Early in the morning at the National Guard aviation facility in Salisbury, N.C., big fork trucks moved among rows of hulking Chinook transport choppers and smaller, more nimble Black Hawks. They loaded the helicopters with FEMA pallets of bottled water and emergency meals.
Meanwhile, National Guard air crews — including those on loan from eight other states — were given their missions.
Chief Warrant Officer Nathaniel Ernst, the pilot of a Black Hawk that carried the sign Guard Chopper 6279, emerged from the briefing. Like the rest of the four-man crew, Ernst is a part-time Guard soldier called into full-time duty for the disaster. In civilian life, he flies for American Airlines.
"We're going to launch out of here, fly up northwest. I think we're looking at kind of the Spruce Pine - Burnsville, North Carolina area," he said, referring to two communities affected by Helene. "We were flying around there yesterday, and you could just see the devastation and the need."
That was the initial plan, anyway. It lasted a few minutes.
Once in the air, 6279 was redirected to the remote community of Creston, N.C. about 45 miles from Spruce Pine.
Ernst set the chopper down in a field near a community center, and one of the crew chiefs, Sgt. John Stevens, unbuckled and climbed out to check with the locals.
Quickly, a group of them formed a line to help the crew unload much of the cargo. About 2,500 pounds of water and about 500 pounds of the emergency meals — similar to military MREs — were packed in the rear of the passenger compartment.
One woman made a point to grab and hug as many crew members as she could. The hundreds of National Guard soldiers working in the disaster zone have been getting a lot of hugs.
Even before 6279 could lift off again, people had packed the supplies into the back of a pickup truck to deliver to homes in the Creston area.
The chopper then made short hop to tiny Ashe County Airport, which is usually quiet, but was nearly clogged with small civilian aircraft that had flown in from all over the country with donated supplies.
Pilots Todd Eby and Grant Baker flew a load down from Goshen, Indiana in a sleek Pilatus turboprop.
"We brought 1500 pounds down, and we're going to go get another load," Eby said.
The idea to help, he said, came as was watching the vice presidential debate. He was thinking about the disaster and suddenly the nation's partisan divide didn't seem that important.
"I got bored with all that mess, and I thought, you know, we could do something," he said.
The goods they and other pilots brought were sorted and stacked into neat piles in a hangar. Local volunteers like retiree Jim Liska of West Jefferson, N.C. backed in pickup trucks.
"We're hauling goods to fire departments all around town," Liska said, pausing from loading cases of baby wipes into his truck. "I'm not sure where I'm going next."
Liska said his home came through the storm fine, but many others weren't as lucky.
"There's some areas I've seen that it's devastating," he said. "And I've got a couple of friends, I haven't heard from them since this began. So, fingers crossed."
Around him, more than a dozen volunteers stacked and sorted the incoming supplies and helped load trucks.
The operation was part of what the Black Hawk's crew would see — and sometimes be a part of — all day as they crisscrossed the remote mountains of the state's northwest corner. A massive ad hoc distribution network for supplies has sprung up. Some are trucked in, some flown in. Some come from official sources like FEMA, others are donated by supermarket chains or through informal community collections across North Carolina and other states.
Throughout the day, the helicopter crew saw large distribution points at airports, as well as smaller ones at the churches, fire stations, and community centers they flew over.
An aerial survey reveals a random tragedy
At the Ashe County Airport, 6279 picked up two members of an 80-person FEMA search and rescue team that's tasked to go door to door in rustic Ashe County.
Zach Smith, one of the two team members, wanted to gather information for his colleagues on the ground and compile data FEMA will need in later phases of the recovery.
"We are going to follow the north fork of the New River headed west and south, doing an aerial reconnaissance down both sides of the river bank," he said, "looking for areas of large debris fields, looking for significantly damaged structures where we can then communicate back with our team to send targeted search teams on the ground to comb through those areas."
As the FEMA team members gave Ernst directions over headsets, he followed every twist of a branch of the New River, just above the trees.
Below unscrolled a random tragedy.
Many homes were fine, but next door there might be a house-shaped spot on the grass where another was swept away. The steep landscape meant a house that's just a couple hundred feet away from its next door neighbor horizontally could be ten or twenty feet lower … and in the path of the rushing water.
The shallow stream was tame again, but littered everywhere with parts of houses - from entire roofs and whole walls to window frames and sheets of crumpled metal. There were stray propane tanks and a Volkswagen Beetle stranded on a sandbar in the middle of the river.
After dropping the FEMA crew at the airport and picking up and delivering more supplies, the chopper crew gave an aerial tour to a county official, who snapped photos and took notes of the destruction. They dropped into an airport at Morganton, N.C. to pick up a network TV news crew stranded after a bird was sucked into the engine of another Black Hawk.
During the day, they also made unscheduled stops when they saw
something they wanted to investigate on the ground.
One such stop came after the crew spotted a family clearing and burning piles of debris on the banks of the Watauga River, not far from Boone, N.C.
Bobby Lovejoy said his family's house was high enough to escape damage, but that wasn't the case for all of his neighbors. He said he, his wife, and two preschool-age daughters watched from the side of the road above the river at the height of the flood.
"We saw houses floating down, and this guy had a little cabin over here, it flipped up and rolled down," he said. "All kinds of stuff. It was crazy."
Lovejoy said he was surprised by the magnitude of the destruction.
"I feel like you'd have gotten more warning about it," he said. "We didn't know it was going to be so bad."
Lovejoy said they had enough supplies for now, so the Black Hawk lifted off headed back to Salisbury. It was almost dark when it arrived.
Ernst climbed out of the cockpit, pulled off his helmet, and thought about the chaos of his workday. The mission had changed multiple times. The chopper had flown over two states and endless miles of twisting rivers. Eleven takeoffs, eleven landings.
"You know you've got to keep going because everyone else is struggling right now, and so you put in the hours to do it," Ernst said. "You get a mission, you figure out what needs to happen to get that mission done, and you do it."
And the next day, they would have to do it again, along with dozens of other National Guard, active-duty and civilian helicopter crews.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
