Four months after Hurricane Helene unleashed deadly flooding and landslides that killed 104 people in North Carolina communities wedged across forests and mountains, the unsettling reality of an extremely slow, difficult and costly recovery has become painfully clear in the western part of the state.
Vehicles that were swallowed by rapidly rising rivers on Sept. 27 remain abandoned in the water. Many partially destroyed streets and bridges that were covered with mud months ago are still impassable. And the frigid blast of Arctic air that recently hovered throughout the South has slowed recovery efforts.
The damage was not spread evenly: In downtown Asheville, the region’s hub, it almost looks as if the storm never happened. And that same split screen informs President Trump’s visit on Friday to an area where he’s far more popular in the surrounding mountain towns than he is in largely liberal Asheville.
But whether people voted for Mr. Trump or not, residents devastated by the deadliest storm to ever strike North Carolina agree on one thing: There is a drastic need for more aid, and they believe it needs to come quickly.
“This shouldn’t even be a political issue,” said Jeffrey Burroughs, the president of the River Arts District Artists, an organization that represents the more than 700 artists who comprise an area in Asheville filled with galleries, bars and live music. “Our community is suffering, and what we need right now is the kind of financial support that matches the level of devastation we’ve received from this storm.”
North Carolina’s Office of State Budget and Management has estimated that the storm caused about $60 billion in damage. The state’s legislature approved roughly $877 million in aid in October. North Carolina is expected to receive at least $9 billion in assistance from a bipartisan measure that Congress passed in December.
State Representative Mark Pless, a Republican who represents Haywood County, a largely rural area about 35 miles west of Asheville, said the needs in the region vary from housing for displaced people, grants for small businesses and more resources to fix private roads and bridges. But the overarching ask was more money, especially in a region where the economy is rooted in tourism and small businesses.
With Mr. Trump’s visit — the first travel of his second term — there was hope that the trip could lead to more federal resources, even though he has not laid out any exact plans.
But the misinformation that Mr. Trump spread after the storm has not been forgotten in the region, such as when he falsely claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had spent billions of dollars of disaster relief aid on housing undocumented immigrants, or when he said that Democratic leaders were “going out of their way to not help Republican areas,” even though Republican governors had thanked the federal government for its fast response to damage from Helene.
Some expected Mr. Trump to use the devastation still visible in the area to attack the previous administration and promote what he would plan to do now.
Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., said that the timing of the president’s visit was important.
“I think it allows him to make a case about the failure of the Biden administration still, almost as if he is still running a campaign, but also, obviously, talk about how he will make things better,” Dr. Cooper said.
