Helene's Death Toll Discrepancies

Appalachia in the Aftermath #5

It’s been a busy week here in Heleneistan. I’ve returned to work on a limited schedule. I’ve delivered three free loads of firewood and a load of heaters to folks in need. And I’ve been catching up on all those errands that got put off while we were waiting for area infrastructure to come back on-line. So I apologize for the late update this week.

A look at my daily newsfeeds shows that the national media is eager to move on from Helene. There has been nothing about us Appalachians in the top news stories for the last several days, as the feeds have been retaken by stories about the campaigns of Trump and Harris, and occasionally one about Israel.

This screenshot is typical of the daily Apple News feed, with no mention of Helene recovery efforts for the past week.

So you could be forgiven, if you don’t live here in WNC, for thinking that all the important stuff has already been reported and that Appalachia is moving on. That is not the case. Although there has been substantial progress on nearly every front, our region is still engaged in massive relief efforts.

A few quick updates before I get to the main discussion topic:

• The main pipe bringing water to Asheville has been repaired, and water has returned to limited areas in downtown Asheville, though only for non-potable use at present. There is still a lot of street-level work that needs to be done before all of Asheville can have running water again. Several schools and the hospital are looking into drilling wells to provide their water needs.

• Clean-up work is progressing at a nice clip with help from local and visiting volunteers, National Guardsmen.

• Power has been restored to the majority of Buncombe County. Some remote areas still without power are hearing estimates of months, not days, before the lights come back on.

• A rumor about armed militias threatening FEMA workers turned out to be overblown. FEMA postponed several engagements across the region after hearing about threats and the rumors began to circulate on social media that two or more trucks full of armed militiamen had confronted some FEMA agents. Turned out it was just one guy spouting off. It’s unclear whether this person made threats in the presence of FEMA agents or was reported by a concerned citizen, and media reports also don’t confirm whether or not he belonged to any militia. So probably not. One arrest was made, and FEMA is back to business as usual as far as I can tell.

• The presence of non-profit relief organizations in the region is still going strong. Donations of food, clothing, and supplies are readily available in most affected communities. Free hot meals are still being offered daily at multiple sites in Asheville. People wanting to send donations are encouraged to think about heat. Cordless heaters and heating fuel are needed. Blankets, not so much. (We’ve received a great abundance of them already.)

• Yesterday I only heard two helicopters fly over my house.

Now onto the main topic.

A lot of locals are questioning Helene’s official death toll as reported by the media, which sits currently at 230 people across all states affected by the storm. The official count from North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is 95 for the state. This total is said to be updated daily, but it hasn’t changed since Tuesday. Officials keep saying that the number is expected to rise, but it does so only very slowly. Every few days it goes up by just a handful of deaths.

The figure seems very low, considering the extent of the destruction, the intensity of the flooding, and how far along our region is in terms of its search and recovery operations. I won’t personally speculate on how low it seems, since I’m not involved in search and recovery endeavors. But hardly anyone I speak to locally believes that this figure is in the correct range. Many of us have heard stories of bodies being discovered by friends and acquaintances. Yes, it’s anecdotal, but it doesn’t seem possible that a death toll in the range of 100 would produce such a vast number of anecdotes, unless you think that western North Carolinians are a bunch of liars, which I don’t.

Some search and recovery personnel and volunteers have publicly objected to the official totals, saying that based on their personal experiences the number of bodies found seems to be much higher. In a TikTok video, one man assisting with S&R in Swannanoa says that he is aware of 145 deaths in Swannanoa alone and was personally involved in the provision of over 4000 body bags requested by various WNC towns and fire departments. (The link is to a repost on Facebook. I haven’t been able to find the original video.)

Needless to say, folks here on the ground are beginning to think this all looks a little fishy-suspishy. So I did a little digging to find out what might be causing the discrepancy between the local anecdotal death estimates and the official death count.

First, I wanted to know whether the official total represents all found bodies or only bodies that have been identified. It was difficult to get an answer to this question. I have been unable to find clearly delineated information from state or local agencies about how Helene deaths are reported and confirmed. But by piecing together statements made by various local and state officials, I am able to make an educated guess. It seems the process goes like this: a body is found, the local authorities take possession of the remains, they work with state agencies to attempt to identify the person, and then they contact the deceased’s surviving relatives. Only after informing the relatives is this death added to the official count.

So one possible explanation for the discrepancy would be that many of the bodies found may have been unidentifiable. But it makes one wonder why they aren’t also reporting the total number of bodies recovered, perhaps as a separate statistic.

Another implication I’ve seen repeatedly made in Helene reporting is that state officials are aware of other deaths, but are waiting to make sure they are storm-related before adding them to the official total. Okay, I’m sorry, but this sounds ridiculous to me. If a body washes up on a river bank or is found in the debris of a collapsed building within days after an epic hurricane, that’s a hurricane death and it should be included in the totals, even if it’s on a separate list for waiting-to-be-confirmed deaths.

But I also found something strange. On October 3—fifteen days ago and five days after the storm—Buncombe County Sheriff Quentin Miller announced the death toll for the county as 73 dead, with 200 missing. But the North Carolina DHHS website, as of today (October 18) puts Buncombe’s death toll at 42, and does not release an official estimate on the number of people missing. (Edited to add: On October 15, Governor Cooper stated that there are still 92 people missing statewide.) In the two weeks that have passed since the October 3 announcement, with all the search and recovery and clean-up that’s been going on in Buncombe County, especially in hard-hit areas such as Black Mountain and Swannanoa, surely more deceased have been found.

The next day, Sheriff Miller did not appear at the daily video-recorded community briefing. Asheville mayor Esther Manheimer did appear, looking tired and stressed. She had just been on a flight over the region with President Biden, Governor Roy Cooper, and a FEMA representative. Neither she nor any other county representative made a statement about fatalities.

In subsequent community briefings, local officials do not discuss the death toll. In fact, they studiously avoid doing so. The community briefings now focus on updates for water and power restoration, where to get food and supplies, how to volunteer, and dispelling negative rumors about FEMA. When asked by local media correspondents for updated figures, they state, “We do not have an update at this time.”

In the community briefing on October 7, Lillian Govus, director of communications for Buncombe County, advised media correspondents that the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is in charge of recording deaths from Helene, and that all further updates would come from that office.

A certain amount of delay can be expected when waiting for government agencies to release information regarding the confirmed number of lives lost in a natural disaster. You want to perform autopsies, verify cause of death, and notify the surviving relatives. But if our death toll in North Carolina is indeed in the upper hundreds or even thousands, as many locals believe based on overwhelming but admittedly anecdotal evidence, then it seems odd that, three weeks in, the official figure is still hovering in the double digits. For comparison, immediately after Hurricane Katrina the death toll was estimated to be between 1000-1500 people, and by the next month, the official count was 1,433—very close to the finalized figure of 1,577.

Hurricane Matthew, which devastated the North Carolina coast in 2016, had its death toll finalized within two weeks of the storm.

As an unregistered opinion-haver, I dislike and object to the way the state is handling the reporting of deaths in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Unlike in other natural disasters we’ve seen, they are not giving us an estimate for the total of deaths, but only reporting those deaths that have been fully confirmed through the state’s opaque recording process. The Army Corps of Engineers can give us an estimate that we have 12 million cubic yards of debris littering our region, but no federal or North Carolina agency can state that they expect the death toll to reach x range by the time it’s finalized. Just, “we don’t have an update at this time,” and, “the number is expected to rise.”

Presumably, these agencies have an estimate for the expected death toll, but for some reason they are choosing not to release it to the public. Based on my limited research, I’ve been able to ascertain that the count for one county—Buncombe—is likely at least double what the official figures report.

If the sheriff announced 73 deaths for the county on day 5, we can safely assume the number to be greater than that now on day 20, while the state is still reporting 42 deaths in Buncombe County. Furthermore, week 2 was a big week for body recoveries by most local accounts.

If we extrapolate this at-least-doubling across the region and say that perhaps 200 people died in WNC as opposed to 95, then it doesn’t make sense why they wouldn’t publish an estimate. It’s substantially more, but not outside of the realm of acceptability for a bad hurricane.

The state and local governments are very concerned with avoiding the spread of rumors around WNC recovery efforts. Well, what better way to quell unfounded rumors of death tolls in the thousands than by releasing an official estimate of fatalities? Or an official number of bodies recovered, perhaps along with a disclaimer that not all causes of death have been verified?

The only reasoning I can conceive of for the state to refuse to make an estimate of fatalities, to delay the reporting on our WNC death toll, to trickle out new confirmed deaths every few days in ones and twos while repeating over and over that the total is expected to rise, is to avoid stealing the public’s attention away from The Most Important Election of Our Lifetime™. This is only my speculation, but since we know for a fact that President Biden, Governor Cooper, and Asheville Mayor Manheimer were all together in a plane on the day before the death reporting suddenly went silent, I don’t think it’s outlandish. I just can’t think of a single other plausible reason.

I don’t think Helene was an engineered weather event. I don’t think FEMA is trying to take over our quartz mines or use the recovery chaos as cover to suppress the redneck vote. I didn’t buy into the conspiracy theories about FEMA sabotaging our local relief efforts willy-nilly. “Maybe something weird happened here and there, but it’s more likely federal inefficiency than a massive conspiracy,” I said. And I didn’t glom onto the rumormongering about armed militias trying to start ground wars with FEMA. “Probably just an overblown, isolated incident,” I said. I still retain my original stances on all these conspiracy theories that have been promoted by folks both on the right and on the left.

So I’m not trying to start unfounded rumors here, I’m just saying that it seems something’s not right in the death toll reporting. “The math ain’t mathing,” as the Swannanoa S&R worker put it in his video. It feels dishonest, and it frustrates me.

Let’s just say that if the official death toll balloons in the week following the election, it wasn’t sneaky.

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Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your donations, your prayers, and the love you have shown us southern Appalachians over the past week. If you would like to donate to a trusted relief effort and make sure 100% of your donation goes to the people who need it, consider the organizations on this list.

My family and I are safe. We are blessed. We were about as prepared as we could have been, in terms of food storage and the ability to survive without modern conveniences for a few days.

Although we were more fortunate than many of our neighbors in terms of property damage and access to needed supplies, this disaster has impacted my ability to earn income and pay the bills. If you feel so inspired, you can help me get through this by becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack for $5/month or making a one-time contribution through the Buy Me a Coffee link below. I am publishing updates on Helene recovery in southern Appalachia twice per week. In addition, my Prayer of the Week comes out each Sunday and I am working on new content focused on spirit-filled, heart-centered responses to the wider dystopia.