Inside a helicopter bringing lifesaving relief to N.C.’s storm-ravaged counties

ABOVE ASHE COUNTY, N.C. — Five days after Helene decimated this region, a lone man remained stranded and needed help. He was waving his arms next to a big X made from debris and spray paint. Nearby was a tent, set up on a concrete pad surrounded by mud.

Yards away, the slate gray water of the New River rushed by. All around him was detritus left by Helene and the floods that followed: trees with their root balls torn out, house materials snapped and scattered by the wind and water.

Spotting the man from their Black Hawk helicopter, North Carolina National Guard pilots Dylan Ebert and Garrett Duerr made tight circles, looking for a place to set down. But the ground was too soft to land the helicopter safely. The man didn’t appear to be hurt, and pickup trucks had managed to reach the area on mud-covered roads. The pilots called in the man’s position to rescuers on the ground — had people not been nearby, they would have hovered and sent a crew member down — and continued on, scanning the riverbanks for others.

The drone of helicopters has become routine across western North Carolina in the wake of Helene. National Guard and civilian aircraft now crisscross the skies of a region where roads and bridges have been destroyed and people are trapped. The helicopters are delivering supplies, picking up people who need rescuing, dropping off firefighters and search-and-rescue crews and radioing for assistance for others who can be more easily accessed from the ground.

Private planes from across the southeast United States have also swarmed the area, flying donated supplies to small airports in the hills. The airspace has gotten so crowded that one Army pilot commented over the radio that it was busier than flying into Newark International Airport.

The morning’s clouds began lifting around 10 a.m., and helicopters started taking off from a National Guard airfield in Salisbury, N.C., about an hour north of Charlotte, to ferry food and water to mountains that have been difficult or impossible to access by vehicle.

They included a Black Hawk crew from the North Carolina National Guard’s “Kill Devils” helicopter unit, which carried two Washington Post journalists as the helicopter flew over the fields and forests and requests for rescue missions crackled over the radio. An elderly man with diabetes needed to be evacuated. A woman had run out of food and water and needed to leave her home.

“I have no idea how this area’s going to look,” Duerr said over the radio. He’d been flying for several days straight but hadn’t been to Ashe County, a rural area in the state’s northwest.

The flying was tricky. The skies were clear, but the steep valleys where many of the region’s towns are located don’t offer many places to land.

The day’s first mission was to deliver water and rations to Jefferson, N.C., the seat of Ashe County. Police had cleared a parking lot for the helicopter to land. It was too small and ringed by telephone wires. The pilots tried to land in a field, but just before touchdown two horses ran out into the open and the crew quickly lifted back off.

Finally, the Black Hawk was able to land at an airport nearby. As soon as the blades stopped spinning, volunteers swarmed to take off the water and military rations the troops had brought in.

Duerr got out of the helicopter and removed his helmet, his hair slicked with sweat. Jefferson had been “by far the most stressful” place to land yet.

The Ashe County Airport usually gets just one or two planes a day. On Tuesday it had 54 and on Wednesday afternoon they were expecting to have 70 by the end of the day, said Andrea Reeves, a real estate agent from the area who has been coordinating the distribution of supplies from the airport.

“I’ve not been out of this hangar since Sunday,” Reeves said between phone calls with pilots and donors.

The planes had filled the hangar with food, water and pet supplies. Volunteers loaded pickup trucks, which fanned out across the county to bring the necessities to people affected by the storm.

“I am in real estate, this is not my job,” Reeves said. “I’m more than happy to do it, just because of the situation.”

“The news media attention is on Asheville instead of these more rural areas,” said Dustin Melton, a nurse anesthetist from Rockingham, N.C., who flew in with his own red-and-white Cessna loaded with supplies people in his town had donated. “A fellow pilot told me that he was going to do it. I said, ‘Well I have a plane, I might as well do it as well.’”

The Black Hawk lifted off and stormed back to Salisbury, flying over Christmas tree farms and mountain homes perched on ridgelines.

After refueling, they took a group of firefighters to relieve colleagues of theirs who had been working for days in Bat Cave, a cutoff town in western North Carolina. The returning firefighters looked exhausted as they loaded their gear in a truck and drove off to get some rest.

But the day wasn’t over for the helicopter crew. Packing dinners of food delivered from a Cracker Barrel, they flew back to Ashe County, a route totally changed as clouds began to form over the mountains and changing light illuminated the farms and forests below in a new way as the afternoon waned.

At the Ashe County Airport, they picked up a search-and-rescue team that would help survey the northern part of the county, figuring out what resources might be needed and whether anyone needed immediate evacuations.

As the pilots followed the slow, looping turns of the river, the two young helicopter crew chiefs, Jarrett Barnes and Leonardo Lopez, leaned out of their windows, scanning the banks, taking photos and making notes.

There were whole hillsides covered in smashed trees. Entire chunks of riverside had been torn out. Anywhere close to the waterline had been swamped in mud. Sheds, porches, kayaks and cars had been slung about by the floodwaters. A recreational vehicle was flipped on its side.

RVs close to the river had been damaged, contrasting with the bigger stone-clad mountain cottages higher up the hills that largely looked unscathed. But with washed-out roads, destroyed power lines and a lack of water in some places, it’s unclear how anyone will be able to live sustainably in this area and others like it for weeks.

After making one last, low turn over the waving man and his tent, the helicopter continued its way back down the river, dropping off the search-and-rescue crew again along with more supplies at Ashe County Airport.

The sun had nearly set and the gas gauge was low when the crew landed back in Salisbury.

The crew turned back to their helicopter, doing their after-mission checks. The next morning, they flew back out to the river near where the man stood. The crew confirmed that roads to the area they had scouted were clear and that local emergency personnel had access, a spokesperson for the National Guard said. It’s unclear what happened to the waving man.