North Carolina residents, including families with small children, are sleeping in snow-surrounded tents as post-hurricane recovery remains slow and federal aid even slower.
This week, up to six inches of snow were predicted for western North Carolina. For hurricane victims still living in tents, that’s yet another natural disaster. A Fox News reporter recently went down to the area affected by snowstorms in North Carolina to talk to some of the Americans living in tents. Meanwhile, the U.S. taxpayer funds hotel rooms, flights, and other freebies for illegal immigrants across the country, to the tune of millions of dollars.
FEMA hotel vouchers reportedly ran out, leaving a number of North Carolina families with no shelter but tents heading into Thanksgiving, the holiday of generosity and plenty. And with federal aid still lacking, and not as many private citizens aware of and willing to ameliorate the situation as might be wished, some of these families do not have a lot of hope for immediate relief.
Fox News’s Steve Harrigan was on the ground in western North Carolina, near the already hard-hit town of Asheville. Harrigan said the “first snowstorm here [is] underway, and these freezing temperatures really the last thing people in western North Carolina needed. If you see here, people were in these mobile homes. Those floors were torn out by the storm Helene, eight weeks ago, they were moved to hotels by FEMA. Those hotel vouchers for many people have run out, and now they are in tents after — eight weeks after this storm, and for families with small children, it is not an easy transition.”
I want to commend Fox News for flying a reporter down to Swannanoa NC today in the middle of a snow storm.
While FEMA is saying no one is in tents, Fox News is literally talking to them.
Well done. pic.twitter.com/lotiBAkO13
— Matt Van Swol (@matt_vanswol) November 23, 2024
One mother told Fox, “It’s awful, especially with your kids. It feels like you’re really letting them down. It’s really cold. It’s very uncomfortable.” And since many people lost both cars and homes in the hurricane, “and there’s no money for many for porta-johns or bottled water,” Harrigan added, families are looking forward to a very bleak holiday season. “And when you talk to emergency workers here, they say the pace of recovery is just startlingly slow,” he added. One woman told him, “There’s no sewer, there’s no water, there’s no power. There’s your answer.”
Harrigan ended, “This is a storm that killed 103 people in North Carolina, cost $50 billion worth of damage, and eight weeks later, you’ve got families in donated tents with wood burning stoves.” As the other Fox News host said, living in tents in the snow is truly a “hardship.” One group that has been coordinating relief for Hurricane Helene victims is Women Fighting for America (WFFA), which accepts donations through GiveSendGo.
The death toll in North Carolina from Hurricane Helene is 103, as Fox noted, but that number may rise as officials continue to investigate and enact recovery efforts. Unfortunately, for many, the recovery efforts are far too slow. FEMA spent over $1 billion on illegal aliens only to inform American citizens hit by the recent hurricanes that there was not enough money left for them. It seems Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas’s insistence that FEMA was “tremendously prepared” for hurricane season was yet another empty Biden-Harris administration promise. When the federal government is responsible for relief efforts, it is inefficient and callous.
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Instead of pledging an additional $50 million for the Amazon rainforest to stop a “climate crisis” that isn’t actually occurring, the Biden-Harris administration should be rushing resources to North Carolinians trying to survive snowstorms in tents.