Helene, FEMA and the Long Wait for Home Fixes
The good news: The total number of flood-damaged homes that need to be rebuilt, elevated or demolished is less than it might have been. The bad news: it's going to take a long time.
BREVARD — First, there was the trauma of the narrow escape from Tropical Storm Helene’s flooding.
“It was up to here,” said Donna Ledford, placing her hand at her collarbone as recalled the early morning of Sept. 27, when she and husband, Randy, waded to safety through the rising current.
The couple and her elderly mother, Malene Sherrill — who lives with them and had to be rescued by boat — then stayed for eight months with the Ledfords’ daughter and her family.
“There were eight of us in that little apartment,” Ledford said.
At the same time, they were coming to terms with the possibility of losing the Burnette Drive home on which they had made payments for 20 years, which they had recently remodeled, which lost 92 percent of its value in the flood, according to an estimate from Transylvania County building inspectors.
The insurance settlement was just enough to pay off their mortgage and buy the 40-foot-long camper where the Ledfords and Sherill have been living since May.
The couple applied to the state for a Hazard Mitigation grant to rebuild their home eight months ago. Though they knew it would take more than a year from that time to learn whether the money would be awarded, that doesn’t change their basic situation: along with all the other fear, discomfort and disruption of Helene, they face a frustrating wait with no end in sight, Ledford said last week as she fried potatoes for a family dinner in the tiny kitchen of the camper parked next to their home.
“It’s like we’re in limbo,” she said.
The Long Road to Elevation
The Ledfords are at ground zero of Helene’s lasting devastation: Their home off Old Hendersonville Highway northeast of downtown Brevard was the most severely damaged in their neighborhood, which was the hardest-hit cluster of slab-built homes in Transylvania.
But they are far from alone.
The Ledfords are among the 22 property owners who have applied to North Carolina Emergency Management (NCEM) for federally funded Hazard Mitigation grants that directly impact their buildings. Eight are seeking awards to elevate structures, two to rebuild them, and 11 to receive buyouts that would lead to homes being demolished and their lots left as vacant green space.
Transylvania Habitat for Humanity also plans to use money from a private grant and other sources to elevate 13 badly damaged mobile homes owned and occupied by Hispanic residents who either did not qualify for Mitigation grants or were afraid to apply for fear of deportation, said Angie Hunter, the organization’s executive director.
None of the work has been completed, and all of it is turning out to be more complicated and time-consuming than expected, said homeowners and nonprofit leaders.
Of course, given the ambitious aims of Hazard Mitigation grants, slow turnarounds are standard. Case in point: The raising of a Rosman home flooded during 2021’s Tropical Storm Fred was not completed until a few months before the arrival of Helene. And Brian Haines, an NCEM communications officer, described the complexity of the award process.
The 11 acquisition requests must be approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) which provides the Mitigation funding, he wrote in an email last week, adding that those applications were submitted for FEMA review in May.
To begin addressing applications for the elevation and reconstruction grants, Haines wrote, NCEM engineers will visit the subject properties in July.
They must determine whether the homes meet the “feasibility requirements” of the grant program, including a finding that elevation is a “cost-effective” option and that the targeted homes are “structurally sound.”
If the properties meet these standards, the applications will lead to further FEMA review, Haines wrote, saying the NCEM team “will complete the engineering designs required to be submitted in the application to FEMA for elevation and mitigation reconstruction.”
None of the state or federal agencies NewsBeat emailed raised the issue looming over all federally assisted storm recovery: President Donald Trump’s and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s stated plans to abolish or reform FEMA after the end of the current hurricane season, potentially shifting its duties to states, actions that would come on top of the already dramatic staffing cuts at FEMA.
But Yesica Miranda, executive director El Centro Brevard, said such disruptions are among the host of concerns for the Hispanic residents that her organization serves.
Though FEMA guidelines allow approval for parents with children who are citizens by virtue of being born in the United States, several such applicants have been denied, Miranda said.
“I don't know a lot about how FEMA works, but I know that a lot of the families who applied did not get anything,” Miranda said.
The Hispanic owners of badly damaged homes, most of whom have lived and worked in Brevard for years or even decades, also face the heightened risk of being caught up in the Trump administration’s increased deportations of immigrants.
Then there’s an action by the city of Brevard that granted a reprieve for all owners of severely damaged properties — but also created a daunting deadline.
In October, the City Council heard complaints from several residents of Duck’s Drive, the main road of a mobile home community of mostly Hispanic residents across Old Hendersonville from the Ledfords’ neighborhood.
They faced long-term absences from their homes, they said, because federal rules would forbid them from making repairs to badly damaged structures before they could be raised.
The Council agreed — at some risk to its qualification for the Federal Flood Insurance Program — to allow work needed to make homes “habitable” as long as owners provide documentation of good faith efforts to meet the elevation requirements.
City Attorney Mack McKeller said the city will work with residents who need more time to finish raising homes and has no power to evict them. But, he added, failure to complete elevation could ultimately result in a loss of city services and even occupancy permits.
Miranda praised the compromise that allowed residents to move back into their homes, but said it has also created “the fear that they are going to have to move out of the house if they don’t get it raised in two years.”
More Expensive, More Complicated
Habitat has been heavily involved in recovery since shortly after Helene’s arrival.
It provided temporary housing, including donated campers, for displaced families, seven of whom continue to live in these accommodations.
It is managing a caseload of 48 flood-damaged properties, providing services such as roof repair to mold remediation, said Mike Krauter, the organization’s director of construction.
And one of its programs is specifically designed to assist Hispanic residents whose homes were among the most severely damaged, who live in fear of deportation and/or whose applications for government funding have been denied, Hunter said.
This population, she said, is the “sweet spot,” for aid from the Charlotte-based Truist Foundation, which in May awarded Habitat a $585,000 grant to help raise 13 of these residents’ homes and relocate four other families.
Another reason to focus on this work, Hunter said: it seemed feasible, at least initially.
All these families live in mobile homes, which are far less expensive to elevate than conventional houses, with expected costs as low as $15,000 each.
But after an article about the recovery effort in Brevard appeared in the Assembly online magazine last month, Hunter was contacted by Roderick Scott, chair of the nonprofit Flood Mitigation Industry Organization and owner of a mitigation company in Louisiana.
He forwarded her a 266-page FEMA document that details the requirements to elevate manufactured homes in flood zones, including the need for engineering approval and standards for anchoring and reinforcing foundations.
Failure to comply could result in the city losing its qualification for the National Flood Insurance Program, Scott said in an interview, “and if you can’t get flood insurance, you can’t get a mortgage in a flood zone, and if you refuse to comply, to build things stronger, when that flood comes again . . . you’ll have damages again.”
All of which means, Hunter said, that the process will take longer and cost more than expected.
“It’s so complicated, let me tell you,” she said.
Habitat is moving forward, though, with proceeds from Truist and assistance from other sources: its share of a $3 million state recovery grant spread among 20 Habitat chapters; the Pisgah Forest Rotary Club, which has offered to supplement the effort; and Jim Hannen, the owner of the community on Duck’s.
He plans to pay to build the foundations for the homes in his park, Miranda said, while owners of mobile homes who lease his lots would be responsible for work such as lifting the homes onto the higher foundations and reconnecting them with electrical and plumbing lines.
Will there be money for those jobs? At least one family doesn’t know, said the 18-year old daughter of the owners of a Duck’s mobile home.
Like the Ledfords, her family had to flee as the water rose, an escape that was all the more frightening because her mother was seven months pregnant, said the young woman. (She provided her own and her parents’ names to NewsBeat, but they are being withheld at the request of Miranda, who said publishing them could put the family at risk for deportation.)
This family lost nearly all of their possessions — furniture, clothing and appliances that toppled over as floodwaters rose more than two feet inside their house.
And like so many other flood victims, they lived for months in cramped quarters. The family of six — seven after the birth of a now-six month old son — stayed in one room at a friend’s house in Brevard, the daughter said.
The mother and father, who have lived in Brevard for 20 years and owned the home for 10, received help from a local church and El Centro for interior repairs, she said, but “there were a lot of things that my father did out of his pocket.”
Though Hunter said the family is on Habitat’s list for assistance, the young woman, translating for her mother, said the family didn’t know about the organization’s elevation program. And though her parents were able to apply for a FEMA-funded elevation grant, they have not heard whether it will be approved, she said.
“It’s been very frustrating, just getting things done.”
The “Hardest Thing”
Government agencies have spent lavishly on some aspects of recovery in Transylvania.
The Army Corps of Engineers paid, if anything, too much for debris removal in county waterways — as much as $66 million on wholesale clearance that has been broadly criticized as excessive and environmentally damaging.
FEMA, meanwhile, has handed out a total of $8.4 million in Individual Assistance grants to more than 3,000 Transylvania residents, which far exceeds the number of people whose properties were damaged — 250, according to a list the county provided to NewsBeat in November.
In an unsigned email, FEMA wrote that such a pattern is typical in the aftermath of disasters. People who temporarily lost access to their homes due to a road washout, for example, might have been eligible for the standard $700 in Critical Needs Assistance typically paid soon after disasters strike.
And the destruction of a private road or bridge, the email said, could lead to long-term absences — and larger grants — even for people whose homes weren’t damaged.
That earlier county tally of damaged properties also shows that fewer homes will need to be elevated, rebuilt or demolished than initially expected. Fifty-four homes on the November list were estimated to have lost more than 50 percent of their value in the storm — the threshold at which FEMA requires structures in flood zones to be raised before they can be occupied.
Those estimates were just that, Krauter said, estimates based on a FEMA formula, and in several cases the cost of the repairs came in lower than anticipated.
But there was never any question that the Ledford’s house would need a Hazard Mitigation grant.
When NewsBeat visited Randy Ledford in November, the interior of the house had been stripped to its studs, and fans and dehumidifiers hummed continually in an attempt to slow the advance of mold and dry family photographs spread out on a counter.
Not much has changed because refurbishment is futile until they know the future of the house, Donna Ledford said.
“Windows won’t go up and down. It still smells moldy, even though we sprayed and part of the kitchen floor is gone,” she said.
The couple received the standard $700 Critical Needs grant, $3,000 in compensation for their displacement and $8,000 to replace personal belongings, an amount that fell far short of their needs.
Before the flood, Donna Ledford, who is a medical records clerk and Randy Ledford, who travels worldwide to repair General Electric power plants, were in good shape to retire in a few years, she said.
“Our mortgage was going down. We could see the light at the end of the tunnel. That’s all gone now,” said Donna Ledford, 58. “It’s hard to start over at our age.”
Though she is deeply grateful that no one in the family was killed in the storm, there is no getting around the profound disruption it has brought to their lives, she said.
“This is the hardest thing we’ve ever had to go through.”
Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com