The Highwire with Del Bigtree - EMERGENCY RESPONSE TEAM REPORTS FROM HURRICANE HELENE DISASTER ZONE

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Disaster response specialist, Steve Slepcevic of Strategic Response Partners joins Del from the epicenter of the North Carolina flood disaster following Hurricane Helene with his team of experts on the ground. He gives a live update, sharing details on the lack of government response, how brave civilians are leading the relief effort, and how the information reported in the media is representative of what is happening on the ground.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Another problem in the United States of America right now that we've talked about is we seem to be really capable of taking hundreds of billions of dollars and sinking them at what appeared to be endless, useless, pointless wars that just get people killed. But one thing we can't afford to do is seem to fix problems like this. Breaking news as Hurricane Helene gets closer to making landfall. The storm's footprint massive. You can see it from the satellite there in space. Tropical storm force winds extending up to 310 miles from the center. Parts of central and southern Appalachia are under flash flood warnings after the region got slammed with historic rainfall. Ashfield's included Western North Carolina where the worst of the weather happening now, but so many people will be impacted. Hurricane Helene has moved on, but left in its wake, a trail of death and destruction.

The only way to describe the damage here in Asheville is historic and catastrophic. Officials in North Carolina say they were blinded by Helene's sheer intensive. Homes swept away. Restaurants and shops torn to pieces. You can see all those roads and yards covered it in mud, water, debris. The mayor there calls it apocalyptic. Homes and buildings swept away by raging floodwaters that have submerged the town. It's beyond anything I've ever seen in my lifetime. Parts of the town not under water completely cut off.

The storm now being blamed for at least 133 deaths, 49 of those here in North Carolina, and that number is expected to go up with as many as 600 people still missing as of this morning. as of this morning. There is no running water in the city. So that is showers, that is flushing toilets, that is, of course, drinking water. Any more resources the federal government would be giving them? No, we've given them, we have two planned a significant amount of it, even though they didn't ask for it yet. Nobody's going to help us. I mean, I don't know what we're going to do. Do you have any faith in the federal response here? No. I don't know about you, and I know I'm an armchair quarterback on

this. I'm not in the middle of it. I don't know. don't know what it takes to try and, you know, dig entire cities out of mud and ruin. But it just feels like every time we see this, it's shocking that a nation is as advanced as ours with all the technology, all the helicopters, all of the, you know, the manpower, the military that we aren't able to just swoop in and get in control of these situations faster. But I want to get to someone that is on the ground. We're going to be joined by my really good friend, Steve Slepsovich, of Strategic Response Partners. We've gone to him before. He's flies right into the center of the disaster areas. He right now is, I believe, in North Carolina.

He's joined by Danile Jimenez. Steve, Danile, thank you for joining me. I just, I know that you're in the middle, Steve, of deploying helicopters. There's a real effort right now to help people, and so I don't want to distract you for too long. But we're hearing stories of, you know, people trap. People that are just not getting the resources. They need water, food, medical supplies. And so what's being done to handle that situation right now from your perspective? So just to give you a quick perspective, we're here at Ground Zero at the Hickory Airport. And we got into Tallahassee three days before Hurricane Helene made landfall. And so right from that point, once it made it hard right and it kind of cruised up to the Carolinas,

We could see that this thing actually was going to stall, make that turn over top, and there was going to be a serious issue with flooding. So anybody who's in the first response, disaster management, anybody who's handled any type of emergency response disasters knew this was going to unfold at this level or pretty closest level, which means they should have pulled resources from Tallahassee and all those task force should have been pushed up into North Carolina right away. That didn't happen. What happened on day six and going into day seven should have happened on day two. So I'm going to turn it over real quick to Denal, who's our helicopter pilot. He's also the one kind of running the operations here because this has become a grassroots private individuals just showing up who have the skill set to actually make things happen. So you want to talk about what's going on in the EOC as far as slight command? Absolutely.

We came in and we're kind of helping divert all the assets that showed up here to where they're needed the most. We've got many civilian aircraft to include civilians. military recently that showed up national guard stuff like that and and what we're doing is we're assigning missions to to help the greater number of people the problem we're running into is a lot of people are out of communications right so we don't know that they need help right so as we're sending civilian helicopters out there to do missions they're also doing reconnaissance on the flight on the way back debriefing us so we can start kicking out more assets to that area absolutely done When you're flying around and there's a lot of aircraft in the air and I know even President Biden is visiting, what is air traffic control like in a situation like this?

Does that get difficult? Do they, I mean, how do you organize all the, you know, planes in the air? They're flying very close, helicopters having to land in difficult areas. So fortunately and unfortunately, when a VIP like that shows up to an area like this, they install what's called TFR, temporary flight restriction. So that kind of like grounds us for a little while until that dignitary leaves that we can get back to work So we did deal with that yesterday We were grounded for a little bit, but now we're back up in the air We're doing we're doing a lot more work today Our mission sets are being dwindled down because of all the great people that have come out to help us

And we got the Army Aviation Heritage Foundation that just showed up with the UH-1 Hueys from Vietnam and they're going to help us move a bunch of supplies their heavy lift to help us helicopters. We got a lot of entities here that are coming just from everywhere to help us out. Now you're saying it's really more of a civilian population. Steve, is that how these things are designed to go? I mean, when, you know, it's not like this is the first natural disaster ever. We have deal with these every year, many of them, some worse than other. And I just sit here going, what is the planning? Is there a set way that these are done? Let the civilians handle it first, then we'll send in, you know, the military National Guard.

Is that how this is supposed to go? No, not at all. I mean, the military, the military, the government, the FEMA task force should have been here on day two. That didn't happen. That was a complete disaster. So what happened is the people showed up. This is no different than what you saw happen in Maui when Archie Calepa set up as EOC,

right? Yeah. The call went out. The people rose up. and rose to the challenge. And that's what's happening. So America has to start seeing really what's happening and how people responding.

So all these independent pilots started coming together. And through our network, we pulled all types of other pilots and assigned our paramedics to those flights and sent them out there. Now, they're doing mass evacuations now, because we're going on day five, day six, no food, no water, people running out of food. Three days of water, that's a problem, right?

Yeah. So some of these are elderly. So I'll let Mike Savager talk a little bit about the medical side of it, but there's massive evacuations that are being scheduled right now to move some of these elderly people out of assisted living facilities. There's looting going on, there's a lot of crime going on. There was some people that got killed yesterday, as a matter of fact, over supply. So, wow.

Look at how the ports are shut down. Look at what's happening and people are going on these panic buying situations. And then add a hurricane to it where people are cut off from those food resources and no comm. So we're going in, everything's got sat radios on our stuff, sat, sat phones. And even that is starting to run low on the supply chain because it's not coming in. So, you know, you need to get your family in order. So I want to talk a little bit, let Mike share a little bit on the medical.

So if you have anything on the medical side of it. Okay, very good. He was on the medical side yesterday for what we were doing out in this area. You know, Mike, we talk a lot about the health of Americans right now. So many people are on pharmaceutical drugs just due to health issues. We've got diabetes, you know, diabetes, medications, insulin, things like that. When you're rushing out of your home, when it's being wiped away by a river, I would imagine you have a lot of people right now that don't have access to the medications they need. And the worst thing you can do is to just go cold turkey off of whatever medications you're on.

So how, you know, in a situation like this, how does someone like you that's involved in the medical site handle that? One of the most important things for anyone that is preparing for a disaster like this is to know exactly what you have. When you have certain medications, if you're on diuretics, if you have insulin, for any medication that you take, whether it's a cardiac drug or blood pressure drug, it's very important for you to know exactly how much of it you have and how long you can go until you need to get another dose of sent to you. One of the scariest parts about responding to disasters, especially in the middle of a situation like this, and we're talking to you guys live from an airport that has been established as the one responding units to go in and to rescue people. If someone is on a dialysis patient and now the dialysis center that they go to has been swept away, in five days, they're going to be septic. That's a very real understanding that we're faced with. That's why it's really important for us in a lot of places that we've flown into. There's volunteer fire departments that are creating LZs for us.

And the minute that we show up, we see them and they're tired. They're overworked. And we're trying to establish communications with everyone. We're grateful for the start links that we've been able to distribute. And yeah, we got 500 of them out yesterday, dropped a bunch of insulin off, delivered oxygen, oxygen is running low. Medical supplies are running low. So those that have any resource to medical type stuff, just have them send a response at SRP. We'll connect them here with the medical director.

All right now. We're going to put this on our screen. See if you live in the area and can help, email response at SRP24.com. They'll figure out how to get those supplies from you and get them to the people that need them. I heard rumor that a big plant or storage, you know, wherever they make IVs, which is going to affect hospitals all across this country, is underwater. Is that true? That's true.

So there's also already a shortage. And then the fact is that we as Americans, even more why we should be sourcing stuff in our own country. Right. If the ports aren't a warning, if the disaster zones aren't a warning, we have to be self-sufficient. so that we could pull from other areas and pull that in. So there's a lot of other shortages because we're getting it from other countries. And when you have multiple disasters happen at the same time, this can cripple and literally put the whole country in absolute chaos really fast. So yeah, there's a lot of other stuff that's going on.

And I'll share with you later on offline. Okay, yeah, like I said, I know you guys, you're in the middle of it. I don't want to hold you up much longer. I do want to talk about the death numbers. numbers. I'm hearing like 150, maybe 250 that are dead, a lot missing. From your perspective, is that number going to come in low? Do you expect those numbers arise based on what you're seeing? And we're in a critical moment here, five days out, any longer people without water without food are going to be in real, real trouble, are they not? Yeah. So let me share this with you.

Just one county has 250 dead confirmed. So the numbers aren't at all. This was yesterday. One county. One county is 250 dead. Yes. Wow. There's also lot of bags that are running out. Okay, so let me put it this way. When you go back to even Hurricane I, the post-art friends and a half, the amount of bodybacks that were dropping just their choppers far exceeded the numbers on just their helicopters.

So no different than sitting there at the bar with the mayor in Staten Island after a Superstorm Sandy. And then him telling me what they had in the morgan versus what was on TV and him just breaking down going, that's not true. true. Sometimes there's also people who undocumented who won't complain those bodies. And then when you see the stuff like the numbers even with Maui, so we get into these zones, we're working with medical directors,

we're working with what's going on. And my question to your viewers is if somebody knows, tell me why consistently the numbers never match. Like what we see on the ground versus what's reported. Is there something that I'm missing, something I don't know. But you know what? Just notice that the numbers are to go up

and sometimes even when they get those numbers up, it's still not what actually is. So I don't know what the answer to that is. All right. I don't know what to tell you. Look, I don't want to hold you guys up any longer when this is all through. Steve, I want to get together with you. And we can talk about maybe, you know, I'm amazed that in all the years that I've been alive,

I've never seen a president say, hey, we need to be better at this. We need to get rid of red tape that's getting the way. We need to be able to drop in and move efficiently. We are modern nation. We've got computers now. We have cell phones. We've got sat phones. We need to get better at this.

clearly we need to get better at this. This is shocking in the modern age that we still look like we're in the dark ages every time we get hit by a tornado or a hurricane. Yeah, listen, 35 years. My first response was Hurricane Andrew. I've seen these responses by multiple administrations under all different. I was a registered Democrat, turned independent for obvious reasons because command and control, in critical situations, someone has to know what they're doing. Well, I mean, look, we'll leave it there. I have a nonprofit here. I don't want to get deep into these issues, but I hear you. I look. As you said, I've watched this through multiple administrations. I don't think I would pick aside right now except to say that we clearly suck at this

in America and we need to get better. But I am so happy that there are people like you and that the citizens and, you know, the beautiful people that step up, make a difference, bring their own aircrafts in to make a difference. That's what makes America great. So maybe we need to put it back in the hands of the people and just let us handle it from here on out. Maybe that's the better way forward. Just a last minute reminder, the first responders that are showing up are incredible. Everyone's doing an exceptional, exceptional job from the top to the bottom. But the command post, the commander in chief from the federal government, that is where the breakdown is. That needs to be addressed. That needs to be looked at very closely. And that's all I got to say for today.

Del, thank you. Thank you to your listeners. All right, you guys have a give, send go, right? To donate to you specifically to your group. Here it is, folks, givsendgo.com slash SRP 24. You see the integrity there. All volunteers, they are in there getting, you know, helping organize flights to get to people in need right now. So, you know, while our government is obviously confused, we shouldn't be. Let's do everything we can to help out.

Gentlemen, thank you so much, so proud of you. I look forward to talking more detail in the future. Thank you. God bless you guys. All right. Thank you. God bless you. Bye for now.