Hurricane Helene, Governor Cooper and the Katrina Standard

As the amount of devastation in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee comes into sharper focus, it becomes clear how woefully unprepared the state of North Carolina was to respond. While we have governmental agencies devoted to emergency preparation and management, western North Carolina was virtually ignored as it became clear the storm was likely to venture in that direction.

And in the aftermath, the response is still extremely slow. Roads and bridges are wrecked; towns are under water; and cell phone service is non-existent in some areas. There are reports of dead bodies floating around and being left behind because of inadequate resources to respond. At least a couple of towns are completely obliterated according to social media reports.

The Last Refuge (formerly Conservative Treehouse) takes Governor Roy Cooper to task for his anemic response to the hurricane’s impact on the western part of our state. The writer refers to Cooper as “jaw-droppingly incompetent”.

I lived in the Charleston, SC metropolitan area during Hurricane Hugo. That category 4 storm decimated the landscape and destroyed the utility lines in fully one-half of the state of South Carolina. I recall vividly then-Governor Carroll Campbell’s strong leadership in the aftermath. It was pretty inspiring. It was an extremely active, all-hands-on-deck approach. I should note that Charleston mayor Joe Riley– a Democrat– also provided good leadership.

Remain mindful that disaster response is supposed to be primarily at the state level.

But Hurricane Katrina during 2005 changed that completely. The media/left complex eager to hurt then-President Bush dramatized the plight of the African-American residents who had refused to evacuate New Orleans, and defied instructions to do so. A new standard was developed that the federal government was expected to swoop in instantaneously; and to fix everything immediately. That standard, of course, only applied to Republican presidents, not Democratic presidents.

This weekend, Joe Biden is lounging on a Delaware beach and Kamala Harris is at a $250,000 per head west coast fundraiser.

And Roy Cooper has completely dropped the ball with respect to preparing these mountain communities for the storm and responding to its impacts. Many people in the mountains have been stranded without access to food, clean water, electricity and transportation. Their homes have been flooded in many cases. We have no idea how many dead bodies are to be recovered.

Roy Cooper and Kamala Harris fail utterly when the Katrina standard is applied. And by the way, where is Josh Stein? What is he doing to help?

Interestingly, the demographics in the western part of the state (excepting Asheville) is heavily white and conservative. That is probably why Cooper, Harris and Biden don’t give a flip. Cooper’s primary interest is radical leftism, so he likely has latent contempt for these people. They are quintessential “deplorables”.

Another issue this hurricane illustrates is the profound lack of wisdom associated with the abandonment of traditional copper land lines for telephone service and the widescale transition to cell phones to replace them. When the cell phone towers don’t work, people are cut off from emergency communication.

I read on social media that one person was successful setting up a couple of sites in Asheville where people could access Elon Musk’s Starlink service that does not require cell phone towers. But that will not cover the entire, vast mountainous region affected by the storm.

This weekend, we learn the high cost of bad leadership.