From Helene to Milton: The death toll from late September’s Hurricane Helene has risen to at least 230 people as recovery efforts continue in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and the Carolinas, the Associated Press reported Monday. More than 250,000 are still without power across the south, with the majority (136,180) in North Carolina alone, according to Poweroutage.us.
New this weekend: “The entire length of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Virginia is closed” — that’s 469 miles of road — “as crews continue their assessment of the damage from Hurricane Helene,” the National Park Service said Saturday after erosion washed out significant portions of the scenic highway. “Based on what the teams have seen so far, significant, and in some cases catastrophic, damage has occurred along the parkway, particularly from milepost 280 to milepost 469,” officials said.
Panning out: Nearly 7,000 federal workers are helping, including more than 1,200 Urban Search and Rescue personnel who have helped rescue or support more than 3,200 people in North Carolina so far, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Sunday. Additional FEMA workers have shipped out meals, water, generators and tarps to those in need.
The Army Corps of Engineers is on duty conducting assessments around North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Their tasks span water/wastewater checks, bridge and road inspections, debris removal, and more.
Almost 1,000 active duty soldiers from Fort Campbell and Fort Liberty are also helping out around western North Carolina in the vicinity of the hard-hit mountain town of Asheville, where flooding swept away key stretches of road, leaving many folks stranded. An additional 500 active duty soldiers will join the recovery efforts soon, Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement Sunday.
The thousand or so active troops come from the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, the 20th Engineer Brigade, the 18th Airborne Corps, and others, according to officials at Northern Command, which helps coordinate efforts across the U.S. mainland, with FEMA leading overall efforts.
Worth noting: “The National Guard has activated more than 6,100 Guardsmen, hundreds of high-water vehicles, and dozens of helicopters and rescue boats from 18 different states in State-Active-Duty status,” Ryder said Sunday.
Status report: The Georgia National Guard has their hands busy passing out supplies. The Tennessee National Guard is clearing debris. The North Carolina National Guard is doing a bit of it all.
And the Florida National Guard is preparing for another major storm, which could make landfall Wednesday, Hurricane Milton.
What might lie ahead with Milton: “A possible 8- to 12-foot storm surge (2.4 to 3.6 meters) in Tampa Bay and said flash and river flooding could result from 5 to 10 inches (13 to 25 centimeters) of rain in mainland Florida and the Keys,” AP reports, citing forecasters.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis expanded his state of emergency declaration on Sunday to 51 counties across the state in anticipation of Milton. He also cautioned that more power outages were likely, and recommended residents keep at least a week’s worth of food and water available—and be ready to drive elsewhere to safety. For the latest, check out Floridadisaster.org/Updates.
Misinformation and lies are disrupting Helen recovery efforts, so FEMA has had to create a website to dispel some of the rumors being spread.
According to AP: “Republicans, led by the former president, have helped foster a frenzy of misinformation over the past week among the communities most devastated by Helene, promoting a number of false claims, including that Washington is intentionally withholding aid to people in Republican areas.”
Of particular note: Donald Trump “has lied about the federal hurricane response with staggering frequency and variety,” CNN’s Daniel Dale reported in a fact check published Sunday.
Also not helping: Georgia conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wrote on social media Thursday that unspecified humans “control the weather.”
Related reading:
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2001, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began.
It’s been one year since Hamas launched its brutal surprise attack on Israel, killing more than 1,100 people.
The Oct. 7, 2023, attack “brought to the surface painful memories left by millennia of hatred and violence against the Jewish people,” President Biden said in a statement Monday. “One year later, Vice President Harris and I remain fully committed to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and its right to exist,” he said, and stressed, “We support Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran.”
“What Hamas did that day was pure evil – it was brutal and sickening,” said Vice President Kamala Harris in her own statement Monday. “We will not forget, and we will not lose faith,” she said. “And in honor of all those souls we lost on October 7, we must never lose sight of the dream of peace, dignity, and security for all.”
Timeline and outlook: Axios looks back at what happened on Oct. 7, 2023, what’s going on now, and where it might all lead. Read that, here.
Latest: “At least seven people were injured late Sunday in what Israel said was a Hezbollah rocket attack on the northern Israeli cities of Haifa and Tiberias,” the Washington Post reported, adding that on Monday afternoon, Israel bombarded areas around Lebanon’s southern city of Tyre.
Additional reading: “Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah,” the Washington Post reported Saturday.
Inside the Marine Corps’ first-ever littoral regiment. Much of what the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment trains for is basic infantry operations—with a modern and Pacific twist, its leaders told Defense One’s Jen Hlad during a recent exercise.
“When we go on the next deployment, we’re going to be pretty disaggregated, seizing key maritime terrain, providing the sensing capability and things like that,” said Staff Sgt. Dylan Greene of Banjo Company. And unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, “The most challenging thing is going to be [that] we do not have air dominance. I would argue we don’t even probably have air superiority, just because of near-peer, and also just going to be like signature management.” More, here.
A destroyer’s first deployment took an unexpected turn. The USS Daniel Inouye’s maiden deployment was supposed to be seven months long, mostly working with regional partners such as Japan and Korea as part of the Theodore Roosevelt strike group. But as tensions in the Red Sea heated up, the group’s deployment was extended, and the brand-new destroyer received a fresh tasking: deter aggression and protect “the free flow of commerce” in the waters of the Middle East. Hlad talked with the destroyer’s leadership as it returned to its home port of Pearl Harbor. Read that, here.
And lastly: For several months, Chinese government hackers penetrated major U.S. broadband providers, “potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests,” the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.
Targets included Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, among others, officials said, describing it as “a potentially catastrophic security breach,” according to the Journal.
“Hackers apparently exfiltrated some data from Verizon networks by reconfiguring Cisco routers,” the Washington Post reports (gift link). “The fact that they were able to make changes in the routers without detection reflects the sophistication of the adversary but also raises questions about Verizon’s security posture, analysts said.” Read more at BleepingComputer, here.
