By Will Doran, state government reporter for WRAL

The state’s response to Helene storm damage in western North Carolina should now be streamlined — and boosted with an additional $273 million — after Gov. Roy Cooper signed a disaster relief package for the storm on Thursday.

The money can be used for purposes such as paying overtime to the state workers on the ground in the mountains, many of whom have reportedly been working 16-hour days clearing debris, rebuilding roads, conducting rescue operations and handing out supplies to storm survivors.

The federal government also has grants programs where it will cover 90% of the costs as long as the state chips in the other 10%, and this money can also be used to get those much larger sums of aid flowing into North Carolina. has brought a sense of bipartisanship to the state even amid an otherwise tense election year. The aid package passed quickly and unanimously through the Republican-controlled state legislature and contained much of what the Democratic governor had requested.

State legislative leaders say this is only the first of multiple relief bills they plan to approve in the coming weeks or months. The state government has billions of dollars held in reserve for emergencies or budget shortfalls.

“Recovery for Western North Carolina will require unprecedented help from state and federal sources and this legislation is a strong first step,” Cooper wrote when he signed the bill Thursday. “Hurricane Helene caused catastrophic damage but also showed the resiliency of North Carolina’s people and its communities, and we must continue the bipartisan work to help them build back strong.”

The bill also includes a wide variety of policy changes aimed at temporarily lifting state regulations in a number of areas to make the work go faster, ensure teachers still get paid even though school is out, and extend deadlines on everything from DMV fees to taxes to probation hearings as hundreds of thousands of people in the mountains continue digging out from the damage and start rebuilding their communities.

Meanwhile, government officials are still working to get a full picture of the number of people killed or missing — as well as what it will take, from town to town, for a full recovery to occur.

“We still don’t know what we don’t know up in the hills and the hollers,” Sen. Tim Moffitt, R-Henderson, said Wednesday ahead of the vote on the relief package. “We’re still working with folks that are very tough, that still do not want to leave their homes, and it has yet to set in on them that they’re cut off from the civilized world. We’re doing our best to get to them.”

The preceding article originally appeared on October 10, 2024 at WRAL’s website and is made available here for educational purposes only. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 106A-117 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Photo above: a volunteer with Samaritan’s Purse helps with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene