In the wake of Hurricane Helene, questions about government response emerge

Long lines for gas. Shelters at capacity. More than 300 road closings. A severely damaged water system that could take weeks to repair. 

Hundreds of miles from where it made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend, Hurricane Helene caused unprecedented damage in western North Carolina, where at least 49 people have died and dozens of others are missing. 

“The devastation was beyond belief,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said at a news conference Monday afternoon. “And even when you prepare for something like this, this is something that’s never happened before in western North Carolina.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency reported Monday that it had delivered about 1 million liters of water and more than 600,000 meals to North Carolina. More than 5,000 households have contacted FEMA to apply for assistance by phone and online. 

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, who joined Cooper in Asheville on Monday, said more than 1,200 federal workers are now on the ground, responding to one of the worst disasters in North Carolina’s history, vowing: “We are going to be here as long as it takes to finish this response and continue through the recovery.” 

But some residents have criticized what they view as a lack of preparation for the catastrophic storm.

Devonna Brown, an Asheville business owner, said she felt the city failed its residents. “They should have been more prepared. They knew that this storm was coming,” she said. “We’re very frustrated by it. I mean, there’s no way to get in, no way to get out.”

Sara Legatski, another Asheville business owner, said officials should have expressed more urgency and brought in emergency water supplies earlier.

“There should have been a more urgent call for people to be prepared,” she said. “Were they stationing water off the mountain ready to be trucked up here, knowing how fragile our water system is? None of this is a surprise. Anyone acting like this is a surprise has not been here long enough and is not from the mountains and does not understand how water works.”

Spokespeople for the city and Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about residents’ criticisms.

Cooper said at a news conference Monday that people are working nonstop to provide food, water and help. He said flooding and continuously rising rivers have prevented first responders from entering some communities.

At a news conference earlier Monday, Buncombe County Manager Avril Pinder expressed frustration with what she described as a slow response to requests for supplies. 

“We’ve been asking for water, and we’re just getting water, and it’s still in low quantities,” she said. “There’s a large need in our community, and we would like to see a different response from our state partners, a better response from our state partners,” which fulfills those requests through FEMA.

At Monday’s White House briefing, homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall told reporters that FEMA focused its pre-positioning efforts in the Big Bend, Florida, area and that the effort saved lives. Post-landfall, it “surged capacity to where it was needed the most.” She noted that western North Carolina has now been identified as the area that was hit most acutely.

Rep. Chuck Edwards, a Republican who represents western North Carolina, said state emergency officials can’t tell him where 400 pallets of food and water from FEMA intended for hurricane relief have gone. Edwards’ staff says two counties in particular, Haywood and McDowell, desperately need water. FEMA said in a news release that it sent 25 trailer loads of food and 60 trailer loads of water to North Carolina.  

State officials are now distributing them, but Edwards’ staff says it hasn’t been able to find out where they are going or when. A state official told Edwards’ team by email Sunday that the state is leaving any announcements about where food and water will be distributed up to the counties. “If the public is just told water etc was dropped off at point X we could see people actually fighting over who gets what,” the official said.

Asked by NBC News on Monday whether FEMA knows what happened to the water and why it’s not quickly getting to those who need it most, Criswell said the agency was “sending as many resources as they’re asking” for and trying to “to push water in.” 

“It’s going to take all of us to come together to make sure, understand where the communities are that maybe we haven’t gotten to yet get those resources to them,” she said. 

NBC News also asked FEMA spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg about a request for more resources that was sent out Sept. 17, which cited a “severe shortfall” in some disaster response teams. Rothenberg acknowledged that staffing had been an issue. “It is true we are operating a lot of missions across a lot of disasters,” she said, which is why the agency put out a call in mid-September for what it called a “surge capacity force.” 

On Monday, about three days after Helene hit Florida as a Category 4 storm, survivors in North Carolina were scrounging for food and clean water and shuffling from shelter to shelter. 

The hurricane, which immediately followed a rainstorm that dumped more than half a foot of rain in parts of western North Carolina, was downgraded to a tropical storm on its way north and triggered mudslides, felled trees, destroyed bridges, breached roads and left thousands without power, officials said. 

“The damage is severe,” state Transportation Secretary Joey Hopkins said. “This is an all-hands-on-deck type of event.”

Meanwhile, water, electricity and cellphone service outages remain widespread across Buncombe County and other parts of western North Carolina, officials said.

Ben Woody, Asheville’s assistant city manager, said essential infrastructure in the city has been damaged, including its water system. “The damage to the Asheville water system is catastrophic — we have a severely damaged water system.” 

More than 11,000 people have requested help trying to locate loved ones they’ve been unable to reach because of spotty cellphone service, said Drew Reisinger, Buncombe County’s register of deeds. Officials have narrowed the number to 150 priority missing persons cases — most of them elderly people or those who are medically dependent — with crews being deployed to homes and elsewhere trying to track them down, Reisinger said.  

State and federal officials said Monday that crews were also working frantically to distribute water, restore cellphone service and repair damage to utility infrastructure and to more than 300 roadways that remain closed across the state, most of them in western North Carolina.

Crews have been distributing some bottled water to residents in public housing across Buncombe County, Pinder said. Water distribution centers also were separately being set up Monday, with officials limiting handouts to one day’s supply — about 3 gallons — per person.

Pinder said the county had tried to head off a water shortage by requesting water and other supplies before the storm hit last week.

“We requested water even before the storm started — because we knew that — not that it was going to fail — but we were asking for water so that people could have extra,” Pinder said. “We were asking for food, we were asking for anything, because we felt some people were going to be cut off because of how much rain was coming.”

Such requests go to the state, which fulfills them through the help of FEMA, Pinder said. Despite the advance requests, Pinder said, Buncombe County received its first shipment of water at 2:30 a.m. Monday.

Asked whether the county had its own reserves of water for such emergencies, Pinder acknowledged it didn’t. 

“We do not have a county stockpile,” she said. The county relies on contractors for water reserves, she added, but she said it couldn’t immediately access water from its primary local provider that it typically relies on during emergencies because “the Swannanoa River kind of made them isolated to us and we could not get to that stockpile.”

At the news conference, Cooper assured residents that the state was working hard to meet their outstanding needs. “What we want to tell people is that more help is on the way,” he said. “This is our main mission right now, and this is a massive coordinated effort to help this area.”

Additional reporting by Jon Allen.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• North Carolina reels from storm's devastation as crews rush to deliver aid
• Helene live updates: Over 120 dead across Southeast, North Carolina ravaged by storm
• Trump falsely says Georgia's governor was unable to talk to Biden about storm damage