‘Craziest thing I've ever heard': Combating misinformation about major hurricanes

As many throughout the Southeast work to get back on their feet after two major hurricanes, others across the country are working to combat a storm of misinformation.

For Margaret Donabed, Thursday brought another day of assessing the damage. Donabed's home in St. Pete Beach, Florida, was heavily damaged last week by Hurricane Milton.

"It does feel surreal, and sometimes, I still get really mad when I think about what happened and what it's going to take to put it all back the way it was," said the resident of Hull, Massachusetts.

Hurricane Milton, and Hurricane Helene before that, have had devastating impacts, from loss of life to destroying homes and businesses. Almost immediately after, false claims started to spread that the federal government created the hurricanes to target certain voters ahead of the Presidential Election.

Donabed can't believe someone would question the storms that have left so much devastation and destruction.

"That is the craziest thing I've ever heard," she said. "They are real, they are real. Just in my 1/10th of a mile diameter of our home, we lost two neighbors."

Former Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, president of the Alliance for Climate Transition, said misinformation "poses the biggest threat to climate transition."

This week, ACT released a misinformation tracer . In the works for the past year, the tracker is a real-time fact checker about climate issues. Type in a claim, and the tracker takes you to nonpartisan s detailing facts about the case.

"Our goal is just to put the correct, corroborated information from reliable sources out to the public to read," Curtatone said. "We may not convince everybody to flip from being a non-believer to a believer, but at least neutralize and get them to ask questions, because if we don't, the lie becomes the truth."