When I drove through Swannanoa in early October, one week after Hurricane Helene’s devastation across much of western North Carolina and greater Appalachia had subsided, the landscape was apocalyptic. Houses in the low-lying, working-class areas surrounding the Swannanoa river had been torn out of the ground and dragged across swaths of land that had been previously covered in trees. People stood knee-deep in mud, pulling their furniture out of branches and contaminated water.
It was hard not to be angry — it seemed that the people of western North Carolina had been left to pull themselves out of a disaster they had no part in.
So when I saw the similarly apocalyptic scenes in southern California last month, after a series of wildfires killed 29 and destroyed thousands of homes in the area around Los Angeles, I felt a similarly terrible sense of grief. When I looked to the responses of fellow North Carolinians, however, I was surprised.
Friends expressed bitterness toward the wealthy citizens of the Pacific Palisades, who they perceived to have gotten a disproportionate amount of aid and press coverage despite having the resources to rebuild. Comments under news articles about the destruction in Los Angeles echoed the same sentiment: what about North Carolina? I couldn’t shake the feeling that the only people benefiting from this anger were the very politicians that had left survivors across the country to fend for themselves.
This frustration makes perfect sense. The counties in western North Carolina that suffered the worst devastation were already heavily disadvantaged: they had higher rates of disability and poverty, and a higher concentration of mobile homes than non-disaster counties. Survivors have complained about the difficulty of filing aid claims through FEMA, and many are still living in substandard housing that does little to keep out the bitter cold. Even the great outpouring of aid in the months since Helene has not done enough to repair the lives of the thousands of people affected.
It’s easy for those of us on the East Coast to have a perception that those who suffered in the L.A. wildfires have an entirely different set of resources on their hands, since the Palisades Fire affected mostly neighborhoods with significantly higher median incomes than most of Southern California. There is no doubt that those living in the multi-million dollar homes along Malibu’s “Billionaire’s Beach” will need far less aid than what our neighbors in western North Carolina have been requesting for months.
But so far, almost all of the aid received for wildfire response in California has been in-state funding — $2.5 billion set aside by Gov. Gavin Newsom, and hundreds of millions raised by private fundraisers like FireAid. North Carolina, meanwhile, received around $9 billion in federal aid under former President Joe Biden to help impacted families. Biden also promised a similar level of federal aid for California, a promise which was quickly abandoned by President Donald Trump. No money given to California has been pulled away from funds that would have gone to our neighbors in North Carolina.
In fact, the most devastated neighborhoods in Los Angeles were not the ones inhabited by movie stars and tech millionaires — they were communities filled with working families who lost almost everything. Altadena, where the Eaton Fire ravaged thousands of homes and which contained the highest concentration of casualties, is not a playground for billionaires but a middle-income, Black neighborhood.
To feel anger toward the federal and state governments that have allowed working-class people to suffer the consequences of climate disaster is natural and necessary to secure more aid. But it does nothing for our neighbors who lost their lives, homes and jobs in western North Carolina to demand that those who lost the same in Los Angeles receive less attention or assistance.
