North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein said he is concerned with the uncertainty surrounding the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the impact it might have on the state now that the Atlantic hurricane season is underway.
NOAA is calling for 13 to 15 named storms, of which six to 10 could become hurricanes. Three to five are forecasted to reach major hurricane status with winds over 110 mph.
The Trump administration is considering cuts to NOAA, and overhauling, or dissolving, FEMA to move disaster management to the states. In January, he established a 20-member committee via executive order to review the agency and propose reforms. In April, he tapped new leadership and members, keeping Michael Whatley, Chairman of the Republican National Committee and former NCGOP chair, on the council.
FEMA faced intense scrutiny after Hurricane Helene impacted parts of western North Carolina in late September 2024, with criticism ranging from running out of funds and allegedly avoiding homes with Trump signs to victims being forced out of hotels at the last minute.
Stein held a hurricane season briefing press conference on Thursday, criticizing any cuts.
“Cuts to NOAA and FEMA are a man-made disaster,” he said. “We need these critical agencies to help us anticipate and respond to natural disasters. A lack of forecasting and a lack of funding both harm public safety, so even as we advocate to protect NOAA and FEMA, we simply have to prepare for the very real possibility that these entities will be of diminished capacity.”
Stein, a Democrat, said reimbursement rates could change with FEMA, going from a 90% to a 75% federal match, leaving the state to come up with a 25% match instead of 10%, which could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.
The governor said the potential cuts mean the state will need possibly hundreds of millions of dollars more to go into the state’s Rainy Day Fund or the state’s Savings Reserve Account.
He told a reporter that the issue is currently being negotiated between the Senate, which he said proposed spending it down nearly to the bottom, and the House, which has added more money. His budget calls for adding $500 million to the fund.
Stein also said that he was concerned about cuts to the National Weather Service, including fewer people monitoring the weather balloons, which were also cut, and interpreting the data, ultimately impacting people’s lives.
Other concerns with cuts to fema
There were other concerns with the uncertainty of FEMA, including a lot of turnover in emergency management positions in both the state and local agencies in the western part of the state.
“That is one reason why it’s critical to have a strong FEMA because most states don’t experience natural disasters on an annual basis the way that it feels like we do here in North Carolina,” Stein said. “Other states may not have a natural disaster for eight or ten years, and so the people in those positions (in the state) are brand new and have never been through a big storm before and won’t have the muscle memory of how to respond in that moment when all of a sudden the storm goes from a Class C to a Class A storm so we need the expertise that exists in FEMA.”
lessons learned from helene
There were lessons that were learned from Helene, including the need to improve communication, when the ability to get a cell phone signal or other forms of communication was wiped out for weeks, which was discussed during the press conference.
Coinciding with that, Stein said, was the speed of misinformation that spread on social media.
“We have to figure out what we can do to get factual information out and to encourage people to seek out that factual information rather than to just repost some outrageous claim they just happened to see on social media,” he said.
It was stressed that people should find reputable sources of information, such as the National Weather Service, local media, and local emergency management, to take action if necessary.
Will Ray, the state’s director of Emergency Management, said they have restructured their cross-training program and some of the exercises they are doing internally and with state partners.
He said the funding model for emergency management, both at the state and local levels, heavily relies on federal grant funding. They continue to work with the governor, legislature, and state delegation in Washington, DC, to create a more sustainable funding model to support critical emergency management services across the state.
Finally, Ray said the logistics with Helene was a catastrophically significant event.
“What we were looking at, at that point, the volume of needs across the disaster area has caused us to reevaluate our logistical supply chain,” he said. ‘The types of commodities, the amounts, and what we have staged in our warehouses, what we have available through contract services, making sure we’re diversifying those contract services as we look at what may or may not be available from the federal government for future events.”
How NC is preparing for upcoming storms
Ray said they are taking action on identified areas for improvement. The State Emergency Response Team is hosting workshops and planning questions, conducting plan reviews, and conducting operational and logistics readiness checks. They are also expanding their training and exercises.
The state is also in the middle of putting together floodplain mapping for the entire state using Light Detection and Ranging, or Lidar.
“We’re very fortunate to have some capabilities both within various agencies at the state level, but also in some partner agencies that allow us to take quick reference pre- and post-disaster imagery,” he said.
In addition, Ray said they are looking at all of the available funding streams, both federal and state, and seeing how they can bolster the flood gauges across the state to ensure they have good data and maximize the alert and warning systems associated with those gauges.
He stressed that interstate mutual aid will continue to be an important focus of theirs as the uncertainty surrounding FEMA continues.
audit of swannanoa community care center
A reporter asked Stein about how the state could keep costs down for recovery contracts like the one highlighted in a state audit, which showed that a Community Care Center in Swannanoa operated for 189 days and cost the State of North Carolina a total of $27.4 million, averaging a daily cost of $145,217. During that time, the center provided approximately 14,000 showers and 18,000 loads of laundry.
He replied that while the state is always prudent when it comes to spending taxpayer money, Hurricane Helene was a catastrophic storm, and the top priority was the health and safety of the people of the community.
“This is a community that had no running water for weeks, folks needed a place to shower, they needed a place to wash their clothes, they needed that from a sanitary perspective,” Stein said. “It was also immediately following a catastrophic storm, where we’re asking people to leave their families and go live in who knows what kind of conditions for weeks on end. All the water that was generated by those stations had to be disposed of somehow, somewhere, and they weren’t connected to a water and sewer system, so these services are expensive.”
He added that it was remarkable that the station was up within 72 hours after the storm hit.
other ways to prepare
Officials also explained ways to prepare for this hurricane season or for any storm, including having emergency supplies, an emergency kit, and plans, including evacuations. Some websites mentioned include:
- Readync.gov
- Knowyourzone.nc.gov has evacuation zones for eastern North Carolina.
- Fiman.nc.gov is a network of over 600 flood gauges across the state. On the website, people can also sign up for flood alerts.
