Helene tested what continuity plans take for granted: staff, signal and signatures
Continuity plans for local agencies are written for the loss of a building or a system. Helene removed people, connectivity and decision authority across a whole region at once, and each of the three needs its own preparation with its own lead time.
Looking Back revisits one week at a time, from January 2020 to today, and asks what it meant for the banks, health systems and public agencies we serve. The series was written in 2026, with the benefit of hindsight, and each article says which week it looks back on.
The week
Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region late on September 26, 2024, as a Category 4 storm, then moved inland across Georgia and the Carolinas. Its remnants, on top of heavy rain in the days before, brought catastrophic flooding to western North Carolina and parts of Tennessee, Virginia and South Carolina. Around Asheville, roads and bridges were destroyed, power and cellular service failed across large areas, and the city’s water system was severely damaged. More than 200 people died across several states, making Helene the deadliest hurricane on the U.S. mainland since Katrina in 2005. Federal, state and local agencies, utilities and volunteers mounted a long response, and satellite internet terminals were among the tools used to restore communications to shelters and public offices.
Most continuity of operations plans for public agencies are built around the loss of a building or a system. Helene removed something more basic across a whole region. Offices stood but could not be reached. Systems in distant data centers kept running, but nobody could connect to them. Staff were unavailable because they were survivors themselves, searching for family, without water or fuel.
An agency keeps serving the public in a disaster only if three inputs hold: people to do the work, a way to communicate and reach systems, and someone with authority to decide. Plans usually assume all three. Helene removed them together. They have different owners and different lead times, which is why they need separate preparation and why they fail together when nobody owns the whole.
Staff: essential personnel are also survivors
Plans list essential personnel and expect them to report. In a regional disaster many cannot, and should not be pressed to until their households are safe. Homes are lost. Schools and childcare close. Fuel is scarce for days.
Agencies that coped well treated staff welfare as an operational task. They checked on employees, supplied water, fuel or lodging where they could, and planned for partial availability lasting weeks rather than days. The planning consequences are specific. Each essential function needs more than one trained person, and at least one should be based outside the likely impact zone, whether in another office of the agency, a partner jurisdiction or a contractor. Remote-work arrangements should name which out-of-area staff can pick up which work, with access already provisioned. Mutual aid through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact and intrastate agreements should cover administrative and technical roles, such as permitting clerks, payroll staff and network engineers, not only first responders.
Training lead time is the constraint. A backup for a benefits eligibility worker or a 911 dispatcher takes months to prepare. That work must happen in quiet years. Pay continuity belongs here too. Staff who cannot reach a timekeeping system still need to be paid on schedule, so payroll needs a documented fallback, such as repeating the prior period’s pay and reconciling later, approved before it is needed.
Signal: the network beneath every procedure
Modern agency work depends on cell networks, internet access and power, usually all at once. When towers lose power or backhaul, staff cannot call each other, reach cloud systems, receive alerts or approve a login on a phone app. Helene’s flooding damaged infrastructure that took days to weeks to repair.
Resilience here is about diversity of paths. Key sites need satellite terminals and the skills to set them up. Radio systems need to interoperate with neighboring jurisdictions. Generators need fuel contracts that assume every other customer will be calling the same supplier. Identity is easy to miss. If every login requires a push notification to a phone, no one can sign in while cell service is down. Hardware security keys, or pre-issued backup codes held securely, keep privileged access working without a signal.
Offline copies matter too: contact lists, procedures, maps, delegations and key records, printed or on encrypted devices. Security policy has to anticipate emergency connectivity as well. A satellite terminal that the agency’s network rules forbid connecting is not usable, so the rules should define in advance how emergency links are authorized and monitored.
Signatures: who may decide when the chain is broken
Spending, emergency procurement, fee waivers, deadline extensions, emergency declarations and staff redeployment all require authority. In normal times it sits with named officials. In a regional disaster those officials may be unreachable for days.
Orders of succession and delegations of authority are standard continuity elements, but they are often stale or unknown to the people who would use them. They should be current, specific about dollar limits and duration, and stored where they can be found offline. Updating them may need a council or board vote, which gives this input the longest lead time of the three.
Emergency purchasing deserves its own attention because the paperwork has a long tail. FEMA public assistance reimbursement depends on documentation of what was bought, why, at what price and under which emergency procurement rule. Agencies should keep pre-approved emergency procurement procedures, standing contracts for debris removal and supplies, and a simple logging method that works on paper. Records kept in the first chaotic weeks determine how much is recovered months later.
The three inputs fail together, so they should be tested together. Tabletop exercises usually assume participants can meet and talk. A more realistic drill removes some participants without notice, takes away phones and shared drives, and asks the remaining staff to find the procedures, the connection and the authority they need. Human resources owns staff, IT and facilities own signal, and legal and executive leadership own signatures. An exercise is often the only place all three owners see the same gap at once.
With hindsight
Recovery in western North Carolina took many months and continued through 2025. Asheville restored drinkable water to its whole system in mid-November 2024, about seven weeks after the storm. Satellite terminals proved their worth in shelters and public offices, and many local agencies added them to continuity kits. Helene also fed a broader argument about federal disaster support. In January 2025 the new administration created a council to review FEMA, and debate over the agency’s future role continued through 2025 and into 2026. That debate gave state and local agencies a further reason to plan for the first weeks of a disaster on their own resources: out-of-area staff, independent communications and authority that does not depend on a single official being reachable.