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Debris removal remains No. 1 burden of Helene-ravaged counties

By Ray Gronberg, N.C. Tribune, Published: July 31, 2025

Work crews cleaning up after Hurricane Helene have removed so much storm debris from roadsides, waterways and other places that it would more than circle the Earth if you lined it up end to end.

But the more than 14 million cubic yards of removals is still not enough, legislators and aides to Gov. Josh Stein say.

“I will tell you from all of my local government officials, particularly county managers, if you’re not hearing them complain about debris removal at this point, they’re not doing their job,” Senate Deputy President Pro Tem Ralph Hise said Wednesday during the latest Helene recovery joint oversight hearing.

Hise, who is from Spruce Pine, a town hit hard by Helene, and other participants in the hearing agreed that the removal effort touches on safety, not just cosmetics. Downed trees and other wreckage are potential fuel for wildfires; any that’s choking streams, rivers and lakes adds to future flooding risks.

 
"I got streams that ran 6- [or] 8-foot deep that now run 2-foot deep, and we're trying to get them back to where they need to be,” Hise said, adding that he’d heard stories that “approximately half the rain we received before the storm now floods every stream that we had. So what was an 8-inch problem is now a 4-inches-of-rain problem."

Hise and other legislators had gathered on Wednesday to hear updates from Matt Calabria and Will Ray, respectively Stein’s point man on the recovery effort and the director of N.C. Emergency Management.

Most of the concern about the pace of the clean-up drive revolves around one thing: the federal government. Legislators voiced no complaints about the work of state agencies.

The main issue is that state officials, from the legislature and the executive branches, both want to pass along every dollar of the cost that they can to the feds. But that comes with red tape, and plenty of it.

Federal rules and procedures are “incredibly complex,” and historically, when FEMA disallows reimbursement claims and sticks state and local governments with the entire bill, “a lot of it is around debris,” Ray said.

Some communities, mainly the ones least hit by the storm, have opted to use their own forces or contractors to do the work. Others like Buncombe County rely heavily on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The state has lined up its own contractors along with a FEMA-sanctioned process for using them, which has become the preferred option for places like Henderson County.

But the overarching problem is that the magnitude of North Carolina’s debris burden is “unlike anything we’ve seen for an event, I would argue, anywhere in the country,” Ray said.

He and Sen. Tim Moffitt, R-Henderson, added later that Helene is almost unique among recent U.S. hurricanes for doing its worst in a mountainous part of the country. The only comparable in that regard is 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico.

“Do you get a sense that they understand the complexities, from a terrain standpoint?” Moffitt asked, alluding to the likelihood that it’s going to take multiple years and many passes to get everything.

“I think they’re starting to,” Ray said.