The federal government would like to issue a correction. Hurricane Michael, the historic storm that devastated the Florida Panhandle in October 2018, was not actually a Category 4 storm when it made landfall, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on Friday. It was a Category 5 storm, with wind speeds of about 160 miles per hour.

Even when it was a Category 4 storm, Hurricane Michael was already one of the strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States. But the new classification means it was even more historic than previously believed. It is, according to NOAA, “the first hurricane to make landfall in the United States as a category 5 since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and only the fourth on record.” It is also “the strongest hurricane landfall on record in the Florida Panhandle and only the second known category 5 landfall on the northern Gulf coast.”

Michael’s upgraded category will surely attract attention because of the role of climate change in extreme weather: The likelihood of such destructive events increases with every part per million of carbon we add to the atmosphere. (We are currently at about 412 parts per million, the most in human history). “I fear the highly unusual is the new normal,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben told me via email. And a Category 5 hurricane making landfall is the definition of unusual. Or, at least, it should be.

But NOAA’s report is also important because it inadvertently highlights how terrible the federal government’s response has been. Six months since Michael, much of the Florida Panhandle is still a shambles. And residents of the most affected areas feel largely forgotten by the public and the federal government, which has not yet passed a federal disaster relief bill for areas affected by Hurricane Michael.

In the nearly destroyed city of Mexico Beach, for example, “thousands of people are still desperate for permanent housing, competing not only with one another for the scarce supply of rental units, but with construction workers who have come into the area,” The Washington Post reported last week. “Many residents are living in damaged homes or trailers unfit for human habitation. Some live in tents. Homeowners are frustrated by stingy insurance companies and bewildering government paperwork, and they’re wary of shady contractors.”