“Operation Blue Ridge” is Florida’s latest attempt to work beyond its borders to help displaced Sunshine State residents.
The initiative, announced by Gov. Ron DeSantis this weekend, will see state resources deployed to North Carolina to deal with damage from Hurricane Helene, with flooding rains destroying infrastructure and homes and causing communities in the mountains to be in a race against time.
“You go to western North Carolina, particularly in the Summertime, it’s basically like Florida North,” DeSantis said while speaking in Steinhatchee.
“Half the people there are from Florida and all these communities, they’re beautiful communities and it’s not humid. So you can see why people do it. Now, a lot of Floridians, by the time Labor Day comes, they do come back to Florida. If this had happened in August, there would have been tens of thousands of Floridians, but there are still Floridians there.”
He touted the multiagency initiative that involves the Florida State Guard, Florida National Guard, Florida Department of Transportation, Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and Florida law enforcement’s efforts “to go up and to effectuate rescues of people who are not able to get out of those areas.”
Chinook helicopters and other aircraft will be deployed, DeSantis promised, vowing to “bring people back to safety … just like we did when Oct. 7 happened and Floridians were caught up in the Israel-Hamas war, just like we did when Haiti started going even more haywire than normal.”
The Governor noted that President Joe Biden called him on Sunday, and while he wasn’t able to call Biden back, he offered some advice for the most powerful man in the world in the event he was watching the state press conference, saying “most of the effort” from the federal government should be in western North Carolina.
The Governor also weighed in on the “ragged” infrastructure of the mountainous regions as a justification for the helicopter help, drawing a chilling contrast between roads in the hills and the four- and six-lane highways found in the exurban landscape of the Sunshine State.
“It’s very pretty, it’s very refreshing because there’s no humidity but it is very ragged. I mean, they build these roads and, you know, it is not necessarily easy to get around all the time. It’s not well lit all the time. You know, it’s just a different, different lifestyle,” DeSantis said.
“And so when you have something like this happen to sever the roads and the bridges and a lot of the things that happened, I mean, basically, I don’t think they have any major way to even get out of a lot of those western North Carolina places right now.”
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