Operation Blue Ridge is over, and Gov. Ron DeSantis is rebutting criticisms of of Florida deploying finite state resources to North Carolina and Tennessee in the wake of Hurricane Helene impacts.
DeSantis said Florida did the “right thing” and “saved lives” amid a “humanitarian disaster” in North Carolina and Tennessee last month.
And the critics? He said they are driving a cudgel for political purposes.
“Some people see how it quite frankly did not make the federal government look well to have Florida out there rescuing people before they had boots on the ground. And so I know it’s kind of like a political thing for some. They want to try to act like we shouldn’t have been helping,” DeSantis said Monday at the state Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee.
DeSantis also asserted that it was probably logistically easier to send Florida search and rescue out of state rather than deal with the burdensome paperwork of temporarily relieving them of duty.
“They would have been deactivated after Helene when the recovery efforts, search and rescue efforts were done anyways. So in some respects, it’s easier just bring them back like we did than to have to remobilize, because there is a period of time if you remobilize, somebody who’s not on active orders just takes a little longer,” DeSantis said.
He added that “any insinuation that somehow rescuing people and saving lives in North Carolina last week has any impact on what we’re doing here now is 100% false.”
The Governor previously said Florida’s response to storm damage in the Blue Ridge Mountains to “bring people back to safety” was “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.”
On Monday, he declared the “mission” accomplished.
“We have helped Floridians who were still there, but we helped a lot of North Carolinians who needed help, and in some respects had been abandoned. So that was a successful mission. That was something that really made a difference.”
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