CHARLOTTE – A Charlotte woman’s window cracked during Hurricane Helene. It was a small crack that only cost $200 to repair.

Susan Lewis can’t believe FEMA offered to put her and three others up in a SouthPark hotel for a month instead of footing the $200 bill.

“I read it over and over again and thought, ‘What am I missing here?'” Lewis told Channel 9’s Joe Bruno. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

The damaged window was in her Forest Ridge condo. Because FEMA offers assistance to Mecklenburg County residents, Helene requested funding to address the problem. She says FEMA denied the claim and told her to file it with her homeowners insurance company. She ended up having to pay $200 out of pocket for the repairs because she has a $1,000 insurance deductible.

“I live on Social Security,” she said. “I’m, you know, a 74-year-old woman, and all these little extra expenses really add up.”

Although FEMA didn’t want to repair the window, she said the agency offered her something else: a month-long stay for up to four people in a hotel. One of the hotels is the SouthPark Marriott. The average price is almost $200 per night.

The hotel even told her that she could get two rooms if she needed space for four people. Instead of paying $200 for window repairs, FEMA offered to spend thousands on a hotel she didn’t need.

“It makes me so sad to think that they may be turning away people with legitimate claims who desperately need them,” she said. “I mean, when I hear about people living in tents and freezing, I think they could use a hotel room, and it just breaks my heart how bad things are here.”

Susan didn’t accept FEMA’s hotel offer, but said she tried calling the agency to work things out. It was unsuccessful.

“When I called, I said twice, would you please go off script, and I know you’re a reasonable person,” she said. “I said, just listen to me. And they just kept reading from the script.”

A FEMA spokesman declined to comment specifically on the Lewis case. They said money for hotel rooms was approved for most registrants out of an abundance of caution and concern for the safety of survivors, given the large scale and unknown impact of the disaster on roads, bridges, utilities and other infrastructure.

FEMA says insurance is the first step in disaster recovery and that FEMA legally cannot provide duplicate benefits for losses covered by insurance.

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