‘The Death Toll Is Going to Be Tremendous’

When Hurricane Helene struck his home in Hickory, North Carolina, Brock Long lost power for four days. Once his family was safe, he headed into the mountains of western North Carolina to help out. He knows the area well: He graduated from Appalachian State, which is in Boone, one of the hardest-hit places in the state. Long also knows a few things about charging into the breach after a major disaster. A career emergency manager, he led FEMA from 2017 to 2019 and is now the executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, which specializes in emergency response.

Speaking with me by phone yesterday, Long sounded exhausted. But he offered a clear view of the challenges that emergency managers must confront in the aftermath of the storm, including the continued struggle to rebuild communication networks and to reach residents who live in remote, mountainous areas where hurricanes are not a common danger.

Long told me that he has been heartened by ordinary citizens’ eagerness to chip in and help, but he warned against “self-deploying” in the middle of such a complex effort. And although he understands some of the complaints about the speed of response to the storm, he emphasized that recovery from events as huge as Helene is necessarily slow. “Nobody is at fault for this bad disaster,” he told me. “It’s not FEMA’s disaster. It's all of our disaster. The whole community has got to come together to solve this problem.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

David Graham: How are you doing?

Brock Long: Tired, brother.

Graham: I bet. What has this been like for you personally?

Long: We were out of power for four days. Thankfully, as FEMA administrator, I practiced what I preached, and we were prepared as a household. But my heart is absolutely broken for a lot of the other communities that really took the brunt of the impact. I’ve been up in Boone, in Watauga County. I made it to the top of Beech Mountain today. I’ve been in Asheville, working with local leaders and emergency managers, trying to, from a pro bono standpoint, just say, Hey, listen, this is what you need to be thinking and protecting yourself and gearing up for this long-term recovery that’s going to take place over the next few years, and trying to get into some of these communities. It was incredibly rough getting to Beech Mountain. Beech Mountain has been completely cut off. We had to find an old logging road to go up.

[Read: North Carolina was set up for disaster]

Graham: Cell service being down has been a real challenge. How do first responders work around that?

Long: When there’s a storm like this, the worst thing that you lose is communication. It’s very hard for local and state and federal officials to obtain situational awareness when you’re not hearing from communities. A lot of times, we have mobile communication capability, or what we call “communication on wheels,” that we can bring in to create temporary capabilities for cell and landline. Everybody wants the power and the comms to come back up, but there’s too much debris for them to be able to get in and do the jobs they need. Getting the debris away from the infrastructure that’s got to be repaired is, in some cases, what leads to the power and the comms being down for longer than necessary.

Graham: Is there a way that emergency managers break down phases of response?

Long: Right now it’s all hands on deck for search-and-rescue and life-sustaining missions. The death toll is going to be tremendous in North Carolina. It already is, but sadly, I think it’s going to grow. There are still people in some of these communities that live way down dirt roads. Up in the mountainous regions that have been cut off, they’re still in the process of doing wellness checks, trying to understand who may be in their homes. Once the life-sustaining mission calms down, you’re already thinking about initial recovery and then long-term community recovery.

Graham: Something that amazes me is the number of different timelines and directions in which you’re thinking at once.

Long: The disaster response is never going to move as quickly as people would like. There’s a reason we call them catastrophic disasters. Things don’t work. They’re broken. And you don’t just say, Oh, let me flip that switch and turn that back on. You have to set expectations and be honest with people: Listen, we took a catastrophic hit. And it’s not just your area; it’s multiple states. People tend to see only their localized picture of the whole disaster event. I couldn’t tell you what was going on in Florida, South Carolina, or Georgia right now, because I am in my own little world in western North Carolina. There are only so many assets that can be deployed. I never point the blame at anybody. Nobody is at fault for this bad disaster. It’s not FEMA’s disaster. It’s all of our disaster. The whole community has got to come together to solve this problem.

Graham: As somebody who knows from catastrophic disasters, how does this compare?

Long: I never like to compare them, but I can tell you that I grew up in North Carolina, and Hurricane Hugo, in 1989, was incredibly bad. We probably had 14 to 20 trees down in our yard. I didn’t have power for eight days, and it seemed like I didn’t go to school for two weeks, and that was purely a wind event. With hurricanes moving over mountainous regions, the geographic effect of the mountains increases rainfall, and it’s catastrophic.

Graham: How does the terrain affect the way this disaster plays out?

Long: The supply chain’s cut off. I probably saw no less than 150 collapsed or partially collapsed roadways today in and around Watauga and Avery Counties alone. They’re everywhere. If it wasn’t rutted out, there was a mudslide and trees down, covering half the road. Some of these communities become inaccessible, so they can’t get the fuel they need to run their generators. They can’t get the supplies up there to service the staff. There’s only so many resources to go around to fix all of the problems that you’re seeing, so the difficult task of the emergency managers is trying to figure out which roadway systems do you fix first, at the expense of others, to make sure that you can execute your life-sustaining missions.

[Read: Hurricane Helene created a 30-foot chasm of earth on my street]

Graham: Who’s the point person for those choices?

Long: All disasters are locally executed, state managed, and federally supported. The locals know their jurisdictions best, and they convey their specific needs to the state. The state tries to fulfill what they can, and anything that exceeds their capacity goes into FEMA. It’s a from-the-bottom-to-the-top system. FEMA is not going to have visibility or familiarity with some of these areas that have been totally cut off, these towns that they don’t work in every day.

Graham: What do policy makers need to do to respond?

Long: If Congress is paying attention, the areas of North Carolina are going to need community-disaster loan capability, because some of these communities are going to be hemorrhaging sales-tax revenue, tourism tax and revenue, and their economy is going to take a hit over time, to where the revenue that’s coming in is not enough to meet the bills, to maintain the city or town.

I do think there is a way out of this negative cycle of disasters. It’s going to take Congress compromising and coming together to start incentivizing communities to do the right thing. What I mean by that is we have got to start rewarding communities that do proper land-use planning, that implement the latest International Code Council building codes, and we have to reward the communities that are working with insurance companies to properly insure their infrastructure.

Graham: I remember hearing your predecessor at FEMA, Craig Fugate, say the same thing years ago, but so far, it hasn’t happened.

Long: I do believe that the emergency-management community needs to build a pretty robust lobbying capability. They need to come together to tell Congress how the laws and the system should be reshaped to create more resilient communities in the future, rather than Congress dictating back to FEMA how it should be done. Because we’ve done that several times, and it’s not working out, in my opinion.

Graham: What have you noticed about how people are helping each other on the ground?

Long: The donations-management piece is really important, because if it’s not done well, it can become the disaster within the disaster. The thing that’s been beautiful about this response is neighbor helping neighbor. People are full of goodwill. They want to give things. But actually what’s got to happen is, you have to get people to donate and volunteer their support and their time into National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, what we call VOAD agencies. Those agencies are plugged into the system. They can handle the problems that local, state, and federal governments can’t do because of the big, bulky laws, policies, and processes.

Graham: People want to help, but they end up doing things that are not really assisting?

Long: Well, they are assisting, you know? It’s great, but we have to organize that effort. And here’s the other thing that I would encourage North Carolinians to do: Give it time. I know everybody wants to jump in immediately, and there are missions that can be fulfilled immediately, but the needs for these communities, after what I’ve seen, are going to be around for years to come. While the cameras are rightfully so focused on Asheville, you’ve got Avery and Mitchell and Ashe Counties in North Carolina that are mountainous and rural, that do not have the capabilities that some of their larger neighbors have, and the needs are going to be great.

The losses that these communities are seeing are going to be generational losses. This is peak tourism season for North Carolina. The leaves are changing in autumn. Last week, if you tried to get a hotel room in any one of these cities for October, it was booked out anywhere, impossible to do it. Then you lead into ski season. I’m afraid that the most important piece of these tourism-fueled economies has been wiped out. One of the things that people can do and help is later down the road, don’t cancel your plans to visit the area in the winter. If you want to volunteer your time and your help, spend money in these communities down the road; help them get their economy back on track.