President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are set to take separate tours on Wednesday of the catastrophic damage resulting from Hurricane Helene, from which at least 150 people have died.
Biden is expected to visit North Carolina and South Carolina days after the storm swept through Florida and traveled north, causing damage as far north as Tennessee and Virginia.
Harris will visit Georgia, which former President Donald Trump toured Monday and where he criticized Harris and the Biden administration for their response to the hurricane.
Biden is first scheduled to land in Greenville, South Carolina, where he will participate in an aerial tour of storm damage. After that, he will head to Raleigh, North Carolina, to be briefed at the emergency operations center and then take an aerial tour of Asheville, one of the areas hit hardest by flooding.
The storm caused severe damage in the western North Carolina city, and many residents have been without running water, electricity and access to cell service and internet.
The federal government has been helping states reopen roads, remove debris, restore power, support search-and-rescue efforts and get cell networks back online, Biden said Monday during a virtual meeting with North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“I want you to know the administration is going to be there … until we finish the job. It’s going to take a hell of a long time and a serious amount of assets,” Biden said.
Cooper said the federal government is assisting with disseminating medical resources, as well as helicopters for land bridges and search-and-rescue operations.
Criswell has been based in North Carolina’s Appalachia region since Biden directed her Monday to stay there for the foreseeable future. As of Tuesday, more than 1,200 FEMA and other agency personnel were in North Carolina, according to the White House, which said at least 25 trailer loads of meals and 60 trailer loads of water were delivered to the state.
The White House said that during Harris’ visit to Georgia, she will get an on-the-ground briefing about the recovery efforts. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, will also “provide updates on Federal actions that are being taken to support emergency response and recovery efforts in Georgia and several other states throughout the southeast,” according to the White House. Harris visited FEMA headquarters Monday and got a follow-up briefing about the impacts of the hurricane.
A White House official said Harris will travel to North Carolina in the coming days. The White House also said Biden would travel to Georgia and Florida “as soon as possible.”
Trump on Monday visited Valdosta, Georgia, where he falsely claimed that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp hadn’t been able to reach Biden. He had also said in an interview taped before he visited Georgia that the Biden-Harris administration was “going out of their way to hurt” rural Trump voters by avoiding offering assistance to Republican areas of the state.
In response to Trump’s criticisms and suggestions that the administration isn’t doing enough, the White House has released detailed lists of the steps the federal government has taken in each state to deal with the devastation.
“He is lying,” Biden said Monday when he was asked to respond to Trump’s accusations that he is ignoring the disaster. “Let me get this straight: He’s lying, and the governor told him he was lying. The governor told him he was lying.”
Biden said FEMA pre-positioned a lot of material from Florida to Tennessee before the storm, so “the idea that we weren’t prepared — the question is no one knew exactly how devastating it would be. We knew it would be significant, and we’ve got a lot already in place, but there’s more.”
Tara Prindiville contributed.
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