President Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon, Sept. 3, sent out a tweet stating, “At the request of Senator Thom Tillis, I am getting North Carolina Emergency Declaration completed and signed tonight. Hope you won’t need it.”
According to a press release, Tillis spoke with Trump by phone both Monday and Tuesday about “ensuring the state of North Carolina has the full resources of the federal government to respond to Hurricane Dorian.”
The state of emergency is backdated to Sept. 1 and it authorizes the “Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures” to save lives, protect property and public health and safety.
It also states that the federal government will cover 75 percent of the costs of the emergency efforts.
Last week, Tillis noted that 93 percent of the federal dollars allocated for repairs after Hurricanes Florence and Michael had not been spent and said he was going to introduce a bill that would allow local governments to apply for that money directly if states didn’t spend it in a timely manner.
Most of the current computer tracks show Dorian either making landfall in North Carolina or coming very close to the coast, and the Outer Banks are in the process of being evacuated.
Although Trump is well known for sending out tweets with misspelled words, in this case he even spelled the name of North Carolina’s junior senator correctly, and it’s an easy one to miss.
