DHS and FEMA continue cleanup effort in Western North Carolina

There's a lot of lessons that can be, that can be learned. Even though there's work to be done, there's lessons that can be learned. And one thing I do believe is when we step back and we have an awful disaster like this, it also allows us to be more efficient, more prepared moving forward. Secretary makes a difference by being here. When the Secretary shows up, it tells everyone, the local community, all of the members of his team from DHS, FEMA, down to the individual field office here, that this is one of his priorities. This was the Secretary's first travel event and he decided to come here to this region of Region 4 and visit western North Carolina. Today we're very pleased that we have the Secretary here. We're very grateful and blessed that for FEMA, but we're especially pleased that he's going to see visually, feet on the ground, and know in his heart, with his eyes, what he actually sees and can take it back to Washington, take it to all the agencies that are helping us, and help them completely understand the needs that we have. So when we're going through this conversation, let's hope we can do better. Not just beat up on FEMA, that's not the point because they've done a great job, but what is it that we could maybe tweak just a little bit to tear down some of the redundancy. We've been able to repair and replace all the water sewer in our downtown. Without the waste treatment facility provided by FEMA, we would still be shut down to this day. We want to make sure that we can hear and understand their concerns and that we can then focus on finding the right solution to be able to make sure that we're meeting their needs. We've been able to restore and reopen our village so that we're now alive and kicking. We still have other needs. We have two bridges. We can't figure out how to get the funding for them. They're private, but we'd be willing to take them and run them because they carry our utilities. So for private roads and bridges, one of the things that we did early on was we understood that, again, we have a different environment here. We have much more complex problems that we're trying to work through. So we looked at the policy and then we got with our headquarters element and said let's look at issuing disaster-specific guidance that is specific to western North Carolina that allows us to do some additional things with private roads and bridges. That gave us the ability to ensure that we had access for communities that were isolated. It gave us the ability to look at individual homeowners and in some cases allow them to pool their resources and fund a bridge that might cost more than what their individual limit may be. We're very pleased with FEMA. They've been on the job almost from immediately standing just a few feet from where I'm standing now. We met with the first representatives with FEMA just hours after the disaster. We're a small community of less than a $400,000 a year budget and that's for water, sewer, that's everything. We lost all of our water and sewer. The entire system was washed away. We've got a team here that is focused on moving forward at a rapid pace and we believe that we've got the support of the Secretary to be able to do that.