Hurricane Helene is America’s Chernobyl moment The tragedy exposes the weakness of the US military

The death toll of Helene is currently inching closer to 200, already making it the second-deadliest storm after Katrina. But this number will rise and then rise again in the coming days. In truth, with the reality of unnavigable mountain terrain, an obliterated road network, and massive power, cell phone and water failures, nobody knows how many are dead. Without sufficient rescue efforts, more Americans might end up succumbing to the lack of water in the wake of the flood. But despite all of this, and despite the fact that the clock is ticking for many Americans trapped without food, water, or means of communication, coverage of Helene has been strangely muted. This silence has, in turn, masked a far darker problem: the lack of resources and manpower going into the rescue effort.

Bush’s response to Katrina was criticised at the time for being lumberingly slow and ineffective. But the relief effort being mounted now is a pale shadow of what was done a mere 19 years ago, and that makes the silence around this disaster even more ominous.

In 2005, significant planning and resourcing was being carried out days before the storm even made landfall. Ten thousand members of the National Guard had gathered from several states to deal with the damage Katrina was about to cause. The final number who helped with the effort measured closer to 20,000. But those guardsmen did not stand alone: the US Army was preparing to assume overall command of the entire rescue effort through US Northern Command, where its battle staff coordinated response forces over various state lines. The regular Army helped too, including forces from the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army Corps of Engineers.

This time, things are very different. At the time of writing, fewer than 7,000 guardsmen are helping with Helene disaster relief, and there was no equivalent preparation before the storm actually hit. US Northern Command, which can only assume responsibility if it is asked to do so by other government authorities, is not coordinating the overall effort. During Katrina, more than 350 military helicopters were involved with the rescue efforts. This time, in a mountain disaster zone where many more helicopters are needed than in a coastal area, well below 100 helicopters have currently been committed.

The Katrina response had its fair share of problems. But the criticism it attracted had less to do with a lack of helicopters and more to do with the bureaucratic inertia that dogged the relief effort. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proved to be slow, inflexible and often hostile to efforts to circumvent red tape or unrealistic rules in favour of things that were practical and simply worked. In one case, the supplier of bottled water that FEMA had on contract failed to turn up on time. Local rescue crews then went to pick up water from local Wal-Mart stores, which could track every litre of water entering and leaving its stores. The water was right there, sitting on the shelves; people needed immediate help, so why not distribute it now and have the government simply pay Wal-Mart for it later? Wal-Mart was more than happy to go along with this arrangement, but FEMA was horrified that someone had circumvented their own chosen contractor. Grudgingly, they accepted the deal already struck, but then acted forcefully to shut down future ideas of dangerous and unauthorised innovation.

So while it can be said that Bush’s administration fumbled parts of the Katrina relief efforts, they at least did so in the context of America as it existed back then. The planning wasn’t always good, but there was planning. The helicopters didn’t always go to the places they were most needed, but at least they were there in large enough numbers. This is worlds apart from the reality of America in 2024. Today, the institutions are weaker, the deficits are bigger, and the US empire itself — then at the height of unipolarity — is critically overstretched. There aren’t enough helicopters, nor enough troops. A decent portion of the Tennessee National Guard, rather than helping rescue Americans in their own home state, are currently deployed to bases in Kuwait. In 2024, the only way for the US military to source enough men for its various far-flung bases and military commitments is to lean heavily on the National Guard. The Guard is supposed to be the primary muscle when it comes to domestic disaster relief, but as the regular Army is falling apart, there simply aren’t enough resources available anywhere in the system anymore.

This means that even though the victims of hurricane Helene have found themselves stranded within a stone’s throw of some of the US military’s more significant military bases — Camp Lejeune and Fort Liberty are both located in North Carolina — very little help has been forthcoming. There remains a belief in the West that, despite various recent reversals and losses, the US military is a machine with near-godlike powers: if it really wanted to, it could fill the sky and blot out the sun with an uncountable number of helicopters and planes, whenever and wherever it wants.

Almost a week into the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, those endless helicopters have failed to appear. And as America readies to surge more troops to the Middle East to potentially fight Iran, it’s clear that they can’t appear, at least not without seriously breaking something somewhere else. Troops and aircraft busy in Tennessee or North Carolina can’t be deployed to Jordan, Iraq or Syria. In theory, the US military exists to protect the lives of Americans — that’s why it falls under the Department of Defence. In practice, Americans have largely been left to fend for themselves, 50 miles away from their own military bases, just in case those soldiers and helicopters are needed on the other side of the world.

Trying to get a sense of the attitude in Washington, D.C. about the very worrying state of the Helene relief effort, I asked friends there to tell me what people were saying about it. Without exception, the response from everyone turned out to be the same: there was no talk. Helene wasn’t even on the radar; it was, after all, just a storm. Besides, hadn’t the situation already been handled? There were 6,000 guardsmen on the scene; that ought to be more than enough.

All of this is becoming eerily reminiscent of Chernobyl — and the accident that in many ways defined the last days of the Soviet Union. That too was just a minor accident that at first seemed like nothing more than a blip to the complacent authorities in Moscow. Only over time did people start to realise that this was truly serious. Chernobyl has since come to be seen as one of the proximate causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union, though the reason why has often been misunderstood. Chernobyl wasn’t actually that lethal: approximately 30 people died as a direct result of the reactor explosion, with maybe 4,000 people dying years or decades later from illnesses related to radiation exposure. Hurricane Katrina, by contrast, led directly to 1,392 fatalities.

The real reason Chernobyl looms so large in stories about the last days of the Soviet Union was because of all the lying, the governmental incompetence, and the shared sense that the Soviet Union itself was a senile construct that no longer had any real point. A healthy society, one in which people still feel a sense of purpose and common belief, could have endured far worse disasters than Chernobyl. But by 1986, the Soviet Union was a place where neither the rulers nor the ruled believed the system still had a reason to exist. By the end, talk of socialism, Karl Marx and historical materialism seemed like nothing more than an absurd joke.

What happened to Russian Marxism, is now happening to American patriotism. Consider the lyrics to “Over There”, one of America’s more famous military-themed songs:

Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming everywhere!
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware! –
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there!

Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, a song like this would have been the embodiment of American patriotism and martial pride. Then, the song had real meaning to it; people felt it. Don’t mess with our proud America, the song warned — if you do, we’ll come over and make you regret it.

If you were to sing those words today to a mother stranded without water in North Carolina, or a Tennessee guardsman in Kuwait who still doesn’t know if his parents back home are even alive, the lyrics will appear like a particularly cruel joke. Indeed, that guardsman won’t come back to help Tennessee, not until “it” is over, over there in Kuwait. What that “it” is, nobody yet knows. The yanks are coming, the yanks are coming: they’re coming to bases in Iraq or Syria, they’re coming to Romania, to Bulgaria, to Poland, to Korea. They’re coming to endless gruelling deployments overseas that the US can’t afford, that talking heads in Washington insist are the most important thing in the world even as America slowly falls apart.

When Iraqi militias fired missiles that killed three servicemen stationed in Jordan, the reaction from most Americans was not patriotic fervour and hunger for revenge: it was exhaustion. Why are they even there? Why can’t they just come home?

Contrary to popular belief, Hurricane Helene is not “just a storm”, in the same sense that Chernobyl was not “just an accident”. Beyond all the destroyed roads, the flooded towns, the ruined electrical networks and the stranded American families, Helene is also an indication that the US political system, followed by its military, is very close to the point of moral and physical exhaustion.

Appalachia has always been forgotten; the people there are used to being treated like dirt. Talking to locals whose families were still stuck in the disaster area, the common refrain was that the help wasn’t arriving because the elites simply hate the people now in need of help. Talking to people in D.C., however, quickly dispelled that notion. What is going on right now isn’t malice, it’s somehow even worse: it’s senility. People weren’t enjoying the suffering of fellow Americans; they were simply so oblivious and zoned out that they couldn’t even notice a problem.

Currently, a hurricane disaster that is significantly more challenging than Katrina is being serviced by something like a third of the resources that Louisiana called upon. And yet few people in Washington even think this is a problem. At the same time as Congress has borrowed another 10 or 20 billion dollars to hand over to Ukraine and Israel, presidential candidate Kamala Harris has announced that the victims of Helene will be able to apply for $750 in relief assistance to help them get back on their feet.

As Chernobyl was, Helene is now becoming: a point at which the sheer absurdity and uselessness of the machine becomes too obvious to ignore. Looking at the disaster unfolding in Appalachia, the winners of the Cold War are now starting to ask the same question that eventually brought down the Soviet Union: what the hell is even the point of all of this anymore?

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Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden

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