The politicization of Hurricane Helene

Before it went underwater, Asheville was becoming a popular stop on this year’s presidential campaign trail, with recent visits there by former President Donald Trump and Gov. Tim Walz.

As the mountain city slowly regains contact with the outside world this week after Hurricane Helene brought devastating flooding, it finds itself and the region around it recast into a political football. At a rally in Erie, Pa., Trump attacked Vice President Kamala Harris for attending fundraisers “with her radical left lunatic donors, when big parts of our country have been devastated by that massive hurricane and are underwater, with many, many people dead.” Since then he has accused the Biden administration and Democratic governors of slowing relief to Republican-leaning areas, and at a stop in Valdosta for a disaster briefing, said that Gov. Brian Kemp was doing a good job dealing with Hurricane Helene but was getting a slow response from the feds.

The parts of western North Carolina most affected by the storm remain largely inaccessible, but Trump, Harris and President Joe Biden have all indicated they’ll be there soon. It will be a shame if that becomes the level at which Helene gets discussed in this campaign, because visits by politicians to disaster areas are the climatological equivalent of thoughts and prayers after a school shooting.

From an Atlanta perspective, it’s a little disorienting to witness a hurricane that begins far to our south, rains on us for a solid day, and ends up wreaking its greatest devastation on a place so many Atlantans think of as a mountain getaway. That should be enough to spark a more searching conversation about why extraordinary weather events like this are becoming more ordinary. This close to the election, it’s being played more for photo ops and memes.

My earliest journalistic recollection from a disaster area is of Vice President Spiro Agnew and Maryland Gov. Marvin Mandel chatting with each other on a rain-spattered hillside as they surveyed the devastation from Hurricane Agnes in 1972. Agnew would soon resign in disgrace, and Mandel would go to federal prison, but at that moment, they were observing a solemn and cherished ritual of public officials. They were there to express dismay over something they couldn’t do much about.

Agnes was similar to Helene in some ways. It was an East Coast storm that veered inland and took a long, wet path through places that had no experience with such violent weather. Ellicott City, the pretty little Maryland valley town where we laid out the twin editions of the weekly Columbia and Howard County Times, filled up like a glass of water.

After being shushed away from the dignitaries by the Secret Service, I made my way to a high school gym converted into an evacuation center for the presentation of the first federal relief check to a storm survivor. She was a young woman who had lost all her possessions and survived only by standing on a table in her apartment as the flood waters rose up to her neck.

I’m not sure if she was completely aware of where she was, days after being rescued. Fifteen minutes before the presentation, she sat unnoticed among dozens of dazed and displaced survivors. After all these years, I can remember the look on her face when the network camera crews and newspaper reporters surrounded her, and someone from a federal agency appeared with the check, as if the ruination of her life had been a quiz show.

That early experience left me with a sore spot about attempts to make political points out of the low points in people’s lives. There are disaster experts at every level of government who hold together communities through essential and sometimes heroic service, usually out of the public eye. Their jobs aren’t made any easier by those who show up for the publicity.

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation has stepped up, donating $2 million to the World Central Kitchen for victims of Helene. Given the deep ties Atlanta has to Asheville, we can expect to see more contributions to that city in its time of need, as well as other places in the storm’s wide area of destruction. That will mean much more than any politician’s visit.