Storms have changed. So have the politics of disaster relief.

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First came the wind and rain. Now come the politicians and the paperwork.

The first wave of office-holders trekking to Southwest Virginia to inspect damage in the wake of Hurricane Helene were those who had some responsibility for the region: Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Sen. Tim Kaine, U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith and multiple state legislators.

Now come the campaigners looking for photo ops. Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance was in Damascus on Thursday; both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have been to Georgia. Storm relief has quickly become a political issue. It’s tempting to wonder what would have happened if Helene hadn’t cut a path through some swing states in an election year and instead had plowed through states that were more distinctly red or blue.

Scientists warn that, as oceans warm, storms are amplifying in their intensity. So are the politics around them, and the government response to the recovery.

Trump criticized President Joe Biden for staying in Delaware over the weekend instead of returning to Washington to oversee storm response — and for not immediately visiting the storm zone.

It’s instructive to think back to 1969, when Hurricane Camille became only the second Category 5 hurricane to make landfall in the United States (the unnamed Labor Day hurricane in 1935 was the first; since then we’ve had Andrew in 1992 and Michael in 1998). Camille and its aftermath killed more than 259 people — at least 124 of those, and possibly as many as 153 of those, in Virginia. That year President Richard Nixon didn’t survey storm damage until 16 days later. That visit to Gulfport, Mississippi wasn’t even Nixon’s first priority that day: dedicating a dam in Texas was. Nixon had spent most of August and the first week of September at his home in San Clemente, California. His daily diaries, available through his presidential library, don’t record any meetings related to Camille. On the day the storm hit Virginia and melted the mountains in Nelson County, Nixon spent the afternoon golfing. On the day after, when Virginia was reeling from the horror, the president spent the afternoon at the beach. Can you imagine a president now who spent his time at the golf course or the beach while a natural disaster of that scale was unfolding?

The difference between then and now is back then we didn’t expect presidents to get involved in managing a hurricane crisis; now we do. Or, perhaps more accurately, be seen doing something during a natural disaster. We’ve also come to criticize presidents more for not being seen doing something soon enough. When Trump was president, he was criticized for his handling of Hurricane Maria. When George W. Bush was president, he was criticized for his handling of Hurricane Katrina. When a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying toxic materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023, that was a human-made disaster, not a natural one, but it was a disaster nonetheless — and Biden was criticized for what seemed to critics to be a sluggish response. Nobody faulted Nixon, though, for being 16 days late to the scene of Camille and then just visiting one location. That’s just one of many ways that the politics of natural disasters have changed over the years. Once they weren’t political at all; now they are.

How did we get to that point? Expectations have changed because government has changed —and because storms have changed. Let’s review.

Federal disaster aid is a legacy of Hoover, Roosevelt, Nixon and Carter

Once, the federal government had no role when a natural disaster hit. The federal government was also a lot smaller then. History has reduced Herbert Hoover to the shorthand of the president who presided over the Great Depression and did nothing about it. That’s not so, but history is often unfair. It was Hoover — who had organized relief for Europe during World War I — who got the federal government into the disaster relief business. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932 as part of his response to the Depression. Its purpose was to lend money to banks to help keep them afloat but also had some responsibility for disaster relief, the first time the federal government had any formal role in the area. Franklin Roosevelt expanded those responsibilities, just as he expanded almost everything else.

Over the years, different federal agencies were assigned different disaster relief duties. Nixon consolidated them all under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1973 as the Federal Disaster Assistance Administration.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter reorganized the executive branch. Out of that came the Federal Emergency Management Administration as a separate agency. Ever since then, we have looked to the federal government for some kind of response when a natural disaster strikes — and, because large-scale natural disasters are happening more frequently, we have more occasions to look to Washington for help.

The quartet of Hoover, Roosevelt, Nixon and Carter is not a grouping of presidents that shows up very often, but these are the four presidents most responsible for getting the federal government into the disaster relief business.

Disasters are becoming bigger — and more commonplace

If you think you’re hearing about natural disasters more often, you’re right. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has produced the chart above showing the number of billion-dollar disasters since 1980. Note that these are inflation-adjusted dollars, so inflation isn’t what’s driving these numbers up — the number of natural disasters is rising, and so are the costs of dealing with them.

No wonder things are more political; there’s more to be political about. 1981 saw just two major events; 2023 saw 28.

The NOAA report attributed this partly to a changing climate but also to how more people and property are now vulnerable — more people living on coasts that might get hit by hurricanes, for instance; although, that’s not really the case with the damage that the remnants of Helene did along the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and Virginia.

For all the attention on the federal response, state and local responses matter more at the beginning

Take a look at here in Virginia: The key assets dealing with the immediate effects of the storm were state and local ones. Youngkin deployed the National Guard, the Department of Forestry mobilized chainsaw crews, state police and other state emergency departments were at the ready. So were local governments and local sheriff’s offices. It was those agencies whose workers were busy rescuing people, cutting down trees that blocked roads and setting up emergency shelters.

I can’t speak to what the federal government could have done differently in North Carolina, where the storm was far worse. However, here in Virginia, it’s difficult to see what the federal government could have done that state and local governments weren’t already doing — and probably doing better since they had more people closer to the scene. The federal government is big, but is it big enough to send rescue teams door to door in Taylors Valley? By all accounts, Washington County’s public safety authorities did a pretty good job with that.

The federal government matters the most after the fact

The federal response matters most after the stormwaters have receded: State and local governments often aren’t capable of paying to repair all this damage. People often aren’t prepared to pay to repair all this damage. That’s when we turn to Washington. The federal government’s not going to be the one rebuilding houses; the question is how much money the feds can provide to make sure somebody can rebuild them. That’s often when we’re disappointed. FEMA said that “for the Virginia Helene event (and all major disasters declared on or after October 1, 2024), the maximum amount of Housing Assistance is $43,600; the maximum amount of Other Needs Assistance is $43,600; and the award amount for Serious Needs Assistance is $770.” That’s not enough to rebuild a house.

Political conflicts at the state level over disaster relief will increase

We’ve looked to Washington for disaster relief funding but, as we’ve just seen, that funding isn’t enough. When the Buchanan County community of Hurley was devastated by a flood in 2021, FEMA rejected the community’s application for aid. Every agency has to set priorities; you can’t fund everything, although the message heard in Southwest Virginia was that FEMA was simply saying it was too poor to qualify for federal assistance because the dollar amount of damage was too small. In response, the state stepped in with $11.4 million in funding, and then another $18 million after floods in the Pilgrim’s Knob and Whitewood sections of Buchanan County in 2022.

It’s easy to see more requests for state funding for disaster relief; it’s also easy to see those requests becoming bargaining points. All the communities hit by Helene in Virginia are represented by Republican state legislators. Meanwhile, Democratic legislators are keen to continue the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which a) imposes a carbon fee on utilities for their carbon usage and b) creates a revenue stream for a flood preparedness program. Flood preparedness is different from flood relief, but it’s easy to see Democratic legislators saying to their Republican colleagues from Southwest: Sure, we’ll support your request for funding, but we need your support for RGGI so we can generate the revenue to pay for it.

We may see these conflicts intensify at the federal level, too

When Trump was president before, he shifted money from FEMA to his anti-immigration programs. The amount of money involved wasn’t significant, but symbolically it made for an easy Democratic talking point. The Project 2025 report drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation calls for privatizing many of the federal government’s weather forecasting functions. The Washington Post reports : “The plan would break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency for the National Weather Service, describing it as ‘one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.’ Meanwhile, a separate Republican proposal introduced in the House last year calls for transforming NOAA into an independent agency akin to NASA, a plan critics say could expose it to political influence.”

A Trump victory in November would bring all those issues to the forefront. Do we want to rely on private weather forecasting during a weather crisis? How much money should the federal government be spending on disaster relief? While disasters can strike anywhere, the reality is that weather disasters are regional in nature: Hurricanes hit the South, not the Pacific Northwest. Wildfires rage in the West, not in New England. How do we create and maintain a national consensus in favor of fulsome disaster relief when some parts of the country are rarely touched by these problems?

Are politicians bad at crisis management?

Some are, some aren’t. I have a theory, though, on why some politicians — who were clearly successful enough to get elected — fail the test when it comes to dealing with natural disasters. That’s because politics is about dealing with people — persuading them, cajoling them, maybe outvoting them if necessary. Natural disasters are immune to all those blandishments. A politician may be innately capable of dealing with a political crisis, but natural disasters can’t be negotiated with. Some politicians do this well; for others, dealing with a natural disaster (or even a human-made one) involves a skill set they simply don’t have because they haven’t needed it before. I am reminded of the scene in the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” where Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is completely flummoxed by the nuclear disaster: He knows politics, he doesn’t know science, and the response necessary there depended on understanding the science. You don’t need to know science, though, to understand we’re seeing more large-scale natural disasters.

In the 1980s, the nation averaged 3.3 a year, according to NOAA.

In the 1990s, 5.7 a year.

In the first decade of the 2000s, 6.7 a year.

Through the 2010s, 13.1 a year.

Over the last three years, 22.0 a year.

As of August, NOAA counted 19 so far this year, and it seems a safe bet that Helene will be number 20 — with more hurricane season to go.

In this week’s West of the Capital:

I write a weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out Friday afternoons. This week I’ll address:

• The latest presidential polling in Virginia.
• The latest political intrigue in Lynchburg.
• The latest endorsements in city council races in Danville and Roanoke.

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