A complicated relief effort unfolds in North Carolina in the face of tough terrain, collapsed communications and a ticking clock

(CNN) — To Cory Vaillancourt, the only scene comparable to the one unfolding in western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene is a war zone.

Nearly two years ago, the Smoky Mountain News politics editor reported from a southern Ukrainian city shortly after its liberation from Russian control.

“The conditions that I’m seeing here in western North Carolina are almost exactly the same, minus the gunfire and artillery shells,” he told CNN on Monday from the town hall in Waynesville, 30 miles west of the city of Asheville. “You have people who don’t have water, they don’t have medications, they don’t have personal hygiene products.

“And,” he added, “they don’t have any way to get them.”

Indeed, the idyll that made Asheville a regional tourist hub of artsy flair, bustling breweries and forested mountain majesty – nearly 300 miles from the Atlantic coast – today appears condemned after one of the deadliest hurricanes to strike the US mainland in the last 50 years.

And now, it’s that beloved southern Appalachian terrain isolating the city and many even more remote neighboring enclaves as residents begin the long, hard work of recovering from a storm that dumped as much as 30 inches of rain in the region and left at least 140 dead across six states.

Five days after Helene hit, hundreds in western North Carolina are still missing. And while President Joe Biden has approved the governor’s request to declare a major disaster in 25 counties, the emergency response remains difficult, an operation grappling with decimated roads and complicated by communication outages.

What is clear is what people here need: essentials like water, food and gas. And they’re adamant they need it now.

“There’s no help or relief from the government or FEMA right now,” Tyler Kotch, the owner of an Asheville pizza joint, told CNN on Monday. “It’s four days out, and we’re still waiting on that.”

‘An unprecedented, massive effort’

The sentiment has been echoed by local leaders, including some who’ve also acknowledged state and federal officials indeed are on the ground – but who still feel the pace of recovery is too slow.

“There’s still a lot of folks that we need to be able to reach, so that is the priority,” Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday night. “But we also are in a situation where we don’t have water and power in most areas, and we do need resources like drinking water and food and other household supplies and personal supplies people might need.”

Mayor Zeb Smathers of Canton bemoaned the total collapse of cell service in his area, telling CNN it had hampered search, rescue and recovery efforts, forcing the community to make do with “1990s technology – at best.”

“There are families living in turmoil because they can’t make a simple cell phone call 72 hours after this storm,” he said. “We can’t communicate with crisis management to deliver supplies because we don’t know what we have and what people need.”

State and federal officials have signaled they understand the dire circumstances. By late Monday, FEMA had delivered 1 million liters of water and 600,000 meals, Gov. Roy Cooper said.

Federal aid is arriving in Canton, also west of Asheville, but connectivity problems have prevented smooth coordination, Smathers said. And he fears for the people who need help.

Some communities can only get aid by helicopter, officials have said.

“We have beautiful, beautiful mountains in North Carolina, but they are rugged sometimes to get through, even on a beautiful day,” the governor told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday night. “After this catastrophic storm, it is very difficult to get to all of those places. That’s why we are relying on air power.”

“This is an unprecedented, massive effort that is being coordinated among local, state, federal, non-profits,” he said. “It’s been amazing to see the work that’s going on. We’ve just got to make sure that it reaches every corner of western North Carolina.”

Resources were in place across the Southeast before the storm arrived, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday. And more than 3,500 federal workers on the ground – 1,000 of them from FEMA – are working with the state to move resources to the communities that need them.

“We know that there’s still great need, we know that there’s a lot of power that’s out, we know that the waste systems are down,” Criswell said.

“We know there’s areas we haven’t gotten to yet,” Criswell added, “and so we’ll continue to get that information of the places that still need critical equipment, critical food and water.”

‘People are freaking out’

Brian Etheridge lived with his family in western North Carolina for more than a decade before moving to Hilton Head, South Carolina. With his teenage sons and a trailer full of supplies, he struck out Sunday to help friends and old neighbors in the disaster zone.

“It’s not just Asheville, it’s everywhere: Brevard, Hendersonville, Highlands, Waynesville, Boone, Blowing Rock, all these areas,” he said, describing a swath of hundreds of square miles where downed trees, landslides and washed-out roads make travel exceedingly difficult.

Etheridge saw utility trucks headed toward the storm wreckage, as well as fire departments and other local authorities out and about as residents wielded chainsaws in their efforts to clean up, he told CNN.

“These people are stuck. They are running out of food, water, there’s no power,” said Etheridge, who returned home Sunday night. “It’s total destruction.”

“The damage is just so vast,” he added. “And people are freaking out and panicking and they are scared.”

From a FEMA warehouse in Fort Worth, Texas, Staff Administrator Steve Reaves on Monday mentioned the challenge of Interstate 40 as he oversaw the loading and shipping of semitrucks to the storm zone.

“We’ve sent every meal we’ve got, every bottle of water we’ve got,” he said, adding his agency has also sent tarps, plastic sheeting and kits for babies and seniors.

But damage to I-40 has created a major bottleneck, Reaves said, between North Carolina and Tennessee.

“That’s the main artery we had there,” said Reaves, also the head of the agency’s union. “Whenever those hurdles like highways, roads, bridges washed out, that delays response to that area. We have to wait for the roads to be rebuilt, too.”

The highway’s eastbound lanes leaving Buncombe County, of which Asheville is the seat, reopened Tuesday, the county said.

Storm will worsen poverty, food insecurity

West of Asheville, North Carolina is even more rural, isolated and rugged, said Vaillancourt, the journalist.

In Asheville, he said, neighbors can share supplies. That’s much harder in the communities he covers: “You can’t just hop around the corner to a neighbor’s house who lives a mile away and has a washed-out bridge leading to their home.”

“There are folks out here,” he said, “and the need is just as great.”

Officials must now overcome myriad hurdles – communications outages, flooding of the “valleys and hollers,” road closures – complicating the recovery effort, said the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management’s former Director Mike Sprayberry.

“These places, a lot of them are remote and, in the best of times, sometimes difficult to get to,” said Sprayberry, now the senior adviser for emergency management for Hagerty Consulting. But, he added, “It’s hard to say, ‘Be patient,’ especially if you’re running out of food and water, or need oxygen, or you need medication.”

“Doggone, I think everybody’s trying to move as fast as they can,” he said, “and they’re throwing everything we have at it.”

In the meantime, the communities Vaillancourt covers are not strangers to food insecurity and poverty. There have “always been issues in rural, southern Appalachia,” he said.

Now, Helene has made those problems much worse, he said, recounting a run-in Sunday with a woman who runs a local food pantry struggling to get non-perishables into isolated parts of Haywood County.

“Again, these areas already struggle with poverty and food insecurity,” he said. “And the disruption of normal daily life due to this storm has made their plight even more dire.”

CNN’s Ella Nilsen contributed to this report.

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