A year later, recovery is underway. Traffic is moving again. Survivors and communities have found some relief through nonprofits and state and federal aid.
But the scars remain.
Lisa Thomas was among those whose lives were upended. On Sept. 26, a Thursday, she said she was at her Spruce Pine home — a 1920s house once belonging to her husband’s grandparents — when her daughter ran inside, shouting that the yard was filling with water.
Within minutes, the grass turned into a shallow pool and water poured through the house. Thomas grabbed her husband’s ashes and some cash before trying to rescue her German shepherd, Storm, her companion of more than six years. Normally he followed her everywhere, but that day he wouldn’t budge.
With no time left, Thomas, her daughter and son-in-law fled. Storm stayed behind, watching from the window. Moments later, the roof collapsed and floodwaters overtook the home.
Thomas’ eyes mist when she speaks of all she lost, but brighten when she thinks of the help she’s received.
“It was like going from having nothing except a piece of land that I didn’t think we’d ever be able to build back on, to having more than I ever dreamed we could have,” she said.
While Thomas is back in a home now with help from nonprofit aid organization Samaritan’s Purse, many are still waiting. Some won’t move back. Debris still litters parts of the landscape. Some roads remain closed. Local governments are anxiously awaiting reimbursement for rebuilding costs.
“It’s still really bad out there. We are, as mountain folk do, we are putting a smile on things. (But) it doesn’t take long for us to hurt,” said Zeb Smathers, the mayor of Canton. “The tears are still falling.”
Reporters with The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer examined where Western North Carolina stands a year after Helene, in key areas: FEMA funding for municipalities. Roads and bridges. Housing.
Here’s what we found.
FEMA funding requires extra approval
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s reimbursement process is known for being slow. The agency is still closing out projects from Hurricane Katrina — and that was 20 years ago.But state and Western North Carolina leaders say the Trump administration’s self-described efforts to mitigate waste and fraud in the federal government are making a notoriously slow process even slower.
As of Sept. 17, North Carolina was waiting on $64 million of already approved FEMA reimbursements to make their way to the state’s bank account. The funds are caught in a newly implemented system of review under the Trump administration. This money would reimburse, for example, the town of Marshall for repairing its town hall building and the North Carolina Department of Transportation for rebuilding roads and bridges.
FEMA’s reimbursement review process is already a monthslong ordeal, says Chris Campbell, the chief of staff for North Carolina Emergency Management . Now, under Trump, projects have to go through two additional layers of approval.
In June, Kristi Noem, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, ordered that all contracts and grants over $100,000 awarded by Department of Homeland Security agencies — such as FEMA — had to be personally signed off by her before release. Projects that already got the green light from FEMA sat on Noem’s desk awaiting her signature for months, Campbell said. In July, more than $100 million worth of reimbursements sat awaiting her approval.
Once projects made it through Noem, they had to face the Department of Government Efficiency. Under DOGE’s “Defend the Spend” program, North Carolina had to justify why already approved payments were needed — essentially re-litigating the entire FEMA process, Campbell said.
The state is currently awaiting $64 million in FEMA public assistance grants, which were recently approved by Noem, to make its way through this new process, according to N.C. Emergency Management. It could take between 30 and 90 days before the state sees this money, a spokesperson for the state agency said.
FEMA said its watchdog efforts over federal funds has actually made the process faster. But small communities — some without full-time managers and inexperienced with the FEMA process — say they’ve had to navigate red tape and demands for needlessly specific information.
In Morganton, City Manager Sally Sandy said since Helene, her staff is spending 50% of their time on average trying to navigate through the FEMA process. Managing recovery while also ensuring citizens don’t see an interruption in services is not easy, she said.
“We all already didn’t have just one box on the organizational chart,” she said. “Then we do what’s meant and required for the daily services and what our citizens expect and, quite frankly, deserve on top of that. And I will tell you that everyone is exhausted. Mentally and emotionally exhausted.”
But FEMA isn’t the only federal assistance North Carolina is waiting on. In a Sept. 15 press conference, Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said he’s asking the Republican-controlled Congress for a second Helene relief package totaling $13.5 billion.
This comes after a similar request for $11.6 billion in February went unfunded, and millions in approved funds from Congress’ American Relief Act and the Department of Housing and Urban Development still have yet to arrive in the state’s bank account.
Helene caused $60 billion in damage in North Carolina. But a year after the storm, federal support has only funded 9% of that, Stein said. This pace greatly trails the response to similar storms across the country, he said.
Local leaders see a need for new systems of recovery — not just for Western North Carolina, but for survivors of the next disaster.
“There’s a real unselfishness, I think, being displayed when you listen to people,” Smathers said. “We want ours, but we want to fix (the system) so our friends and neighbors who we may never meet don’t have to experience what we’ve experienced.”
Thousands of roads reopened
The N.C. Department of Transportation has a lot of experience fixing roads and bridges after hurricanes, but it had never seen anything like Helene.
NCDOT identified about 9,400 sites damaged by the storm, ranging from collapsed shoulders and missing guardrails to roads swallowed up by landslides or washed away by creeks and rivers. Numerous bridges had disappeared, and pavement that wasn’t broken or missing was often littered with downed trees.
The damage was so extensive and widespread that in the days after the storm NCDOT declared that all roads in Western North Carolina should be considered closed and all but emergency travel prohibited. The storm left 1,467 roads impassible, NCDOT said, cutting off several communities from the outside world.
NCDOT crews and contractors from as far away as California worked steadily to reopen roads and reestablish connections. Every community in Western North Carolina had some sort of road access by Christmas, if sometimes only a single-lane gravel path.
As of last week, the number of roads still closed because of the storm stood at 34, with another 40 considered “partially closed.” Of the 1,438 roads that have fully reopened, many will need to be rebuilt to bring them back to highway standards and to make them more resilient in future storms.
“Ninety-seven percent of the roads that were impacted have been reopened,” Gov. Josh Stein said at the opening of NCDOT’s annual transportation summit in Raleigh this month. “While we recognize all the work that remains — and there is a great amount of work yet to do — it is nevertheless astounding to think of the progress that we’ve made in this recovery in just under a year since Helene hit.”
NCDOT has spent about $1 billion so far on Helene. The department estimates the final cost of rebuilding the region’s roads and bridges will approach $5 billion, about 80% of which will come from the federal government. In contrast, NCDOT spent about $700 million on repairs from all previous storms combined since 2016, which includes two hurricanes, Matthew and Florence, that devastated the eastern part of the state.
First home rebuilt, but will past problems be avoided?
By a state estimate, Helene damaged more than 73,000 homes, including 8,800 that were seriously damaged or destroyed. The price tag for repairing all that: about $15.4 billion.The state isn’t covering the entire cost. Repairs so far have come through a patchwork of sources — loans taken out by homeowners, insurance reimbursements where coverage existed, and FEMA aid. Nonprofits have also been central since day one.
Thomas, who lost her Spruce Pine house to a landslide, knows the difference that outside help can make. As her home collapsed, Thomas’ family escaped to a small shed on higher ground overlooking the creek, an offshoot of the Toe River. From its wooden deck, they watched the current sweep away everything below.
“We went up there and sat in that building and watched our whole life just float down the river,” Thomas said.
For months, they rotated between motels, a house in Spruce Pine, and eventually two campers donated by families from Michigan. Then Samaritan’s Purse approved her daughter’s application for assistance. By early August, construction on a new house was complete, set on higher ground above the site of her destroyed home.
Still, nonprofits cannot meet the region’s vast housing needs alone. To address what’s unmet, the state received just over $1.4 billion in federal housing recovery funds.
Renew NC, a program in a new division of the Department of Commerce created by Stein, is managing those funds. The Democratic governor also established a recovery committee to advise on the broader rebuilding effort and has requested additional funding from the federal government for rebuilding.
Renew NC was created in part to avoid the pitfalls of Rebuild NC, the recovery program launched after Hurricanes Florence and Matthew that drew steep criticism for delays and mismanagement. On Aug. 27, Renew NC announced it had completed the first repair through its single-family housing program — which prioritizes low- to moderate-income families with seniors, children, or people with disabilities — touting the milestone as evidence the state was moving more quickly than in past disasters.
But many still see the pace as too slow. And they still question whether the program will avoid past issues.
There are still families in Western North Carolina in campers or cabins outside their homes. Many are still in rentals and hotels. Some have taken buyouts and left the region altogether, while others have fallen into homelessness — all in a region already facing a tight housing market.
“They’re losing hope. It’s sad. It’s taking a hit on their mental well-being, and sometimes their physical well-being as well,” Clyde Town Manager Joy Garland said. “They’re just in limbo.”
A state dashboard shows almost 3,000 families have applied for the program. Applications close in late December.
Back on her new porch, Thomas gazed at the scar of a landslide carved into the mountainside surrounding the property, damage she hadn’t realized was there until after the storm. The campers where her family once lived still sit on the lot.
Inside, she has begun to fill her home with donated items — some made by the Amish — and estate sale finds. Most of the furniture her mother had given her was lost, but she managed to salvage a small outdoor table, a wolf painting that once hung in her kitchen, and has hung up a 2001 newspaper clipping about repairs to her old house. A friend also gave her a new companion — a Bernese Mountain Dog.
As she spoke about her new home, a blue heron flew over the creek, now twice as wide as it once was. Minutes later, a smaller heron glided past.
“They’re coming back,” she said. “We were worried.”
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