Government officials were forced to flee a North Carolina county amid reported threats of armed civilians out “hunting” for hurricane relief workers.

On Saturday afternoon, the Washington Post reports a U.S. Forest Service official sent an email to several different federal agencies warning “National Guard troops had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying [they] were out hunting FEMA,” the government body responsible for overseeing emergency response management.

The message, which has been confirmed as authentic, added that incident management teams “have been notified and are coordinating the evacuation of all assigned personnel” in Rutherford County.

While it’s understood that officials had been given the all-clear to return to the area by Sunday afternoon, similar threats were reported in Ashe County on Sunday, such that the local Sheriff’s office warned FEMA had again been forced to “pause their process” while an assessment of the risk was carried out, Axios reports.

These incidents offer the starkest evidence yet of the havoc caused by the rampant spread of misinformation as to the origin of Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the nature efforts to contain the damage caused.

Many of the conspiracy theories surrounding the storms and the government’s response have been spearheaded by Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, last week blamed nefarious (albeit unidentified) electoral forces for “controlling the weather” by means of extra-terrestrial laser technology.

Other tinfoil-hatted pundits have suggested the weather was somehow engineered as part of a conspiracy to provide political cover to megacorporations engaged in lithium mining, as well as spreading fake reports of citizens being deliberately abandoned in the rubble.

Donald Trump has also fanned the flames, pushing unfounded allegations that the Democratic Party is deliberately withholding disaster relief from Republican voters, and that emergency funds have been diverted to undocumented migrants.

With FEMA already having been forced to set up a “rumor response” page on its website, the recent reports of militias roaming the hills in North Carolina is sadly not the only evidence of ways in which these disinformation narratives are adversely affecting the emergency relief efforts.

“It’s terrible because a lot of these folks who need assistance are refusing it because they believe the stuff people are saying about FEMA and the government,” Riva Duncan, a former Forest Service official based in Asheville, North Carolina, told the Washington Post.

“And it’s sad because they are probably the ones who need the help the most.”