Grieving North Carolina families forced to bury dead in backyards as they blast FEMA for hurricane ‘cover up’

Grieving families in North Carolina have been forced to bury their dead in their backyards – and are accusing authorities of downplaying the damage caused by Hurricane Helene.

The official death toll rose to 227 over the weekend – half of whom were from North Carolina – but state and federal officials told The Spectator that this number is woefully inaccurate. 

Many bodies haven’t even been recovered amid debris and flooding. There are also piles of deceased people who have yet to be identified. They are being transported all over the state in hopes of finding open morgue space.

‘According to folks on the ground – fire, medical, law enforcement officials – they’re way underreporting the numbers. All the morgues are full and they’ve hauled a ton [of bodies] to Greensboro,’ the state official said. ‘People are starting to bury them in their yards because they have no place to put them.’

One individual who was in Asheville when Helene hit told The Spectator: ‘It’s so much worse than they’re saying…I think there’s a massive cover-up.’

The destruction from Helene, and the immense multi-state death toll, comes just days before Category 5 Hurricane Milton is set to barrel into Florida’s coastline.  

Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida at night on September 26 before laying waste to Georgia and the Carolinas with record storm surges and tornados.

North Carolina alone had six confirmed tornados on the morning of September 27, two days before 500 members of state’s national guard were deployed to help with rescue efforts.

Locals say they are ‘pissed’ at General Major Todd Hunt, director of the North Carolina National Guard, for waiting a whole 48 hours to get boots on the ground.

There were 5,500 national guardsmen deployed around this time, some of them from other states such as Florida. 

‘That’s why you saw the Florida National Guard and other units out there – and why private citizens stepped in, even as state and federal officials tried to shut down their efforts,’ an anonymous source familiar with the situation in North Carolina told The Spectator.

Before North Carolina national guardsmen were deployed, a four-year-old girl was killed in a car crash in Claremont, a town around 40 miles north of Charlotte.

Another person died after a tree fell on their Charlotte home.

In North Carolina’s Buncombe County, 40 people have died, the county manager has stated. 

Asheville, a popular tourist destination in Buncombe County, was one of the hardest hit towns, where scenes of complete devastation are all too common.

The small mountain town of Swannanoa dealt with flood levels not seen since 1791, and locals have said their community was ‘entirely erased.’

This comes days after a whistleblower wrote a letter to Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., that details how the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has wasted and misappropriated funds in the wake of Helene and is now ‘exacerbating the emergency.’

The letter to Gaetz also alleges ‘hundreds if not thousands’ of first responders and service members have been ‘without deployment orders’ with some waiting around in hotels while others ‘have sat idle’ as Americans throughout the southeast are in dire need.

Last week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that FEMA ran out of money to make it through the hurricane season, after it handed out more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to give housing assistance to illegal migrants over the last two years. 

Joe Gabriel Simonson, a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon, snapped a picture of Mayorkas shopping in a luxury department store in Washington D.C. allegedly on October 5, which would have been during the peak of the Helene rescue efforts.

‘So, suffice to say, the guy isn’t working around the clock,’ Simonson wrote on X.

DailyMail.com approached Homeland Security for comment.

President Joe Biden also came under fire for his response to the disaster because he spent the weekend of the hurricane hit at his Rehoboth Beach vacation home.

‘I was commanding, I was on the phone for at least two hours yesterday, and the day before, as well. I commanded, it’s called a telephone,’ he told reporters. 

Following this criticism, Biden deployed 1,000 active duty soldiers to North Carolina. He also took an aerial tour with Governor Roy Cooper to witness the damage before giving a news conference.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, has also visited the designated hurricane disaster zone twice.

Her opponent, former President Donald Trump, has slammed both her and Biden for what he called ‘the worst response in the history of hurricanes’ during a rally last Thursday in battleground Michigan. 

‘A certain president, I will not name him, destroyed his reputation with Katrina,’ Trump said, referring to former President George W. Bush. ‘And this is going even worse. She’s doing even worse than he did.’