Prep Comms - Hurricane Helene: AAR Upstate SC pt1

Episode Date: November 2, 2024

Here's a timeline rundown from our Helene Prepping and Recovery After preparing gas and propane midweek, we ensured all equipment was charged and ready. At 0400 on the 27th, my mini comm hub was active. By 0630, local repeaters went offline, and at 0730, we lost power. With severe winds raging, we canceled work, activated our generator at 0800, and monitored fire and ham bands on the BTech 6X2Pro. Once the rain subsided, we utilized the Simple Pump, though filling the tub beforehand had slipped my mind. We assessed farm damage, surveyed nearby areas, then focused on family, using GMRS almost exclusively. Around day 2, the local club activated the backup 2m repeater. We quickly learned the importance of organizing supplies, checking on neighbors, and securing water for extended family. Thankfully, AT&T held steady, and Starlink was invaluable. Our generator was essential, though a wiring fix was needed post-storm. By Sunday, life resumed as near-normal, with only brief setbacks. Reports of coax internet still remain down. Fiber proved resilient yet delicate, and Verizon was unreliable. Ultimately, radio communication, though modest in our setup, was a lifeline for many in WNC, showcasing its critical role during a crisis. KM4ACK Helene Net Video! (Must Watch!) BTech 6x2Pro : https://amzn.to/4htGNTj Baofeng UV21: https://amzn.to/4fp4VFr BTech GMRS V1: https://amzn.to/3YZaPY5 Btech MURS V2: https://amzn.to/40v2Hzr WLN Micro Handi : https://amzn.to/4elglss Water Bob : https://amzn.to/4etzQiB Ecoflow 2700 : https://amzn.to/4f7OaOR Starlink (1 mo free for you and me)  

Hey, welcome in to the prep comms podcast. It's the after action report from hurricane Helene that none of you have been looking for. I'm kidding. I know I've heard from a lot of you. Thank you very much for checking in on us. We're doing great. And finally getting around to getting this put together for you. I'd kind of anticipated this being one of our first video podcasts, but life keeps showing up.

And generally life is great. So I don't want to discourage that, but we'll get around to it. We're getting close. Hey, I'm Cale Nelson, Caleb Nelson, K4CDN, WRVR237. I'm an amateur radio operator, have been for, I don't know, a decade or so, and always been a comms geek. If this is your first time ever coming by the PrepComs podcast, welcome in. It's a show that I decided to begin a couple of months ago to help everyone out there who's interested in preparedness begin to make their best decisions for communications for whatever they're prepping for. I can tell you that I was not necessarily prepping for a tropical storm to blow through my farm, but it did. So thankfully, some of the preps that we had made over the last 25, 30 years came in quite handy. You know, I did learn a lot through this

whole thing, and that's what I want to talk about in this episode. But first, let me just give a shout out to all those folks up in Western North Carolina. We're still praying for you guys. I know that things are progressing kind of slow and other ways are progressing fast, but we're down here praying for you. We're doing what we can to help. Our water filters are still on sale at the Hub City Mercantile. That's the podcast sponsor here, guys. It's a business that my wife and I own in downtown Spartanburg, South Carolina.

And you can find us online where we ship for free all over the U.S. at hubcitymercantile.com. Now back to Hurricane Helene. She came on shore, I believe it was a Wednesday night into Thursday morning, or Thursday night into Friday. Thursday night into Friday morning is when we began feeling the effects here in the upstate of South Carolina. If you look at the map of the eastern coast of the U.S., I am in South Carolina in a town called Spartanburg. I live on the very far outskirts and very rural living down this way. And I kind of knew something was going to, that we were going to be affected in some way. I can't tell you besides looking at the maps, but I honestly thought that the storm was going to wobble a little bit to the left. Then I woke up, I guess it would have been Thursday morning, and I told my wife, I said,

it's wobbling back to the right, which meant back to the east. And that Wednesday, I had decided to go ahead and fill up all the cars. I've got multiple drivers in my household, so everybody filled up their car. Everybody made sure they were topped off all the way. Got all the handy talkies out. Made sure they were ready to go. The few backup batteries we actually have here, we made sure those guys were fully charged, still on trickle. And I went by and swapped out my empty LP or propane bottle.

I guess that's a or propane bottle. I guess that's a 20-pound bottle, and picked up a spare, so I'd have two. So I don't know, maybe a little bit less than a year ago, I bought us a Blackstone grill, I guess it's a 36 or 48 from Costco. We have cooked on that thing like crazy, and I can tell you on a storm, it's amazing to have as well, big props to Blackstone. So we had plenty of gasoline, we thought. And we also had a lot of propane to cook with, if necessary. Didn't really know that we would feel the effects in the fashion that we did.

There are a lot of reports out that state that in the state of South Carolina, Spartanburg County was hit the hardest. Now, we didn't have the most to lose power. We didn't have the most folks to lose internet. We didn't have the most folks to lose whatever. But we did, I guess, with storm severity, we caught the brunt of it. And it was a pretty sad day for a lot of folks. A lot of people still, here we are, just to date the podcast, a month and a lot of folks. A lot of people still, here we are just to date the podcast,

a month and a couple of days beyond the storm. And we still have people with trees in their yard, trees on their houses. It's not a good look. It's very hard for a lot of people right now. And we just got like sustained winds of 40 miles an hour for five hours. We didn't get the mudslides and the rivers running over and destroying towns, nothing like that. It was nothing like you've seen on the news for western North Carolina. But there was quite a bit of damage here. There's even reports, and they've been unofficial and I can't find the right person to talk to, that there were no less than 12 tornadoes measured in my county. And if you look at some of the destructions and path of destructions,

those were not straight line winds. It was amazing some of the destruction that we saw. So either way, let me just get back timeline in here. I got all the gas, got ready to go, set the family down before, I guess this would have been Thursday night before bed and said, look, about two o'clock tomorrow morning, it's going to get really windy. We're probably going to have a storm. Not really sure how long it's going to last. The power could go out, but it shouldn't be a big deal. I think we're going to be okay. Just be aware that if you

hear the wind blowing like crazy, that that's what's going on. I'll be awake, I'm sure. And I was to see what's going on. So got everything ready about four o'clock that morning, that Friday morning, I believe that was the 27th. I had to get out of the bed because the wind was just, man, it was blowing like, like you have a really bad thunderstorm here in the upstate and you get harsh winds for maybe three to five minutes, maybe 10 minutes at the most. But by now, this thing's been blowing for two hours and it's just going to beat the band. It was very out of character for our weather. And I'm 51 years old nearly.

And this is the first time I've ever lived through this where I live. All right. So I got up. I got my laptop out. Starlink was still running. Um, I was able to turn the television on the Roku, the weather channel. I had a laptop on with radar running there. Um, the house power was on. So I had my, what we call an armchair station and amateur radio. So let me explain that real quick. It's kind of an old term because back in the day, Papa would sit in his recliner and watch television. And of course, I think it happens when

you get past 40, you find your favorite chair and that's where you kind of live. Well, in the amateur radio hobby, a lot of the guys have a secondary station in their living room or their den, whatever you call it. We argue about that at my house, but we have a secondary radio station that's connected to an antenna on our chimney, and it's right beside our couch, which is where everything feeds in from the chimney. Our Starlink, our television antenna, the amateur radio backup antenna, all those things feed in right in the same area. So I've got a station there with a power supply and a Yaesu 7250, because I know somebody wants to know. That's a dual band VHF-UHF amateur radio transmitter. So that dude was connected, had it running, listening to the local repeater. An Elmer of

mine who, an Elmer, by the way, is a seasoned veteran of the amateur radio hobby, K8HID. His name's Gary, great friend. He was actually driving to work in this thing. It was crazy to listen to him driving in. And we were kind of five or six of us that were talking, talking about the wind, talking about the storm, talking about the track, and monitoring just that kind of stuff. The state repeater system was linked and was listing there as well. I had a couple of handies and my Uniden Home Patrol 2 scanner running. So I mean, I had comms everywhere. It felt like an episode of this podcast in real life. And I think I even shared that on Instagram about one or two days into the show or into the event. But either way, I had a

little mini comm running there. So I had radar. I had multiple nets running on or listening to multiple nets, participating in one, uh, listening to the fire department, dispatch, county sheriff, EMS, all of it going about four o'clock in the morning. Carla gets up about four 35 o'clock. Um, we're just kind of listening, kind of paying attention. Some of my kids are coming in and out cause they're like, why is all this noise happening? Storms just blowing like crazy. Still no daylight yet, but we're getting closer to daylight. And all of a sudden all amateur radio traffic stopped on our local repeater.

And I thought, well, Gary must be at work or Steve must have turned his radio off or, or whatever. But it turns out that our repeater for the local amateur radio club is on an 850-foot tower at about 625 feet. It's got a remarkable coverage for a lowland repeater. And that whole system, that whole tower, that whole transmitting site, because it's a television transmitting site as well for the state television channel. It all went down. It lost power. And I guess there's not a generator. I heard there was, heard there wasn't. It didn't work for a couple of days. So it must have

something really big happened over there. And we lost all of that. We did have repeaters, other local repeaters that we could access down in Union, South Carolina, over in Greenville, South Carolina, the Mount Mitchell repeater, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. So we didn't lose amateur connectivity, but we did lose our primary repeaters in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Now that was quite a shock for a lot of people. A lot of people live and die by one singular repeater. They never venture out or talk to other people. They just monitor one frequency, and that's the only one. And, man, there's some folks that were struggling because of that.

It's always great to have your radios programmed where you can access other localized repeaters or semi-local. Um, I personally, and this is kind of down a rabbit trail, but I'll go ahead and throw it in here. I always personally program my radios. Every one of them is exactly the same. Number one, but number two, the higher you go up in the channelized frequencies or the channels on the radio, the further away from home you are. So basically, channel three is home base. Channel four is home base number two. Channel five is a little further out, but still pretty close to home. And it's that mentality that I program with.

And it makes it easier when your primary goes down to just click up the band a little bit and find the next closest operating machine, which we did. So 6.30ish that morning, the amateur radio repeater went down. About 7.30 that morning, all power in our house went down. And this was where I've got to stop myself and get way down in my notes to come back to this. But this was where this one hour is two hour window that I was three hours, maybe that I was awake and up and going and realized really how bad it was that I didn't act more than I probably should have acted. And meaning that I should have been in there filling the bathtub up. Why did I? I mean, I could see the storm on radar. It was terrible outside and it wasn't giving up anytime soon.

I don't know why I didn't fill my bathtub up with cold water while the well pump was running. I just didn't. And we'll talk about that later. So I kind of got distracted in the keeping up with what was happening. I was trying to monitor the fire frequencies and to see just where at in the county the damages were. Down here, we didn't really get any calls, but again, we're extremely rural and nobody was out. It was so bad outside, nobody was out trying to go to work. There was no interstate traffic. So we didn't really have a lot of calls on the front end of the things, but man, up in the north end of the county, it was, it was a pandemonium. So anyway, uh, get that out there,

but I got distracted. I got distracted by hanging out with my fam. I got distracted by listening to the radios. I got distracted cause you know, the storm was pretty intense and weren't ready for that kind of thing i even i even got distracted by work because that was a work day for us i'm the installation manager i've got about 30 guys that work for me on 11 different crews and um they were all texting hey what are we doing today and i'm like look out the window um you know sometimes common sense isn't common so i had to like tell everybody we had to like tell everybody, we're not going to work today. We're not going to work boss, man. Uh, he was completely out of the, out of the loop. No one knew that he had a monster tree through his house in about 150 trees down in

his yard. So, uh, he was preoccupied and his phone wouldn't work. Um, Verizon went down very early in the storm locally. We never once lost service with AT&T. Now, I can tell you that we didn't always have a good solid internet connection to look at Instagram or to scroll Facebook, but we could always call and text with our AT&T phones. Now, AT&T is the only service provider on my farm that you can have a reliable signal with where we live. And that's why we've been with them for well over a decade now because of that fact. And they were also the only ones in Spartanburg that stayed up 99.99% of the time. Verizon was terrible. T-Mobile was okay. And those are just some of the reports that I've heard from folks. About 7.30 in the morning, we lost power here at the house. The wind was still

blowing like crazy. The rain was falling basically sideways. And it got dark real quick in the house, but not a problem. We've got candles and lanterns and all sorts of stuff. So, you know, I mean, you can be afraid if you want to, but you don't have to be. And, uh, we had things in place that we knew the storm was coming. We were prepared, even if just a little bit. Uh, so we had our lanterns and we're able to, you know, get some light around the house. Uh, everybody was informed, do not flush the toilet unless it's real bad kind of a thing. And, um, then at this moment I decided, Hey, we should probably fill the bathtub up with what's left in our hot water heater. So we did that and we got probably 20 or 30 gallons

of water in the tub that we eventually used, you know, for toilet toilet use. Um, man, it would have been great to have filled that dude up to the brim with cold water. And we would have had some hot water to bathe with, or at least some lukewarm water later that day or the first, first of the next day. A big mistake on my part. I even have a water bob. That's the big, um, big water bag you put in your tub that you can just fill it up and you don't like slosh it around and, or have open water in the tub. It's in a container basically. I'll show note a lot of this stuff by the way, but, uh, yeah, we, we couldn't find it and didn't even think about it till afterwards. Um, and that was a, um, that was another thing we'll talk about in a minute. So

power goes down at seven 30. Now everybody's up and, um, you know, Chick-fil-A is not operating. The music store is not operating. The hair salon's closed. I've closed the flooring store. Um, so we're all home and we have no power, but we have a generator that we had just filled up with gas two days prior, had gas cans on hand, ready to go. So, um, my son and I, my youngest son and I went out and got the generator running and it was, you know, I mean, I don't live on the coast and I've been in some thunderstorms, but man, you get real, you get real wet real quick when you're out in a tropical storm and the rain's falling sideways.

You're out there 10 or 15 minutes. You got to come in and take all your clothes off because they're all soaking wet. I mean, to the bone, water running down your back, even with your best raincoat on. It was wild. Totally wild. I got the generator running and connected it to the house through the breaker generator cutoff. Started it back up through the breaker generator cutoff. I don't know what happened. I had no idea what was going on. The house was wired for the generator. We had tested it before. It worked fine. This is why you should test more than once every two years your stuff. And so the generator we bought, long story, maybe I'll get to it at the end of the show here. But I took the generator.

Actually, I won't do that this show. I'll do it the next one. We took the generator, got it running. It came with this really nice extension cable that would give you four or five outlets on the end, ran it in split off, got our refrigerator and freezer back online. Um, had a couple of lamps and a fan running. And, um, so the generator was able to carry us, uh, throughout the whole time when we ran it, we didn't run it overnight just because we were tired of hearing it. Um, So generator was great.

Started at eight o'clock that morning. But I got to tell you, I got to give props to B-Tech, man. A couple of years ago, I had bought some gear from them. I needed some stuff and they were really great to deal with. They recently came out with a UV Pro, UV Pro Handy Talkie. It's an amateur radio. It can be used by anybody, I guess, but it's made for amateur radio. We'll talk about those later, maybe in the next program as I do a follow-up with this. My family and I had purchased for all of us the B-Tech 6X2 Pro, and it's a DMR digital dual band. It's a very complicated radio, but it's a very powerful radio in the fact

of all that it can do and mated with the ZBM2 antenna, it's even more powerful in its performance. So, uh, those basically became our go-to radios for the entire time, at least for me. Um, and then we had Balfangs and WLNs and I'll list the radios we had but I can tell you this a little bit after we got the rain started we got the generator started right the rain never quit for a while it finally did quit it's gorgeous following that we decided hey now's the time to go out put the simple pump in service so we popped the lid on the well. We connected our simple pump handle and were able to pump water into our pressure tank, which gives us pressurized water inside the house for the shower or for the washing machine or whatever.

And we actually used our washing machine powered by the generator and water pumping by my eldest son, Eli, who was amazing. All my kids did so great. I can't wait to tell you how great it was. Oh, they were. It wasn't great, but they were. We got out and looked around. We had some damage to the shack, the barn up there. We had about nine or ten trees down.

Got in the pickup. Took a spin for about ten miles around just to see the damage that we needed to kind of anticipate getting into town if we had to go. Lots of lines down, trees on the road, trees on houses. Primarily down here, we did have trees on houses, but the vast majority of trees were in the road. And thank God for the rednecks with side-by-sides and chainsaws as they got right to work with their bobcats as well and opened their roads up. had a lot of power lines down on the road or very low hanging so our fire trucks weren't able to do a whole lot thankfully we had no big fires but our brush

trucks were able to be used you know the smaller pickup truck style and it worked great we got on with our family life i mean we just picked up My house is cleaner now than it's been in about a year. Our yard looks better now than it has in multiple years. And it was because there were no distractions here. We had nothing to do but work together and try to clean the place up to get prepared for reality, the real life to come back because the reality we were in was it was a little harsh at times so no power for days i think we went maybe six days five days something like that and i know that's pretty minimal but just to tell you that's where we were um the backup two meter amateur radio repeater came up on the second or third day after it went down and it operated like we knew it would it did great a couple of days later the state got power restored back to the transmitting facility

and the big repeater came back online. So that was pretty fantastic. We did have extra gasoline. I didn't have enough. I used to have a lot of spare gasoline. And then after Carla being sick and then the lawnmower and just never filling them back up and whatever, you just run low and whatever. Uh, you know, you just, you just run low on stuff. So I had some, I didn't have to go buy gasoline because we had all topped

off, but I did. And, um, there were some places that you would sit for three and four hours to get gasoline. If you would read the Facebook post online, or maybe talk to somebody on your ham radio, you'd find that you could wait 15 minutes somewhere else and buy gasoline. So I didn't have to wait. I think the longest I waited in line for gasoline was about 30 minutes. And again, I'm not like bragging about that or I'm so smart. And I'm just telling you my experience because I know there are a lot of people that set for a daytime all day waiting to get gasoline. And this is just how it went down in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Gas and supplies. It looked just like you think it would look. You know, you've read the prepper novels.

You've seen the pictures from the snowstorms or the hurricanes. There was no bread. There was no meat. Basically, all the grocery stores had to go in after a day or two. Those who didn't have backup power and throw everything away. And they did. I mean, it was so weird. I've seen it before. Saw it again. I mean, it was so weird. I've seen it before,

saw it again. Toilet paper was blasted. There was nobody, you know, nobody had toilet paper. I guess people don't keep toilet paper in their house. I don't know how that works, but either way, it was, it was a mess. The Walmarts opened when they could, and they were limiting people in the stores, which appreciated it was cash only by the way hey make a note it's cash only when stuff gets in the fan need to say that out loud and thankfully we had atm some cash out we don't keep a lot you don't have a lot of cash it's not hard to not keep a lot of cash but we we were able to get some and have in hand here um one of the things and i'm probably gonna have to come to some of this in a, in a

follow-up, um, that was a Friday. Saturday was just kind of a recoup kind of a day. Sunday morning, had to go to work. Normally never work on Sundays. They canceled church. People couldn't get out guys. I mean, the roads were blocked. I mean, trees were on houses. It was, um, it wasn't pandemonium even on Sunday. Um, but I was able to get to my office, which so weird. It had power, it had hot water and it never lost internet connectivity. But I met, uh, the boss man, their sales manager. We went through trying to figure out what we were going to do because, uh, all of my guys are independent contractors. They need to work. Uh, all the salespeople sales they just had made, or we had scheduled, a lot of those people had trees on their houses, or you couldn't get to

the neighborhood, or the power lines were down, or whatever. So we had to make some creative decisions. And Monday morning, we went to work. And you know, we haven't missed a day of work since. That's pretty amazing. We're in the flooring business. I work for a flooring company as the installation manager. And we installed floors through this whole thing. So weird. Now we did a lot of tear out too. So don't misunderstand me, but thankfully my guys were able to stay busy because they need to eat and we're able to help people get this stuff out of their house. So it's kind of a win-win. I say that to say this, you won't hear my story in any part of my story. You won't hear me, uh, hiking into chimney rock and packing supplies and handing out radios or running net control. My life was

unaffected in that matter to the point it was so unaffected that I had to go to work. Carla had to go to work. My kids had to go to work because we were operating. There were things happening. It was bad for a lot of people, but at the same time, you've got 40% of the people who are struggling very severely. The other 60%, they're still having to go to work. They're still having to get up and get it done. And that's what we had to do. And I told Carl, I said, man, could you imagine if this would have been back in the day when I was a homeschool dad? Me and the big boys would probably got the chainsaws and go to North Carolina because there was no one to answer to. We were just us.

But life's different now. That's how we roll. So that was Sunday. Went to work. Never missed a day. And life has continued on. I want to kind of dig deeper, though, into the aspect of communications and how that worked for us here on the farm and even in the county.

But I don't want to extend this episode too long because I know how that can get. So I'll be back. Just let this one play through. We'll start the next one, and we'll continue the discussion here on PrepComs. Thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed my rambling today. And maybe it spurred you to think about what things you did or didn't do

to prepare for whatever you may be preparing for. All right, I'll be back next time, guys. Thank you so much for listening. God bless, 73. Outro Music