AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida, where that state's panhandle and peninsula meet. But it's in North Carolina where hundreds of roads remain impassable because of damage from the storm. Deanne Criswell is the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and she joins us now. Welcome to the program.
DEANNE CRISWELL: Good morning, Ayesha.
RASCOE: Do you know the extent of the damage in places like western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee?
CRISWELL: Ayesha, this really has been such a significant event that has had damage across five states. I have reports of major infrastructure damage from Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, as well as Tennessee. While Florida and Georgia, the lifesaving piece has stabilized, we are still in an active lifesaving mode in North Carolina. It'll take some time before we can understand the true extent of all of the damages up there.
RASCOE: Well, and I wanted to ask you about that because you see reports online where people are still trying to get rescued in North Carolina. And I understand there are state and local and federal interactions here. But what is FEMA's role in that?
CRISWELL: Yeah, so we have, right now I believe it's nine search-and-rescue teams in North Carolina. We have more that are coming in today. I talked to our lead on the ground there this morning. And the current information I have is they've done close to 500 rescues with local, state and federal resources. And so we augment the capability that the state and the local jurisdictions have, and we're sending in more resources at their request to make sure we can get to everybody that's been impacted by this, people that are still isolated from the effects of the storm.
RASCOE: How long do you think it will take to get these basic necessities to people? People are saying, especially in North Carolina and other places with bad flooding, they don't have food. They're stranded. How can you get those basic necessities to people or get basic infrastructure up so they can make calls and things of that nature?
CRISWELL: Yeah, specifically in North Carolina, right now, we know that there's been several water systems that have been impacted, as well as the communication systems. And so we have moved commodities like food and bottled water into the area. We're moving more in, but we're also - have the Army Corps of Engineers that's going to be in the area today assessing the impacts to those water systems, so we'll understand what it's going to take to bring them back up online. And we're also moving Starlink satellite into that western part of North Carolina to help with the comms. But we're seeing the same challenges across the other states as well, and we have teams from the Army Corps of Engineer, and we have commodities in all of those locations to help as needed. When I was in Florida, I know the state is setting up multiple points of distribution. They're using their own resources, but we have additional resources if they did need them, and we'll continue to do that across Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee as needed as well.
RASCOE: Do you have what you need to do this level of recovery? Is FEMA staffed and funded in a way that allows it to deal with these more and more powerful storms in this era of climate change?
CRISWELL: Well, Ayesha, I think, you know, you might be aware that we are running low in our disaster relief funds, and we went into what we call immediate needs funding in early August. What that did is made sure that we had enough funding in that disaster relief fund to support an event just like this, so we could do the life safety work. With the continuing resolution, it gives us the ability to spend against the president's budget for fiscal year '25. But without a supplemental, we're going to find ourselves in the same situation with immediate needs funding in January, maybe even earlier, depending on the impacts from this storm.
RASCOE: I mean, cost is something that obviously life is first, you know, and there are a lot of people suffering right now. But how much do you think this storm will cost your agency, the taxpayers, when all is said and done?
CRISWELL: Yeah. I don't have a good number to give you this early into it, but what I can say is, I mean, these are five separate major events that each are going to have significant costs associated to them - just the amount of infrastructure that I've already seen damaged in Florida, what I'm hearing damaged in the other states. I'm going to Georgia today to check in on them, and then I'll be in North Carolina on Monday, so I can get a better idea of what those total impacts are.
RASCOE: That's FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
CRISWELL: Thank you, Ayesha. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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