Third house collapses in four days on North Carolina coast

(ASHEVILLE, N.C.) — Twenty-six people remain unaccounted for in hard-hit North Carolina, weeks after the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Helene, officials said Monday.

Last week, 92 people were unaccounted for, officials said.

Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, wreaking havoc across the Southeast from Florida to Virginia. Helene destroyed homes and roads, stranded residents without cellphone service and water, and claimed the lives of nearly 250 people throughout the Southeast.

At least 95 of Helene’s fatalities were in North Carolina, officials said. Gov. Roy Cooper called Helene “the deadliest and most devastating storm” in the state’s history.

After misinformation spread about recovery efforts and the availability of Federal Emergency Management Agency funds in North Carolina, Cooper stressed at Monday’s news conference that the “deliberate disinformation and misinformation … needs to stop.”

“It hurts the very people we are all trying to help,” he said. “It discourages and makes people fearful of signing up for help. It enables scam artists and it hurts the morale of government officials, first responders and soldiers who are on the ground trying to help.”

Former President Donald Trump is set to visit to the hard-hit city of Asheville on Monday to survey damage from the storm.

Cooper said he’s asking the former president to “not share lies or misinformation while he is here.”

Cooper said the White House “responded quickly and positively to our request from FEMA, which has had 1,400 staff on the ground and has registered 206,000 people for individual assistance, and distributed $124 million directly to people who need it.”

“As for long-term recovery, state and local government will be all in, along with the federal government,” Cooper said. “This will take billions of dollars and years of bipartisan focus from everyone working together to make it happen — from new roads and bridges to public building to water supplies to people’s homes.”

FEMA is now launching a “new initiative” to hire community liaisons in North Carolina’s impacted counties, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell announced Monday.

“We know that so many people have temporarily lost their jobs. We know that others just want to be able to give back, and we want to help keep people in these communities while they recover,” she said. “So these new community liaisons are going to work alongside us at FEMA to make sure that they are the local voice, the trusted voice in their community, and that they can share with us the local considerations and the concerns, so we can include them as part of this recovery. They’re going to be embedded in every county, working directly with county administrators, mayors and community leaders, bridging their concerns with our FEMA staff. And these jobs are available for people to apply right now.”

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(WASHINGTON) — A piece of the Titan’s carbon-fiber hull recovered after the submersible’s deadly catastrophic implosion showed “anomalies,” a National Transportation Safety Board engineer said Wednesday during a weekslong hearing on the incident.

Don Kramer, the acting chief of the NTSB’s materials laboratory, testified during the U.S. Coast Guard’s hearing into the June 2023 implosion of the OceanGate submersible while on a deep-sea dive to the Titanic shipwreck.

Kramer said his team examined material from the manufacturing of the hull and found “several anomalies within the composite and the adhesive joints, including waviness, wrinkles, porosity and voids.”

They also examined a piece of the hull recovered from the ocean floor and found similar anomalies, including “waviness and wrinkles within the hull layers” and voids within the adhesive that joined the layers, he said. The recovered hull also showed “features consistent with rubbing damage at one of those adhesive joints.”

Kramer said the Titan debris on the ocean floor showed that the hull “encountered a significant amount of delamination” — or separating into layers — most of which was within or adjacent to co-bonded adhesive interfaces.

Asked by OceanGate’s counsel whether any of the delaminations, voids or rubbing damage could have been present before the implosion, as opposed to being caused by the implosion, Kramer said he is not offering analysis as to when they occurred.

Further asked by OceanGate’s counsel whether any of the issues he observed could have caused the implosion, Kramer said that is “still subject to our own internal analysis at this point.”

Strain response after loud bang on dive 80

Kramer also discussed the loud bang passengers heard as the Titan ascended during a dive that occurred a year before the implosion, on July 15, 2022 — referred to as dive 80 — which has been referenced throughout the two-week hearing. The bang was also detected by the Titan’s real-time monitoring system, which had sensors to detect acoustic events, as well as multiple strain gages to monitor mechanical strain, he said.

Kramer said his team determined that the hull’s strain response changed after this loud bang incident in subsequent dives in 2022. He said the strain gage data showed a change in the strain in the hull for four of the eight gages.

“Those changes persisted from dive to dive,” he said.

There was no difference when comparing the strain response to a dive prior to dive 80, Kramer said.

No strain data is available for dives conducted in 2023, according to Kramer.

Phil Brooks, OceanGate’s former engineering director, testified on Monday that following the loud bang on dive 80, the strain gage data showed a minor “shift,” though they did not see “any further shifts in strain data” on subsequent dives in 2022. Nothing “really seemed out of the ordinary,” and OceanGate co-founder and CEO Stockton Rush made the decision to continue dives, Brooks said.

Asked how his team arrived at its determination on the change in strain response based on the graphs of the available data, Kramer said, “I guess it’s a matter of opinion as to whether one can discern the changes in strain output.”

Brooks said Rush theorized that the loud bang was caused by the frame “readjusting back to its original shape” as it returned to the surface.

Kramer noted that the NTSB’s investigation is still ongoing, and the scope of his presentation was therefore limited.

Marine Technology Society draft letter to Rush

William Kohnen, the CEO and founder of submersible maker Hydrospace Group, said during his testimony on Wednesday that he would not have made a carbon-fiber hull. He said it would cost “too much money” and “is really, really difficult.”

The investigators asked Kohnen about a draft Marine Technology Society letter he wrote in March 2018 to Rush based on public safety concerns raised during a conference.

“This was considered an issue of where we as consensus, as professionals in this industry, had significant concerns — not on one particular thing, but the overall approach of neglecting the years of experience and tradition and diligence that we applied,” he said.

Kohnen said the letter was signed by around 40 members and went through other drafts, though the Marine Technology Society board never approved sending it to Rush on behalf of the society. Rush still managed to get a copy of the original draft letter, which Kohnen said they discussed over the phone.

During the call, Kohnen said he told Rush he found the language on OceanGate’s website confusing for the general public not familiar with submersibles and that they were “highly inferring” the experimental sub was classed, when that wasn’t the case. He said the website was subsequently updated.

Kohnen stressed the importance of classification and regulations to build safe submersibles.

“We have a record of 50 years without a single fatality until Titan,” he said. “It does indicate the power of our regulation.”

OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations after the deadly implosion, which killed five people, including Rush.

The hearing on the incident is scheduled to run through Friday.

The main purpose of the hearing is to uncover the facts related to the implosion and to make recommendations, the Coast Guard said.

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(NEW YORK) — Tens of thousands of Boeing workers have voted to strike after rejecting the proposed contract from the embattled aerospace company — a move with far-reaching implications for the U.S. economy.

Boeing had reached a tentative agreement earlier this week with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, or IAM, the union representing 33,000 workers at Boeing plants in Washington State, Oregon and California.

However, union members rejected the contract agreement on Thursday night with a vote of 94.6%. IAM’s members will strike at midnight on Friday after 96% voted for the action.

“The message was clear that the tentative agreement we reached with IAM leadership was not acceptable to the members,” Boeing said in a statement following the strike vote. “We remain committed to resetting our relationship with our employees and the union, and we are ready to get back to the table to reach a new agreement.”

A work stoppage would weaken Boeing as it struggles to recover from a years-long stretch of scandals and setbacks, hamstringing the nation’s largest exporter, experts told ABC News. But, they added, workers are frustrated with what they perceive as inadequate compensation and a sense they must sacrifice to make up for the company’s mismanagement.

Here’s what to know about what’s behind the strike and its implications for the U.S. economy:

Why are Boeing workers preparing to strike?

Neither Boeing nor the IAM wants a strike. The workers might carry one out anyway.

The tentative agreement struck this week delivers a 25% raise over the four-year duration of the contract, as well as worker gains on healthcare costs and retirement benefits. The union had sought a 40% pay increase over the life of the deal.

The agreement also features a commitment from Boeing to build its next commercial plane with union labor in Washington state.

Boeing touted the strength of its offer earlier this week. “Simply put, this is the best contract we’ve ever presented,” Stephanie Pope, Boeing Commercial Airplanes president and CEO, wrote in a letter to union members obtained by ABC News.

The union echoed support for the agreement, urging workers to ratify the deal.

“We have achieved everything we could in bargaining, short of a strike. We recommended acceptance because we can’t guarantee we can achieve more in a strike,” IAM District 571 President Jon Holden, who leads the union local involved in negotiations, told members in a public letter.

In response to ABC News’ request for comment, a Boeing spokesperson pointed to a letter sent to union members by CEO Kelly Ortberg.

“I hope you will choose the bright future ahead, but I also know there are employees considering another path — and it’s one where no one wins,” Ortberg said.

“For Boeing, it is no secret that our business is in a difficult period, in part due to our own mistakes in the past. Working together, I know that we can get back on track, but a strike would put our shared recovery in jeopardy, further eroding trust with our customers and hurting our ability to determine our future together,” Ortberg added.

IAM declined to respond to ABC News’ request for comment.

Still, the vote indicates that workers are ready to defy the company and the union. For years, West Coast Boeing workers have taken issue with their level of compensation, especially in light of strong company performance and a surge in the cost of living, experts said.

“There are years and years of pent-up frustration among Boeing workers,” Jake Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis who studies labor, told ABC News. “This is an expression of being completely fed up.”

Union members also view themselves as being asked to make sacrifices made necessary by the company’s mismanagement, said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst at Atmosphere Research Group.

In January, a door plug blew out of the company’s 737 Max 9 aircraft during an Alaska Airlines flight, prompting a federal investigation. The renewed scrutiny arrived roughly five years after Boeing 737 Max aircraft were grounded worldwide following a pair of crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed a combined 346 people.

In 2021, after a two-year ban, Boeing 737 Max aircraft were permitted to fly.

Boeing is carrying nearly $60 billion in debt, Pope noted in her letter to union members. The company’s share price has plummeted almost 40% since the outset of 2024. Ortberg took over as CEO last month.

“The workers cannot and should not be expected to bear all of the burden of the changes needed at Boeing,” Harteveldt said.

“But I don’t think Boeing is asking them or expecting them to do that,” Harteveldt added. “Boeing has extended what appears to be a very generous offer with substantial wage increases.”

What’s at stake in a potential Boeing strike?

Boeing, which employs 145,000 U.S.-based workers, is a major U.S. firm with a sprawling network of suppliers, experts said.

The company estimates that it contributes nearly $80 billion to the U.S. economy each year, and indirectly accounts for 1.6 million jobs.

A prolonged strike would weaken production with the potential to slow output, diminish income and trigger layoffs, Harteveldt said.

“There’s a risk of a downward spiral,” Harteveldt said.

Such a strike would not impact flight activity or down planes, however, since the workers at issue take part in manufacturing new products. That stands in contrast with an averted railroad strike in 2022, which would have halted a sizable share of the nation’s cargo trains.

“This wouldn’t be as devastating,” Rosenfeld said.

Still, he added, a potential strike would hold implications for a signature U.S. firm.

“It would further damage an iconic company that has already had years of setbacks,” Rosenfeld said.

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