I have absolutely no proof that this is the case, but I strongly believe that the government of North Carolina and FEMA are hiding the real death toll from Hurricane Helene. 

Perhaps I am too cynical. Perhaps the difficulty of reaching remote areas is just too great to recover missing bodies. Perhaps... There are lots of perhapses that one can dream up, but the fact is that the number of missing people is unknown, and has been since the storm hit on September 26th. 

That's nearly three weeks. 

The death toll has remained relatively steady, with a few people added every once in a while as their bodies are recovered. But after 19 days nobody can say how many people are missing. That's very odd. 

It’s impossible to determine exactly how many people were reported lost in Helene’s aftermath — or how many haven’t been found. The American Red Cross has received more than 9,000 reunification requests from family members searching for loved ones, but the nonprofit declined to say how many of those requests had been resolved. The federal government does not maintain a comprehensive list of storm-related missing-person reports, and the majority of counties do not publicly release those numbers.

Since the hurricane hit, I have expected the death toll to rise to somewhere in the four-figure range, but the reported figure is in the 230ish range. Of course, my expectation could have been way off, but with whole towns wiped off the map and many people living in the valleys of Appalachia, where communications lines are down, and roads washed away, untold numbers of people are missing. 

With 9,000 reunification requests--and many people live with or near their families and don't have connections outside the region they live in, there are many unreported missing persons--the Red Cross refuses to specify how many people have been reunited. How many of those people are just missing, and how many are dead?

Nobody is giving us a hint. We read about individual stories in the sparse news being spoonfed to us from a hurricane, but little real reporting about the recovery efforts. Instead, we get bombarded with warnings about "misinformation" and warnings not to trust any news not coming from the MSM and the federal government. 

I recently traveled to NC and victims of Hurricane Helene told me nearly two weeks after landfall, the Biden-Harris Administration had STILL not provided them with all the resources they desperately needed.

But CBS selectively edited OUT ENTIRELY this first-hand perspective. pic.twitter.com/ZjO5LWdtsM

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) October 15, 2024

Speaker Mike Johnson just posted about how CBS cut out most of his answer to a question about Helene in order to make the Biden administration look better and more competent, and that seems to be the theme of the month: coverups of Harris and Biden failures through selective editing. 

I am asking for donations of warm clothing & supplies for cold weather for the victims of Helene in WNC. 1/2 of the entire state was pretty much wiped off the map. Literally. The death toll when this all over will be upwards of 10,000 people I am told from people in WNC actively…

— Britt Woo (@BrittWoo10782) October 15, 2024

With perhaps over 10,000 missing people--we just don't know the real number--there is zero chance that the death toll is so relatively low. We have seen the pictures. We know that tens of thousands of people did not or could not evacuate. We know that search and rescue took far too long to reach people. And we know that lots of remote areas were totally wiped out, under 15 feet or more of water. 

I have heard many stories of bodies being stored, more body bags being ordered and many people still lost. The final death total for Helene will probably be well over 1,000. My suspicion is that the administration and media do not want this to get out until after the election. https://t.co/97KHMoYYnA

— Tar Heel Born (@FREDNEW80205049) October 14, 2024

I don't know how many people died in Helene, but I am sure we are not seeing much of the truth. Helene gets a bit of coverage, but much of it is about how misinformation is being spread. 

No doubt there is plenty of misinformation, but some of that is because precious little information is being released. Things are much, much worse than we are being told. How much worse? I have no idea because social media is the only place where much can be found, and social media is raw--you only see what people post, and people post things for a variety or reasons. They are anecdotes, not synthesized information. 

I believe--and this is my impression and not reporting--that we are being gaslit. Our government knows much more than they are saying, and what they know is that a bigger catastrophe happened than we have been told. 

That is an inconvenient truth at this point in a campaign cycle, so the media and the government are downplaying things.