Paragraph 1: The Storm’s Arrival and the Call to Serve
When the world tilts on its axis, it rarely gives notice. For Kerry Giles, the tilt came in the pitch-black, rain-lashed hours of September 27, 2024, when the phone shattered the fragile silence of a night that wasn’t—a night that had already transformed Western North Carolina into an inland ocean of churning mud and broken timber. Hurricane Helene, a monster that had merely grazed the Florida coast, had found the mountains and unleashed a biblical rage—up to thirty inches of rain in some hollows, wind gusts tearing the very air apart at 100 miles per hour. The storm didn’t just break the land; it broke the fundamental sense of safety that comes from living in a place where the ridgelines had always provided a fortress against the outside world. Now, that world was ending. On the other end of the line was the Rutherford County emergency manager, his voice tight with a strain that had nothing to do with the crackling static of the line, asking if Giles—the director of public transit—could possibly authorize vans to evacuate people who had become trapped by the rising waters. Sleep was gone, replaced by an adrenaline-soaked reality where the clock had stopped. She had not yet processed the irony that a tree had just punched through the roof of her own house, its branches now a spiky barricade across her front yard, holding her hostage in her own home. But her response, given without a heartbeat of hesitation, was absolute: if you can get me out, I will come.
By the time the morning sun finally broke through the roiling clouds—casting an eerie, sickly light on a landscape that had been entirely rearranged—Giles was already in the eye of the storm’s aftermath on the ground. The emergency manager called again, this time not for transit, but for communications. The 911 system was overwhelmed, but it wasn’t just the downed lines and shattered cell towers causing the crisis. In a matter of hours after the call went out, the system logged over five hundred missing persons requests. He needed her to go to the Emergency Operations Center, to answer the phones, to field the frantic media calls, and to become the human voice telling a terrified community where to find help, where to find shelter, and who to tell when they just couldn’t find their mother, their husband, their child. With a profound sense of helplessness, she finally got a message to her own daughter in Boone hours later, only to be pulled deeper into the vortex. The FBI and sheriff’s deputies took over missing persons, turning Giles into the county’s public information officer—the sole liaison between the outside world and a county fighting for its life. The physical damage was staggering, but it was the spiritual toll that loomed even larger. She was working on pure adrenaline, fueled by nothing but cold coffee and a terrifying sense of duty, all while her own house sat silent and damaged beneath the oaks.
Paragraph 2: The Digital Storm Arrives
And then, just when the physical rain had finally stopped and the waters began to recede, leaving behind a cracked and filthy residue on the mountainsides, a second, more insidious storm swept in. On October 3rd—the first day she caught even a fleeting break—Giles stepped out onto her back deck with her dog for the first time, blinking in the unseasonable light. It was supposed to be a momentary reprieve, a chance to breathe fresh air and feel something other than the suffocating pressure of a thousand terrified voices. Instead, she looked down at her phone and felt the blood drain from her face. The social media feed that was supposed to connect her to the world had become a sewer of paranoia and weaponized lies. There, glowing in the crisp autumn sunlight, were accusations that federal agents had told Chimney Rock residents their land was being seized under eminent domain and that bulldozers were already lined up to flatten the town—bodies, debris, and all—to plunder hidden lithium deposits. She read comments that FEMA was stealing supplies, that truckers were getting their tires slashed, and that a local pastor was ordering body bags to keep pace with a death toll that the lying media wasn’t revealing. She had not cried yet, not really, not even when the tree crashed through her ceiling. But looking at that phone, seeing the perfect, corrosive lie eat its way through a community that was bleeding, she broke. She snapped a selfie of her tear-streaked face, sent it to her husband with the silent scream of a thousand words, and had to check herself from collapsing. It felt exactly like COVID—the exhausting, soul-crushing fight to push a boulder of accurate information up an endless hill of manufactured distrust.
Later, she would tell someone that the realization of facing that again, while her community was so raw and hurting, was utterly overwhelming. She knew the cold mechanics of disinformation, how it doesn’t care about the truth it destroys. And she understood that this wasn’t just a bunch of confused people getting the wrong idea—it was a deliberate weapon, a raft of falsehoods lashed together by bad actors with a vested interest in making desperate people further lose hope. The lies became a story that the entire world told, mutating as it flew. It was a narrative stitched together by a random X user named Chris Martenson, whose post-a fake account of a resident claiming the feds were coming with bulldozers—amassed millions of views in days and went on to be amplified by Russian disinformation sites, and, critically, by American political figures who saw an advantage in a swing state. Donald Trump, running for president again, stood in front of cameras and accused FEMA of diverting money to immigrants. Mark Robinson, the then-lieutenant governor, claimed Joe Biden had coldly declared there were “no more supplies.” Marjorie Taylor Greene and a chorus of others insisted the hurricane had been geoengineered to hurt Republicans. There it was: the seed of believability. Giles had been in that meeting in Chimney Rock; it was to discuss infrastructure repair, not mass eviction. There were no lithium mines in Rutherford County. But in a region where the state had failed to get trailers into remote hollers for weeks, where catastrophe had severed the very electric communication lines that delivered certainty, cynicism was as plentiful as fresh mud.
Paragraph 3: The Fertile Ground of Fear and Frustration
Experts would later point out that myths never grow in a vacuum; they need fertile ground, and Western North Carolina had become a perfectly tilled field. It was the geography, first—the isolation. Coves and hollers where neighbors were connected by high ridges at the bottom of valleys with a single road out, or sometimes none. When the bridges washed away and the power died, the outside world didn’t just seem like a distant government; it ceased to exist. In the void, the traditional self-sufficiency of the mountain culture turned from a virtue into a cage of suspicion. “Rural folks commonly think of themselves as independent,” explained Sarah Jackson, a professor of emergency management at Western Carolina University, “and then in a catastrophic disaster like this, you have to [rely on others].” That shock of vulnerability, the realization that you can’t just handle it yourself, breeds a desperate need to assign blame. The local emergency alerts—which should have been the best lance against the lies—were themselves often a mash of unclear wording and contradictions that offered no timeframe or, worse, told people to do one thing while another agency said the opposite. Priscilla Jackson, who lived in Waynesville, survived on a junked “boombox radio” wired with D batteries, trying to separate useful dispatch info from the fear. In that void, the voice of the state was often silent, but the voice of the internet—if one could get online—was a screaming cacophony of accusations.
The result was a perfect feedback loop of trauma. People were not just grieving the loss of their homes and their hillsides; they were grieving the future, and they were being told—virtually in the same hour—that the government was incompetent, that they were being deliberately ignored, and that the people offering help were actually the ones trying to bulldoze them. The North Carolina Department of Public Safety would later note in an after-action review that “well-meaning individuals sharing incorrect information, coupled with coordinated disinformation efforts, undermined public confidence in official communication channels.” They admitted that the strain of correcting this garbage redirected significant staff time and resources away from rescue response efforts. For Giles, the toll was monotone. She was inundated with hateful comments on her own Facebook page, forced to play whack-a-mole with hundreds of lies. Her only armor was exhausting repetition—hours spent replying to strangers, clarifying that yes, the water is safe at the shelter, no, FEMA is not running out of money, yes, the National Guard is in the holler. She was working twelve-hours days to stem a tide that did not ebb. Meanwhile, the federal government was not even present to defend itself. “The Federal government does not have a face,” admitted Victoria Barton, FEMA’s associate administrator for external affairs. But in the absence of that face, the digital wild west filled the void with a mask of pure malevolence.
Paragraph 4: Adaptation and Creative Counter-Offensive
Realizing that a press release shot into the void was like throwing a paper airplane into the hurricane, the agencies got crafty. The first evolution was forced by sheer necessity: they had to meet people where they were, both physically and digitally. Radio, accessed via cars and battery-powered devices, became the unsung hero—the only living link to an open ear. For those with no ears at all, the humble paper sign taped to the window of a church or a general store became a lifeline. In communities where the internet had completely died, Haines and others pinned crucial resource maps to bulletin boards outside fire stations and churches, understanding that the act of seeing a human face—or even a credible printed logo—was more powerful than a 140-character tweet. The N.C. Emergency Management team leaned hard into real-time video, uploading clips of search-and-rescue operations and hazardous materials teams showing up and going to work, hoping the visual evidence would counter the nothingness. They flooded Facebook with aerial shots of the damage and close-ups of bulldozers clearing roads, essentially becoming the trust brokers of the new reality.
Then, they embraced the algorithm. Instead of just relying on traditional media gatekeepers, they partnered with trusted local nonprofits, faith leaders, and even social media influencers who had already built loyal followings. FEMA dispatched personnel with more than just clipboards; they were sent with walking-around talk. They coordinated with Starlink to get the digital lifesavers back online. Inside the bunker, tech teams set up a joint watch-desk to monitor the rumble of social media, flagging new casualties like the Martenson post as they emerged. The strategy became less about deleting the lies and more about making the truth easier to find, a kind of “refuting the lie with an equal dose of reality.” They created shared Microsoft Teams channels where PIOs like Giles could instantly flag a weird rumor they spotted on a local moms’ Facebook group, and get immediate confirmation or denial from state counterparts. They set up “joint information centers” so that every PIO looking at a screen knew they weren’t the only one feeding the beast. The effect was a tug-of-war for the psychological high ground, but for the first time in a major American disaster, the response was not just about the physical rescue but about erecting a fragile dam against the digital deluge.
Paragraph 5: A New Playbook for a Broken World
The aftershocks of that learning curve are still being felt, but they’ve built a lasting foundation of resilience. Kerry Giles, who survived a subsequent summer of floods in Rutherford County, now trains her own emergency management team to immediately start shooting short, raw reels of their daily work—the extrication of cars from a flooded street, the clearing of a culvert—because she saw how effective that proof-of-life message was. Brian Haines now calmly uploads videos of the mundane necessities of state work—the disposal of hazardous materials, the logistics of staging rescue teams—to show that the great government machine isn’t a malevolent robot but a collection of neighbors in neon vests. FEMA institutionalized the ideas brought to life in the mountains. They now have “pre-bunking” playbooks, crafting messaging toolkits that guide local officials on how to gently but firmly correct a rumor, and they participate in regular joint training exercises with state PIOs, embedding journalists in simulated events so that the trust bridges are built before the bridges wash out. At a summit this past summer, Giles, Haines, and dozens of others across the state networked like war-weary comrades, swearing they would never let their communities be caught so flat-footed again. The after-action report specifically mandated that these individuals practice social media monitoring and inter-agency communication exercises regularly, ensuring that they maintain the proficiency to counter the next storm, because, as Haines put it, “We can really be reaching the public directly through these venues.”
There are even glimmers of success stories emerging from the rubble. This spring, during a series of intense wildfires in Georgia, FEMA’s social media team saw a whisper campaign claiming the agency had withdrawn its firefighting crews. Quickly, working with the state, they reached out to local news radio, had the regional administrator go on the air, and saw the lie die within days. The key, they realized, wasn’t to argue on Twitter, but to get the trusted local fire chief to pop up on camera saying, “No, you’re wrong, FEMA is here with me.” The new doctrine boils down to a brutal but simple truth: you can’t control what people think, but you can control the environment in which they think it. The most profound lesson? To wash away the paranoia, you don’t just give out a statement; you give out a face. You show up at the grocery store. You get the mayor to vouch for you. You don’t say “trust me”; you say, “Look at this photo I just took of your neighbor getting help.” It’s an exhausting, high-touch way to do crisis communications, but in the face of a propaganda machine that works 24/7, it’s the only way forward.
Paragraph 6: The Modern Social Problem We Can’t Surrender To
Yet, the dark irony remains that for all the strategic creativity, the war is far from over, and the terrain is eternally shifting. Disinformation is not just a glitch in the system; it is a symptom of a massive social problem, a viral cancer in the digital body politic. As Bryan Giemza, a professor who tracked the aftermath, bluntly put it, “As long as it’s profitable… it’s not going to go anywhere.” And indeed, it is profitable for politicians seeking to aggrandize power, for foreign adversaries seeking to destabilize the strongest country in the world, and for the relentless ghost of confirmation bias. There is no app that will make people trust the truth. Giemza noted that strategies like “pre-bunking” are elegant in theory but impractical on a wide scale because you can’t predict the life of a lie before it’s born. The public’s willingness to assume good faith in their government, especially after a disaster, is at an all-time low, and that’s a wound no amount of clever hashtagging can heal. Sarah Jackson pointed out that it’s hard to blame people for listening to the radio for hours upon hours when the basic infrastructure of civic life—electricity, internet, a phone line to a loved one—has been destroyed and replaced by silence.
Is the struggle futile? Absolutely not. But it is profoundly human. It means agencies have had to grieve the death of the “information superhighway” dream and accept that they are not just providers of useful traffic patrols, but warriors in a constant, exhausting war of attrition. It means accepting that the initial onslaught of misinformation is inevitable, and the only answer is to be more nimble, more constant, and more present. To push back against the lie that the government has abandoned you to bulldoze your home, you just keep showing up until your feet bleed. That’s what Kerry Giles chose to do, and Brian Haines, and scores of others like them. They are fighting for more than the next emergency; they are fighting to keep the very idea of a community afloat. They are trying to build trust like they are laying brick, one meeting at a time, one verified fact on a church marquee. They do it not because they believe they will eradicate the lies, but because the alternative—surrendering the streets to the monsters of fear and cynicism—is simply unthinkable. “We’re here to help,” Haines says, and those four words have become the new mission statement. They are the quiet, firm proposition that in the midst of the digital abyss, the most revolutionary thing a government can do is to simply not lie, to be there, and to hope it is enough. The hope is not in the disappearance of the storm, but in the undeniable proof of the shelter being built against it.