Similar to other disasters, the recovery after Helene takes a lot of time and money. Unfortunately, due to the recent changes in administration at the federal level, this money has been very slow to come. Early in January, the Biden administration awarded multiple hundreds of millions of dollar grants to help the recovery process, but this money has been in limbo since the inauguration. During the campaign, Trump promised to help the area recover, but FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been slow to give out the money required for the western side of the state to recover.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/03/16/hurricane-helene-north-carolina-recovery/ —- This is the article I used for the first section

There have also been issues on the state side. The North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR), the state office with the job to help rebuild houses, has had a very rocky and controversial history. During the response to Hurricane Mathew, they were shown to award contracts to extremely unreliable contractors and favor certain companies that failed to meet deadlines and budgets. They also moved extremely slowly, with some people having to live inside moldy and decrepit houses while waiting for state assistance or for their house to be rebuilt. We will have to wait and see if the the office has learned from its past, or if they will fail the people of Western NC.

http://ncnewsline.com/2022/05/13/unnatural-disaster/ —- This is an article that goes in much more detail on the issues that NCORR has had