A slew of falsehoods about Hurricane Helene, including claims of funds diverted from storm survivors to migrants and even that Democrats somehow directed the hurricane itself, have hampered the response to one of the deadliest hurricanes to ever hit the US, the nation’s top emergency official has warned.

Misinformation spread by Donald Trump, his supporters and others about the hurricane has shrouded the recovery effort for communities shattered by Helene, which tore through five states causing at least 227 deaths and tens of billions of dollars of damage. Many places, such as in western North Carolina, are still without a water supply, navigable roads or vital supplies.

“It’s frankly disappointing we are having to deal with this narrative, the fact there are a few leaders having a hard time telling the difference between fact and fiction is creating an impedance to our ability to actually get people the help they need,” Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), told MSNBC on Monday.

Trump has accused Joe Biden’s administration of “abandoning” people to the crisis and, baselessly, of being short of disaster relief funds due to money spent on undocumented migrants. Such claims are “frankly ridiculous” and creating a “truly dangerous narrative that is creating this fear” among affected people, Criswell said.

In multiple rallies in the past week, Trump has accused Biden and Kamala Harris of favoring migrants over disaster-hit areas. “They stole the Fema money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” Trump has said.

“Kamala spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal immigrants.” Trump added the places worst hit are “largely a Republican area so some people say they did it for that reason”.

JD Vance, Trump’s Republican running mate, echoed this theme on Monday, telling Fox News that Fema’s focus on migrants is “going to distract focus from their core job of helping American citizens in their time of need”. Last week, Stephen Miller, a far-right Trump adviser, said that “Kamala Harris turned Fema into an illegal alien resettlement agency”.

Fema does, in fact, have a housing program that offers shelter to migrants leaving detention but this is separate from its disaster relief program. “No money is being diverted from disaster response needs. None,” the White House has stated.

In remarks on Monday after speaking to Criswell by phone, Harris urged politicians to stop “playing games” with lives at stake. According to the White House pool, the vice-president said: “There’s a lot of misinformation being pushed out there by the former president about what is available, particularly for the survivors of Helene. First of all, it’s extraordinarily irresponsible. It’s about him, it’s not about you. The reality is Fema has so many resources that are available to those who desperately need them.”

Congress recently provided an extra $20bn for disaster relief but Biden has warned that more funding will be needed to help the long-term recovery of places increasingly assailed by powerful storms fueled by global heating.

Other conspiracy theories and erroneous claims have swirled online and in areas affected by Helene, such as the assertion that Fema will give only $750 to individuals as a loan (it is, in fact, a grant, and can be followed by further claims for more than $40,000) or that the agency is seizing people’s land.

Fema has, unusually, put up a web page to counter these claims, with a spokesman saying the misinformation is “extremely damaging” to response efforts as it deters people from seeking assistance. “We are going to continue to message aggressively so everyone understands what the facts are,” he said regarding the looming Hurricane Milton, which is set to hit Florida.

Some social media posts spreading misinformation about the hurricanes called for militias to be formed to confront Fema workers, while other posts contained antisemitic hatred aimed at figures such as Esther Manheimer, mayor of Asheville, North Carolina, a city badly affected by the storm.

“It’s surprising to me how this is developing but unfortunately it seems antisemitic hate speech is becoming more common in the United States today,” Manheimer said.

“I’ve tried to steer clear of X and other platforms but there is a lot of misinformation that people tend to believe. We’ve had people in the community reaching out to ask if false things are true because folks are intentionally misleading them.”

Manheimer said that Asheville, including her own home, still lacks running water but is being “overwhelmed” with support by Fema to clear roads and get power back on.

“People have lost everything here and the last thing we need is for people to spread false information,” she said. “There are talking points being distributed throughout the Republican party that just aren’t correct. They seem to think spreading misinformation will help win this election.”

One of the more outlandish claims about the hurricane came from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist Republican congresswoman who previously claimed that Jewish lasers from space caused forest fires. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X about the hurricane last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said: “There is no mechanism to control a hurricane and no evidence that anyone was trying to modify it. This is just a crazy conspiracy theory.”

“While humans don’t ‘control’ the weather we are affecting the weather. Human activities, mainly the emission of greenhouse gases, did indeed make Helene more destructive.”

He added: “If she wants humans to stop affecting the weather she should support phasing out fossil fuels.”

So far, Biden has declared the federal government will pay for the entire cost of activities such as debris removal, search and rescue and food supplies for Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The president has also already approved disaster help for Florida ahead of Milton’s arrival.

This approach has garnered some rare praise for Biden from Republican governors of affected states, with some Republican lawmakers calling for the conspiracy theories to abate.

“Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods,” Kevin Corbin, a Republican state senator for western North Carolina, posted on Facebook last week. “Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you or have you continually contact your elected officials to see if they are true.”

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The past seven decades of microchip production have been a race to get smaller. Cerebras Systems, which hopes to break a drought in initial public offerings, is instead going big. Its Frisbee-sized chips are, it says, as fast as it gets at handling super-complex artificial intelligence models. In that sense, size may be on Cerebras’ side. In another, the opposite is true.

Cerebras hopes its jumbo wafers can take on industry champ Nvidia. The idea is that by plonking more memory and processing power on a larger area, data can be moved, stored and crunched faster and with less power consumption. The company’s tests suggest it enables Meta Platforms’ Llama 3.1 model to spit out answers about 20 times faster than rivals.

It is not just its speed that is unusual. The lossmaking firm gets almost all of its revenue from a single customer, Abu Dhabi’s G42. Large prepayments from that and other customers make up the lion’s share of its cash. If G42 makes a sufficiently big order in future it gets more shares at a discounted price, diluting IPO investors.

A further risk could come from irritating a colossus. Nvidia is the go-to for AI, and engineers are used to using its own proprietary programming language. Cerebras warns in its filing that large rivals could pressure their customers to give it the cold shoulder. They might not need to: anyone splurging vast sums on building bots may favour a supplier soundly tested in the field. Switching isn’t simple: using Cerebras chips means also using its other hardware and cooling systems.

Nvidia isn’t the only giant with sway over Cerebras’s future. Both firms’ chips are manufactured by the ubiquitous Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. But where Nvidia is a big influential customer of TSMC, Cerebras is a tiny one. Semiconductor supply chains are long and brittle. The company has been stuck with unsold inventory before, and warns it may again.

Being a flea on the ankle of a giant could pay off: a little more business would go a long way. Assume Cerebras can keep up its recent habit of doubling revenue each six months, and it would be in line for $400 million or so this year. Put that on Nvidia’s 25-times multiple, and it is worth $10 billion.

Given the paucity of tech IPOs and the heat around anything AI, there is every chance investors might entertain that kind of valuation. But given the unusual risks, Cerebras would be best keeping its price ambitions smaller than its outsize chips.

john.foley@ft.com

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast and wreaked a path of destruction across the southeastern U.S., the state is again on high alert for another rapidly intensifying storm.

Forecasters upgraded Milton from a tropical storm to a hurricane on Sunday, a day earlier than expected, and warn that it is poised to reach Category 4 strength before making landfall in Florida midweek.

It strengthened into a “major” Category 3 hurricane early Monday morning when its maximum sustained winds started nearing 125 mph. It quickly intensified to Category 4 status with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, the National Hurricane Center said just after 9 a.m. ET.

At that point, the storm was about 150 miles west-northwest of Progreso, Mexico, and about 735 miles west-southwest of Tampa. The coast of the Yucatan Peninsula is under a hurricane warning, while hurricane watches, storm surge watches and tropical storm watches and warnings are in effect for parts of the west coast of the Florida Peninsula.

Milton is expected to move just north of the Yucatan Peninsula on Monday and Tuesday before crossing the eastern Gulf of Mexico and approaching Florida’s west coast by Wednesday.

The NHC says most models agree that Milton will cross the Florida Peninsula, though people “should not focus on the exact track” because models still disagree about the exact location and timing of landfall.

Even so, forecasters warn that it is likely to be a “large and powerful hurricane at landfall in Florida, with life-threatening hazards along portions of the coastline.”

They say areas of heavy rainfall will impact portions of Florida on Monday, and again on Tuesday through Wednesday night, bringing “the risk of considerable flash, urban and areal flooding,” as well as the potential for moderate to major river flooding.

Parts of the Florida Peninsula and Keys could see 5 to 10 inches of rain through Wednesday night, with localized totals up to 15 inches in some areas.

There is also a growing risk of life-threatening storm surge and damaging winds for parts of Florida’s west coast beginning late Tuesday or early Wednesday. Forecasters say it could raise water levels to as high as 8 to 12 feet in coastal areas of Florida, including Tampa Bay.

“Residents in that area should follow any advice given by local officials and evacuate if told to do so,” the NHC said, referring to the west coast of the peninsula.

Floridians are bracing for evacuations and impact

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has already expanded an emergency declaration to cover 51 of the state’s 67 counties and is warning people across the peninsula to prepare.

“Do not get wedded to the cone,” he tweeted on Sunday. “Floridians should prepare now for potential impacts, even if you live outside of the forecast cone. We recommend following all evacuation orders from your local officials.”

Florida Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said on Sunday that the state is preparing “for the largest evacuation that we have seen most likely since 2017 Hurricane Irma,” when nearly 6.8 million Floridians left their homes, resulting in statewide traffic jams.

But he also cautioned inland residents who don’t live in an evacuation zone or depend on electricity for medical needs that “it may be better for you to just stay in place.”

Several Florida counties have ordered evacuations starting as early as Monday morning.

Manatee County and Pasco County have ordered the evacuation of residents in certain low-lying areas, mobile homes and RVs, while Pinellas County ordered the evacuation of all residential healthcare facilities within certain zones.

Emergency officials are urging Floridians to look up their zone, plan an evacuation route and leave as soon as they’re ordered to do so.

Guthrie also said Floridians should take into account that many are still recovering from Helene: Did they use up their reserves of water, food, pet food? Do they need to buy fresh batteries? Have they restocked their supply kits to last each family member up to seven days?

“Please make sure you’re doing that today,” he said.

Lines started forming at gas stations on Sunday as people stocked up on fuel, water and other supplies, member station WGCU reported.

It notes that public school districts in many counties will be closed from Monday through at least Wednesday and that Florida Gulf Coast University — near Fort Myers — will close its campus Tuesday and Wednesday, after shifting to remote operations.

The St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport has already announced the cancellation of all Allegiant Air flights on Wednesday and Thursday.

Milton is forecast to spare other states submerged by Helene

Milton is poised to strike an area still recovering from Helene’s Category 4 winds and rains.

But it is expected to exit into the Atlantic Ocean, sparing many of the southeastern states that were hit hardest by Helene, including Georgia and the Carolinas.

More than 220 people were killed by Helene, one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005. The Associated Press reports that about half of the victims were in North Carolina, where historic flooding destroyed entire communities.

Abnormally warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, fueled by human-caused climate change, has made it easier for hurricanes to strengthen rapidly and bring even more wind and rain ashore.

Milton is the ninth hurricane to form in the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June through November. It’s the fifth to form since Sept. 25 alone, breaking a previous record of two during that period.

And this is officially the first time three simultaneous hurricanes have been recorded in the Atlantic Ocean after September, according to storm researcher Philip Klotzbach. In addition to Milton, Hurricanes Kirk and Leslie are also brewing.