Today is the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Helene devastating the region. The storm destroyed homes, businesses and roadways and claimed 106 lives. And as many in the community reflect on the disaster, we are also in the midst of another emergency: wildfires.
Emergency management plays a critical role in how communities handle these crises from storms to fires.
This week, more than 300 members of the North Carolina Emergency Management Association are gathering in Cherokee for their annual conference.
Association President Daniel Roten is the Emergency Manager of Alleghany County. Roten spoke with BPR on Wednesday. He said that the N.C. emergency managers are a tight-knit group.
“There's 101 of us. We're a family. And when something goes wrong, we all come running,” Roten said, referencing heads of emergency management departments in the state’s 100 counties plus the Qualla Boundary.
He said the conference often happens in Cherokee but that gathering in the West held a special meaning after working on Hurricane Helene together.
“Last night during the banquet,” Roten said, “I asked the group, ‘Did you ever think you'd go on a hurricane deployment in the mountains of North Carolina?’ A lot of those people, we saw them during Helene. They were sitting in our emergency operation center helping us.”
Roten says that many of the emergency managers across the state have more than one job. In Alleghany County, Roten also manages fire inspections, 911 operations and often fills in for building code inspectors. BPR asked if he felt like the county was understaffed.
“When everything's nice and sunny, if you have good people that work for you, it's fine. We make do. We manage. That's what we do as EM's. We know that there's going to be times where it's not going to be ideal. We just roll on with it,” Roten said.
A number of panels during the conference focused on Hurricane Helene and what lessons can be learned from the disaster. However, Roten says there is still a lot to process about the hurricane.
“It's been six months since the hurricane, but we're still digesting all this stuff. So it's probably a little premature to say that there's something necessarily right on our radar. There will be some changes made,” Roten said.
He explains that recovery from the storm will take years.
“If you come to an EM conference and mention the word recovery, you're going to get a whole lot of sighs and, you know, rolled eyes and things. It's just that there is a lot of bureaucracy in recovery,” Roten said. “I think that process could be streamlined a little bit, but we also do try to work concurrently to say, ‘Okay, we're trying to repair for this one, but prepare for the next one.’ So it is a challenge.”
Overall he says that he is proud of the work that happened during Hurricane Helene.
“We did a great job, as well as we could have, given the total calamity of this event. I don't know if I can say it was the worst thing to ever happen in North Carolina, but if it isn't, it is not far from it,” Roten said. “Obviously nothing's ever going to be perfect. But we will do our briefings and our after-actions and we will find some areas that we can make some improvements.
“We have a saying in the EM world. We can't necessarily always stop the disaster, but maybe we can make it hurt just a little bit less.”
