By Karl Plume and Nathan Frandino
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 U.S. 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 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.
"It usually takes the government three, four, five days to coordinate a response, so we just decided to hop into action," Everhart said.
Helene, which has killed more than 200 people, ranks as the most deadly named storm to hit the mainland United States since Katrina, though the 2005 storm claimed a much higher death toll, estimated at 1,400 in a 2023 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In the wake of Helene, the number of people unaccounted for remains unclear. Officials put the number in the hundreds earlier in the week, but that has come down as communications are slowly restored and stranded storm victims are located.
The official response has included 1,000 active-duty military personnel ordered to help by President Joe Biden. In addition, 4,800 people from the federal workforce and 6,000 National Guard personnel from 12 states have been deployed, according to the White House.
Another 600 search-and-rescue personnel were due to arrive and supplement the untold number of state and local rescue and relief teams.
Volunteers are stepping up as well, including Tennessee-based flight company Aeroluxe Aviation, which brought a ground crew and three Robinson 44 helicopters to the area, co-owner Brook Barzyk said.
Aeroluxe has carried out an estimated 150 deliveries of water, food, baby items, fuel and Starlink satellite systems, Barzyk said, with each helicopter able to carry 400 pounds (180 kg) of supplies.
"When we're landing in some of the communities where we're dealing with residents of the communities, everyone has been extremely thankful, and very, very helpful, to a point where we have to monitor them rushing the helicopter because they're so excited," Barzyk said.
Aircraft components maker Acme Aero said in a Facebook (NASDAQ:META) post it recovered 144 people on Monday, 120 of them over the age of 68. It also planned to deliver up to 200 Starlink satellite systems to rural fire departments.
Others have gone overland on foot - and hoof.
The Mountain Mule Packer Ranch in Raeford, North Carolina, is running mule trains of supplies into isolated areas, according to its Facebook posts.
Mountain Mule Packers specializes in "extreme terrain pack animal supply trains" and services to military units operating in remote and high-altitude areas, according to their website.
A local business owner, Dave Gindlesperger, 60, joined others in the mountains about 45 miles (72 km) northeast of Asheville to search homes. In some cases, the houses had disappeared, washed away by floodwaters.
In other areas, entire communities were destroyed. "Some we went to, and there was nothing," he said.
Riding on all-terrain vehicles, Gindlesperger and others cut their way through downed trees with chainsaws to get to houses.
"Yesterday was the first day that I could sit down and cry and weep and just, you know, wrap my mind around this," said Gindlesperger, a North Carolina native who runs three furniture and household goods stores, including one in Boone that was destroyed.
(This story has been refiled to remove an extraneous word in paragraph 6)