consideration for politics. I've spoken with several administrators over the years, and they are consistently professional, don't take wildly differing approaches to their work, and are dedicated to emergency response. When an employee at FEMA was caught telling workers not to help people with Trump signs in their yards, it was rightly a scandal. Yet in his first term, Trump himself reportedly withheld or delayed disaster funds in multiple cases based on partisanship. His reversal on assistance for Arkansas residents raises the specter of a future in which only states whose governors are close to Trump can hope to obtain relief. And yet if FEMA isn't prepared for hurricane season, doesn't have sufficient staff, and is laboring under a president who would like to see it gone, the problem may not be that only the president's allies can get help from the federal government—but rather that no one can. Related: Hurricane Helene through the eyes of a former FEMA chief David Inserra: There are too many federal disasters. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Feudalism is our future. Ukraine's warning to the world's other military forces The GOP's new Medicaid denialism Today's News DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the family of the man accused of Sunday's attack at a Colorado demonstration for Israeli hostages has been taken into ICE custody. Elon Musk posted on X calling President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act a 'disgusting abomination.' Mount Etna, an active volcano in eastern Sicily, erupted. No injuries resulted. Dispatches Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains the No. 1 rule for understanding Donald Trump. The Weekly Planet: Our diets are awful for the planet. But we can't simply abandon food, Michael Grunwald writes. Explore all of our newsletters here. More From The Atlantic Diddy's trial is revealing a conspiracy, but it's not the one people expected. Dear James: 'I'm not very punk rock' Evening Read Nutrition Science's Most Preposterous Result By David Merritt Johns From 2023 Last summer, I got a tip about a curious scientific finding. 'I'm sorry, it cracks me up every time I think about this,' my tipster said. Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation's most influential department of nutrition. Read the full article. Culture Break Watch. Our writers and editors recommend five movies they could watch over and over again. Read. Susan Choi's new book, Flashlight, considers the evolution of rage. Play our daily crossword. P.S. Professional emergency managers are some of the most impressive people I've interviewed. To succeed, they have to be extremely practical, very creative, and totally unflappable. In 2015, while reporting an article on 'maximums of maximums'—the biggest hypothetical catastrophes the nation could face—I asked some sources what their nightmare was. 'What keeps me up is another form of a pandemic, respiratory transmitted, highly lethal virus,' Anthony Fauci told me. (Good prediction, doc.) But when I asked Craig Fugate, then FEMA's administrator, what kept him up at night, he answered in the way that only a veteran of many disasters could: 'Nothing.' — David Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
