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North Carolina officials say the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, is not moving fast enough to help people who lost homes from Hurricane Helene's winds and floods more than a year ago. They say the agency has the money to help but is stalling. Laura Hackett with Blue Ridge Public Radio reports that some property owners are caught in a painful waiting game.
LAURA HACKETT, BYLINE: The River Knoll townhouses in Asheville, North Carolina, sit alongside a tranquil patch of land near the Swannanoa River. Mary Lynn Manns, a retired professor, lived in one of the homes for a decade.
MARY LYNN MANNS: It used to be a very cute place. Nothing special. It was just I had everything organized for the house that I was going to live in for the rest of my life.
HACKETT: Then, during Hurricane Helene, the river rose to nearly 30 feet, flooding her foundation. Her house, along with many in the neighborhood, has been unlivable since. So for the last year, Manns has been on the hook for a mortgage in a house she doesn't see as safe to live in or rebuild.
MANNS: The foundations are in bad shapes. You can't just put up a house. And plus, we've had the discussion, should we do this? We're clearly now in a floodplain.
HACKETT: Scenarios like these are why FEMA has the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. The agency doesn't want people to rebuild homes on a floodplain where they're likely to flood again. The FEMA program offers homeowners the option to sell their property at pre-storm values. Manns applied for the buyout program last November. She's one of hundreds of applicants who are going through the complicated process.
DON CAMPBELL: To date, we have not had any of our project applications approved.
HACKETT: That's Don Campbell, a staffer with North Carolina Emergency Management, which administers the program for the state.
CAMPBELL: We understand that many of those applications are sitting on the desk of the secretary of homeland security.
HACKETT: And that's Kristi Noem. FEMA already set aside $1.5 billion for the program in North Carolina, but nothing can move forward without her signature. FEMA declined an interview for this story but said in a statement it believes a large percentage of the home buyout applications are ineligible, citing rule violations. That's news to William Ray, the director of North Carolina Emergency Management.
WILLIAM RAY: We do not have anything in hand that says that officially things are ineligible. We are not able to get a good answer from FEMA as to why they are not moving forward.
HACKETT: Meanwhile, more than 500 damaged properties in western North Carolina remain in limbo. Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, says he's never seen anything like this.
CHAD BERGINNIS: It is unfathomable to me that we're at the place where the federal government is dragging its feet so much.
HACKETT: He says it's unfair for people who are financially vulnerable after disasters.
BERGINNIS: And I fear, for the homeowner that's waiting on these grants, at some point - what? - are they going to have to declare bankruptcy? These are the things that keep me up at night.
HACKETT: It keeps Mary Lynn Manns up at night, too. Right now, she's on the hook for three monthly payments - a $900 mortgage and a $500 HOA fee, even though she can't live in her house. And there's a $1,500 monthly rent on her new apartment.
MANNS: We're watching our savings just dwindle and dwindle and dwindle and we're going, oh, my God, how much longer can we do this?
HACKETT: That's hard to know because even if her application does eventually get approved, experts say all the paperwork and inspection requirements for FEMA to pay for a house can take years.
For NPR News, I'm Laura Hackett in Asheville, North Carolina.
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