By mule and helicopter, volunteers deliver aid to Helene victims
World
By mule and helicopter, volunteers deliver aid to Helene victims
ASHEVILLE, North Carolina (Reuters) - An army of private volunteers including mule drivers and helicopter pilots are helping deliver supplies and rescue stranded victims after one of the deadliest storms in recent US history ripped through the mountains of western North Carolina.
One week after Helene slammed into the Florida Panhandle and devastated wide swaths of half a dozen states, untold thousands remained cut off around Asheville, North Carolina, with many roads impassable and telecommunications equipment damaged or destroyed. The mountain communities' isolation has complicated the massive relief effort undertaken by federal, state and local officials.
Many residents have stepped up to help, including Ben Miller, a real estate agent and father of two from the Winston-Salem area, who has been driving supplies into the affected area.
"It's been pretty intense," he said. "This seemed like it couldn't happen here."
Miller dropped off 27,000 bottles of water in Marion, just outside Asheville, on Sunday. The next day, the 44-year-old brought aid to Spruce Pine, a remote town where he has family roots.
"I know how hard some of those areas are hard to get to when it's 60 degrees outside and totally dry. So as this thing started to unfold, I could really envision that there were a lot of places they were going to have trouble getting to," Miller said.
Miller gathered donations from businesses and families from his son's soccer team, including large totes for distributing water for cleaning, washing and flushing toilets, he said.
In addition to individual efforts, a number of volunteer groups are supplementing official channels of disaster relief, a long tradition that includes the so-called Cajun Navy, an ad hoc flotilla of civilians who helped rescue people stranded in Louisiana after 2005's Hurricane Katrina.
A volunteer group of private pilots, the Altitude Project, says it raised $200,000 this week to fund operations, said member Andrew Everhart, who owns an insurance agency. His fellow volunteers include a professional race car driver, the owner of a distribution and logistics company, and others who work in commercial real estate and social media content creation.
"It's a lot of guys that have jets and helicopters and a lot of connections, and we just decided to lock arms and create our own thing and help people out," Everhart said.
The Altitude Project has been running supplies from a 25,000-square-foot (2,320-square-meter) warehouse in Charlotte to communities near Asheville, where about 20 inches (50 cm) of rain fell in a matter of hours late last week.
