The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ON-THE-GROUND UPDATE ON HURRICANES HELENE AND MILTON

Episode Date: October 12, 2024

Disaster response specialists, Steve Slepcevic & Sam Eaton of Strategic Response Partners, join Del from the path of devastation of Hurricane Milton in Florida. Get their on the ground perspective of the catastrophic damage and the vast difference in the response from the local and state government in Florida compared to North Carolina with Hurricane Helene.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

I really love what we get to do here on the high wire. We get to bring you news that I know for sure everyone else is afraid to tell you about. And this show, I guarantee you, is going to have some moments that's going to blow your mind. But right now, we're dealing with a hurricane Milton that's just hit Florida. Just seven days ago on this show, we checked in with Steve Slepsvic with strategic response partners about the hurricane that it hit in North Carolina. I don't remember reporting or having

a report on hurricanes like back to back like this, but we did want to find out what was going on, what's happening in North Carolina, what's happening in Florida. So once again, I'm joined right now at the top of the show with Steve Slepsvik and Sam Oh, we have the hurricane news montage.

Let's make sure you all know what I'm talking about. Hurricane Milton slammed ashore last night as a cat category three and swept across the state with incredible force. Absolute wrecking ball coming ashore earlier this evening. Deteriorating conditions across the great state of Florida. The storm is having a wide and devastating impact on Florida right now. This storm is one of the strongest to hit that part of Florida in decades.

It's just around 8.30 in the evening is a category three major hurricane with 120 mile per hour winds. It's brought the complete arsenal wind gusts past 100 miles an hour. toward the center of the path in Venice, Florida. The storm surge turned streets into raging rivers overnight. As the system barreled east, dangerous storm surge and flooding tore through the streets of Sarasota, pushing debris and this dumpster down the road. At this point, it's too dangerous to evacuate safely, so you have to shelter in place and just hunker down. And a historic tornado outbreak in central and south Florida, 30 tornadoes at least reported,

one of which went over Wellington, Florida, and was strong enough to toss this car into the side of the house and shear off this tree. In St. Petersburg, Hurricane Force Wind ripped the fabric roof off Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays. That's also where thousands of cots were set up to House first responders. In terms of what it's bringing on so many levels, whether it's a tornado outbreak or the wind of the surge, it's just all the worst-case scenarios are being realized. Now, of course, when you watch that report, this storm didn't bring as much rain as Helene did, but you had this other scenario, which was tornadoes. My understanding is there was over 30 reported tornadoes that came along with this hurricane, as though a hurricane is not enough on its own.

Just outrageous circumstances. And now I can get to what I was so excited to report. So excited I almost skipped every other news organization's reporting. but I'm joined by Steve Slepsvick and Sam Eaton now from disaster relief responders that are there. Steve, a week, you've been at this a week in North Carolina right into the eye of the storm here again in Florida. What do we have to report about Milton? It feels like I'm hearing that it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but what is your perspective on the ground there? Yeah, so if you see the weather reports, Milton was a very tight tornado.

So it was a small circumference. It had a small bandwidth. It was extremely powerful towards the center of the eye. So it's not as big as you typically would have saw with Helene, how big and wide that storm was, the amount of rain that it was carrying. But like you said earlier, it was carrying a lot of signatures of supercells, rain-wrapped tornadoes inside of that hurricane that was moving on shore, which was one of the reasons we kind of was really on guard all last night. as we wrote it in. So we have team members that live in Lakewood, Bradent, Temple Terrace, and Tampa. And so they hunkered in. The whole team hunkered in. We had our emergency, like service equipment, power generation. We had to pull trailers off of that area,

so you're not flipping equipment over. We weathered the storm. First thing before daylight, three o'clock, we had pushed out, right, so that we could get in and start doing our damage assessment and getting to place. Well, one thing that was very different is leadership. Leadership, leadership, leadership, leadership. If you saw what we saw and the people around us, there was task force, the different Florida Urban Search and Rescue Task Force that were on the road with us, full convoys, just going into those zones, setting up, staging up. And you can't, when it comes to leadership, maybe they need to change governors between the two states of what it means to actually respond. And so I'm here with Sam Eaton. He's a retired battalion chiefs 30 years of Palm Beach County. He's seen hurricanes.

The first hurricane I responded to was Hurricane Andrew. He was his first hurricane. So we're the old guys in the game. But I want to say him to talk a little bit about the leadership, what we've seen, and then some safety things that people need to know. And so really quick, Sam, just really quick. So what you guys are saying about leadership is still government leadership, local Florida government, getting people out on the road to help people to be ready to assist.

You felt like that's a strong response, but that's the type of leadership we're talking about coming from government. DeSantis and on down in Florida. Is that what we're discussing? That's exactly it. Difference is if you notice, Governor DeSantis stepped up and he said, you know what? This is a local problem. We're going to handle it. Not FEMA. We don't need them. We can handle this at a state level and take care of business. That's how it should have been done in North Carolina, right? Yeah. The reality is that you can see how this this bloated system of federal government, it fails miserably. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what people say,

results don't lie you don't like the results that's feedback take a look at your results right that's the reality of it yeah sam yeah you see and seeing that in north carolina at 100% uh we're talking about you had a grassroots effort that was that needed to be formally formulated because there was a void of response people are trapped there there's injuries there's people isolated in the area and these these locals came together to uh formulate a plan that before we actually got in the area and started working to get resources into those areas. Unfortunately, they didn't have that command structure, that leadership that would come from the, normally from the state or the local government, that kind of stuff.

It just wasn't in place. So they had to make do. Just looking at the difference in that operation and another operation that we were in, leadership does matter. And in the later airport that we were working with, clearly they had an understanding of what that would look like. We were able to come in there and help and assist and bring that, bring the level of that command up. Fantastic. And so, you know, when we look at this, obviously, I mean, is one of the reasons, though, I mean, I feel like part of this is Florida, because of where it's located, it's used to hurricanes, it's more prepared for, you know, things like this. You know, can you make the argument that North Carolina just wasn't prepared because it hasn't really needed to be as prepared as often as Florida is? Does that play into it? No, that's a chicken accent. Okay.

That's a cheap excuse because North Carolina, like all states, you do all scenarios disaster planning. They've had floods in those rains with some heavy rains from other cells before. They've had flooding in those areas. They knew and can tell what would happen. So what they do is they do these all scenarios base that if this were to happen, this is what's going to happen. And here's what our response was. Well, when they knew that that was the setup, and then they didn't meet the setup to bring the actual resources, the actual team members in there to make those rescues.

And it was day seven going on, day eight, was the first time that we saw state resources coming in. It's too late then. The people in North Carolina didn't need their help at that point. And you're basically saying at hour one and two here in Florida, you saw state-sponsored response happening immediately. So that's a huge, huge difference. They have the infrastructure place.

You can see it on the way in. Clearly, we're already here. there's clearly an opportunity for local government to get their fire departments now through their jurisdictional surveys. They're already clearing streets. You can see the evidence of that. There are some major safety concerns with the public that I would get into. But bottom line is that there's clear evidence that they were on this as early as we were starting to clear the roads and get things kind of squared away from the area.

I know that it looks like you're standing in front of the stadium. Is that where the entire roof was torn off? And what are you seeing as far as damage right now in Florida? What are the big problem areas and issues that people are dealing with there? Yeah, so you have a lot of roofs that are blown off from some of the older buildings. Some of the new Miami-Dade Wind Code buildings that are built to Cat Vives weathered quite well. You know, they're going to have moisture and water intrus and that type of stuff. Debris, you know, windows that are blown out.

But for the most part, Florida weathered very well. There's quite a bit of power out, but the line workers that were lined up at, at the stadium and also down at the staging area. They're going to line up for these sections. The power's coming up real quick. The comms are out in a but many areas. So we're currently on Starlink. Elon making the grid possible, you know.

And then a lot of people don't know when they're coming back into these areas, some of the safety features, but just on the comms alone, like these sat radios, we carry sat radios with us so we could communicate among our entire. team when we're doing surveys on buildings we're carrying the radio to radio two mile radius right and then when we're actually in other areas we're saying certain comms are work then we're on our

sat phones right and i always say get an iridium sat phone don't get an emmer sat right but that is what controls chaos right then we have the star link on the vehicles and we're moving through these areas real quick and all that is again i'm just going to share it with you is uh is tina blanco from the sat store right uh one two three sat dot com she's done an incredible job of donating sat for us all over North Carolina. Wow. We've handed out to the intimate command for free. And then even people that we'd run into that are in remote areas that were taking

command organically, the citizens, she's like, you will know where the need is. And so we would just hand them out. And there it is. It's a two-month contract that'll get you out of the woods. Where's your government? $750 and they don't even show up. And then they did not any people. They deny people.

Like, it's embarrassing. This is not the America that I want to raise my money. kids in. Well, you represent the best of what America is, Steve. And I know that last week, you know, we had asked, you know, the people that watched the high wire to help you raise some funds. How did that work out for you? Were we able to assist you there? Did you find that? Because I find our audience to be relatively effective. I just wanted to see how that worked out last week. I want to share that with you. When we deployed, my wife asked me, how are you going to fund this. Okay? And I'm like, I really don't know. I just, there's a calling inside that we got to go,

right? And my guys are, I'm in. There's no question. They don't hesitate. They're not in their ego mind. They're just spirit left. They're like, okay, let's just, we're going. And they can't wait to get off the axe and get in there. They knew that this was going to be a mass undertaking. Yeah. All their helicopter pilots said, reach out to all the helicopters, you know. Let's get these guys in the tarmac. And like I shared, there was dragon flies that looked like coming out of the sky from everywhere. Wow. He's independent. And these guys showed up.

Some couldn't fly. They're a little reckless. I mean, they probably went to the best pilots, but their heart was in the right place. Some were cowboys who are coming in. I'm like, whoa, whoa. So we started marshaling and everything else. But I can tell you this. There's a saying in the Bible that says, asking you shall receive.

In 35 years, I've never set up a gift sendo. And a dear friend of mine said, are you a believer? You have to ask Steve. And I said, I really have a hard time with that. And then talking to you, you're like, We should set up on just saying go. We have $20 something thousand. Every pilot on these big birds, the cranes are $1,500 to $1,500 of fuel every load.

Okay. When you have 12 to 15 birds flying nonstop for two weeks straight, going on two weeks now, that's $500 to $600 a tank. Then some of the pilots that were paying, thank God for a lot of the pilots that are like, dude, I'm here on my own time. I'm good. I'm good. Yeah.

Other people like, hey, I'm good. And then other people are like, hey, I'm going to pay some of the fuel on these aircraft. And so it was amazing how to get together. Tell you this, your audience that gave was the only show that I actually went on at that time because I was so busy. And you're like, can you go live? I said, yeah, there's some that's going on. The world deserves to know, right? Yeah.

When you put that up, we're over 281,000. The last I checked on it. Wow. Which was able to cover, which was able to cover the fuel costs out there, the mobilization cost, the cost for some of the paramedics who are out of work, some of the paramedics that you know that walked away from the jobs, like John Knox, who's been out of work for two years, hasn't been paid. This is one of his first assignments that he got paid on because of your listeners. So the money that comes in goes right to those hard costs. It doesn't come to me. I'm like, God can cover that, right?

because we're in the private sector. So we're in Florida. We don't need money for Florida. Florida's got it handled, right? What happened in North Carolina was spirit-led, and because of your audience, the kindness and the giving from their heart, where maybe $20,000, $25,000 left,

and that's the end of the Helene. If there's anything that comes in after, that money's going, I'm going to share this with you. It's going to go to Samaritans first, and if your audience is okay with that, because on the very final, stretch of this, we stood up there airport and hand in hand loaded barrels and barrels of fuel. Just at one day, there was five Chinooks that landed generators and one of the three

star generals was there to actually put this all together. And it was amazing what was we were able to accomplish because they didn't know how to do the helicopter ops. And as two families coming together, they're like, what do we do? I said, don't worry. Don't worry about paying us. We'll cover our people. Seven independent. And these are the cowboys, but had to kind of tone them down. They were the best of the best because in those aircrafts, one or two engineers from Starlink, which was amazing, one of our paramedics, who also acted as a flight crew,

make sure of the ground crews, they got in and out of aircraft, and a helicopter pilot. Everything else was loaded with citizen, IVs, insulin, that these departments needed, warm clothes for the people in the mountains. And so they were able to finish. We dropped some of these guys off, poor guys. They're like, are you going to come back, pick me up? I said, don't worry, you're good.

We don't worry where you're at. So Sam was running the whole incident command. Accountability. 30 years, right? I was sure that we knew where the personnel were on the mountain where they'd been dropped off. What time they'd been dropped off. We had a two-hour time frame. We would make sure that we're going to pick them up at least within two hours.

And it was a well-oed machine with the assistance of SRP and some personnel there on the ground as well. And Operation of Starlink. I mean, you know, Elon Musk putting that, that whole mountain grade right now is under Starlink. So where they try to cut control off, communication off, it took these. private businesses to come up, show up, and show a miracle what it is. But the ultimate thing was the people in North Carolina, the most resilient, the most loving, the most hardworking mountain people that everyone deserves to acknowledge support and love.

It's been an honor, truly, to do that. Well, I want to acknowledge, acknowledge support and love on you guys. It's brilliant what you do. The way you charge right in, for those of you watching right now, as you heard, they're just about 25,000 short. amazing last week. You literally were a part of putting fuel in helicopters, saving lives if you want to help out and just get them over the top there. You can still go to givsendgo.com slash SRP 24 strategic response partners.

Just amazing work that you guys, you know, do. I want to let you get back to it. I love that we have you on the ground when these events are happening. And just best of luck to you. and we're praying for you, your safety, and all the people that you're coming in contact with now in Florida and North Carolina. Thank you so much. Thank you, Del.

Thank you to your listeners, to your sponsors and your supporters. Thank you for getting the word out. And ultimately, this gift, people have actually saved lives that they will never know. Indirectly, with a $20 donation, you know, it was incredible, every part of it. So thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Steve, thank you, Sam. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.