Hell hath no fury like Helene… and a region scorned

Hurricane Helene made landfall this last week, ripping through eastern Florida before parking itself over eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina where it proceeded to dump biblical amounts of rain that wreaked biblical levels of destruction in the region.

Seriously, the prolific videos and images on social media are terrifying to watch of homes washing away, mudslides ripping down hills at horrific speed, and whole towns being wiped from the map.?

Three months ago, DHS Secretary Mayorkas said FEMA was ready for hurricane season, but seemed to backtrack rather dramatically this week as confusion and lack of coordination reigned. As the number of dead crossed 200 with hundreds more still missing, making this the worst hurricane in US history, the parallels to 205 Hurricane Katrina and the terrible management of that disaster grew increasingly common.

Anger and frustration are mounting as reports emerge of private citizens being told by authorities not to help (they’re helping anyway), FEMA relief seems stalled, and military units are being kept at their bases as local areas struggle with the aftermath.

What’s crazy to me is that coverage of the relief failure with Hurricane Katrina was wall to wall in the weeks following that storm, but coverage of Helene’s destruction and the faltering relief efforts has been relatively smaller, at least at the level of national news coverage.

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In this week's edition on Substack:

• Ground operations begin in Lebanon
• The US economy narrowly avoids a nasty ports strike
• Kamala Harris attempts a border rebrand