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I have absolutely no proof that this is the case, but I strongly believe that the government of North Carolina and FEMA are hiding the real death toll from Hurricane Helene.
Perhaps I am too cynical. Perhaps the difficulty of reaching remote areas is just too great to recover missing bodies. Perhaps. There are lots of perhapses that one can dream up, but the fact is that the number of missing people is unknown, and has been since the storm hit on September 26th.
That’s nearly three weeks.
The death toll has remained relatively steady, with a few people added every once in a while as their bodies are recovered. But after 19 days nobody can say how many people are missing. That’s very odd.
It’s impossible to determine exactly how many people were reported lost in Helene’s aftermath — or how many haven’t been found. The American Red Cross has received more than 9,000 reunification requests from family members searching for loved ones, but the nonprofit declined to say how many of those requests had been resolved. The federal government does not maintain a comprehensive list of storm-related missing-person reports, and the majority of counties do not publicly release those numbers.
Since the hurricane hit, I have expected the death toll to rise to somewhere in the four-figure range, but the reported figure is in the 230ish range. Of course, my expectation could have been way off, but with whole towns wiped off the map and many people living in the valleys of Appalachia, where communications lines are down, and roads washed away, untold numbers of people are missing.
With 9,000 reunification requests–and many people live with or near their families and don’t have connections outside the region they live in, there are many unreported missing persons–the Red Cross refuses to specify how many people have been reunited.
