Editorial: Be ready to help

When a hurricane leaves communities in soggy ruins and people are desperate for help, the last thing they need is botched recovery programs with prolonged delays and squabbling over what’s gone wrong.

Those systems need to be in place long before a storm strikes, and those responsible for leadership and oversight must exercise their responsibility to ensure the quality, timeliness and efficiency of emergency responses.

For an example of how badly things can go wrong, take a gander over the border to North Carolina.

In October 2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall in South Carolina and turned its deadly track northward. Even though Matthew’s winds had eased by the time the storm moved into North Carolina, it killed 25 people, brought extreme rainfall and severe flooding, and caused considerable, widespread damage.

That was nearly six years ago, but the devastation from Matthew’s floods is a daily reality — not history — for thousands of North Carolinians. Despite millions of dollars in federal relief funds, many remain displaced. Thousands are living with relatives, in motels or in travel trailers. Others live in still-damaged houses filled with mold and mildew.

A recent in-depth report by NC Policy Watch lays out a disturbing account of how, even though North Carolina received $236 million in federal disaster relief money to renovate or rebuild houses that were badly damaged by Matthew, more than half those homes have yet to be repaired. The money came from a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program designed to help households with low or moderate income whose insurance won’t cover the cost of repairs or who can’t afford to hire contractors.

What NC Policy Watch, a nonprofit journalism project of the North Carolina Justice Center, found when it examined how North Carolina handled the housing relief money should be a clear lesson for all storm-threatened states, including Virginia: Don’t wait until the storm has come and gone to make certain relief programs are ready to help as soon as possible.

North Carolina was apparently woefully unprepared to make good use of the hundreds of millions of dollars HUD sent to help lower-income homeowners with flood damage. The agencies that tried to handle the housing relief program, inexperienced in dealing with federal emergency-relief bureaucracy, soon ran into problems.

In 2018, two years after Matthew hit, the state legislature created an Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR) to run the housing disaster-relief efforts. People with high-level experience at HUD and in disaster relief in New York after Hurricane Sandy were recruited to get things going.

What followed was a series of missteps, controversies and frequently changing requirements, rules and procedures. Now, there are disputes and allegations about preferential treatment for a major contractor, about who should have done what, and about how to hold government agencies accountable.

Other factors figure into the delays, it’s true. COVID hit in 2020, bringing with it supply-chain problems, staffing shortages and other disruptions. Prices of construction materials soared. The fact remains that North Carolina was not ready to deal with the disaster. The state has been playing catch-up ever since Matthew hit, falling further and further behind.

Amid the delays and disputes, thousands of people are still waiting for help nearly six years after a hurricane hit a state that’s routinely ranked in the top five on lists of those most hurricane-prone. Thousands still live in inadequate, even unsafe, housing or are in what was supposed to be temporary quarters. Millions of federal relief dollars poured into the state, but many of the storm’s victims are still waiting to benefit from any of it.

We know the storms are coming. We know that hurricane seasons are producing more storms than ever, and that those storms are more frequently very powerful. And we know North Carolina, and Virginia, are in the crosshairs.

Having sound emergency response protocols, with strong oversight, is essential to help when disaster strikes. There’s no excuse for waiting until people are suffering.