nuebe gaming As Trump Visits North Carolina, Battered Communities Hope for More Aid

Four months after Hurricane Helene unleashed deadly flooding and landslides that killed 104 people in North Carolina communities wedged across forests and mountains, the unsettling reality of an extremely slow, difficult and costly recovery has become painfully clear in the western part of the state.

Vehicles that were swallowed by rapidly rising rivers on Sept. 27 remain abandoned in the water. Many partially destroyed streets and bridges that were covered with mud months ago are still impassable. And the frigid blast of Arctic air that recently hovered throughout the South has slowed recovery efforts.

The damage was not spread evenly: In downtown Asheville, the region’s hub, it almost looks as if the storm never happened. And that same split screen informs President Trump’s visit on Friday to an area where he’s far more popular in the surrounding mountain towns than he is in largely liberal Asheville.

But whether people voted for Mr. Trump or not, residents devastated by the deadliest storm to ever strike North Carolina agree on one thing: There is a drastic need for more aid, and they believe it needs to come quickly.

“This shouldn’t even be a political issue,” said Jeffrey Burroughs, the president of the River Arts District Artists,PESO99 an organization that represents the more than 700 artists who comprise an area in Asheville filled with galleries, bars and live music. “Our community is suffering, and what we need right now is the kind of financial support that matches the level of devastation we’ve received from this storm.”

North Carolina’s Office of State Budget and Management has estimated that the storm caused about $60 billion in damage. The state’s legislature approved roughly $877 million in aid in October. North Carolina is expected to receive at least $9 billion in assistance from a bipartisan measure that Congress passed in December.

Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.

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