Ron Grindstaff, right, comforts his wife, Marie, as they remove belongings from their home in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on Sept. 30, 2024 in Old Fort, North Carolina. (Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)
Former President Donald Trump will be in Fayetteville today for an event that’s described as a “townhall,” so it seems at least possible that he and the North Carolina Republican officials who are usually at such events to support him might be asked a question or two by those in attendance. If that’s the case, and there’s an audience member with a bit of gumption, here’s a question that deserves to be asked:
Why did both the Trump administration and the North Carolina legislature repeatedly block rules that would have strengthened flood protections and storm standards of the kind that might have saved lives and property during Hurricane Helene?
As the New York Times reported in a detailed story on Thursday, “decisions made by state officials in the years leading up to Helene most likely made some of that damage worse, according to experts in building standards and disaster resilience.”
The state officials in question were the Republican leaders of the North Carolina General Assembly.
While the report allows up front that “no amount of preparation could have entirely prevented the destruction” Helene unleashed, it also explains in painful detail how, time and again since they assumed control of the General Assembly in 2011, GOP legislative leaders have nixed legislation and rules, and overrode gubernatorial vetoes, designed to protect against the impacts of hurricanes and other storms.
Among those rejected proposals were rules that designed to “restrict construction on slopes with a high or moderate risk of landslides.”
This is from the report:
“Those decisions reflect the influence of North Carolina’s home building industry, which has consistently fought rules forcing its members to construct homes to higher, more expensive standards, according to Kim Wooten, an engineer who serves on the North Carolina Building Code Council, the group that sets home building requirements for the state.
‘The home builders association has fought every bill that has come before the General Assembly to try to improve life safety,’ said Ms. Wooten, who works for Facilities Strategies Group, a company that specializes in building engineering. She said that state lawmakers, many of whom are themselves home builders or have received campaign contributions from the industry, ‘vote for bills that line their pocketbooks and make home building cheaper.’”
Not surprisingly, very similar anti-regulatory actions were also a feature at the federal level during the Trump years. This is from a Washington Post report published during the first year of the Trump administration:
“President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that he said would streamline the approval process for building infrastructure such as roads, bridges and offices by eliminating a planning step related to climate change and flood dangers.
…The White House confirmed that the order issued Tuesday would revoke an earlier executive order by former President Barack Obama that required recipients of federal funds to strongly consider risk-management standards when building in flood zones, including measures such as elevating structures from the reach of rising water. Obama’s Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, established in 2015, sought to mitigate the risk of flood damage charged to taxpayers when property owners file costly claims.”
As was so often the case in North Carolina over the past decade, Trump’s action was also taken in response to action by the homebuilder lobby, which sought the repeal and over the objections of insurers and environmental advocates. This is the same Donald Trump, of course, who spoke repeated lies earlier this week about Helene relief and recovery efforts.
Such deregulatory action is also, sadly, of the same ilk that Americans can expect as soon as next year under the detailed policy plan prepared by the Heritage Foundation known as Project 2025 – a blueprint for a new Republican-led era in Washington that contains scores of proposals to restrict or repeal regulations designed to promote public safety and wellbeing.
The bottom line: As North Carolinians across the state struggle to catch their breath in the aftermath of the Helene catastrophe, there are many questions to ask about why we weren’t better prepared, how we can fashion a rapid recovery, and how we make communities more resilient going forward. And as the above news reports make clear, a lot of those questions about poor preparation need to be directed squarely at Republican legislative leaders and, whenever he visits North Carolina, former President Trump.