Right now in North Carolina, an index card can save a life.
Blue-lined four-by-five-inch papers lie in a grid on a plastic folding table at Hickory Regional Airport, with coordinates and what those stranded in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene need:
Baby formula.
Insulin.
Staff.
A ragtag group of pilots at the two-room private airport pick up three or four cards at a time, take to their helicopters and fly west. Fuel is expensive. If they can’t finally land on the rickety terrain in the mangled Appalachians, they’ll need more maps and more options before they return. The organizers realized this halfway through their second day of missions.
But Andy Petree, a retired NASCAR analyst for ESPN, will take just one card Monday at 5:56 p.m. The sun will set in about two hours. This is his sixth and final ride of the day. His first was 12 hours ago, when he flew his son from their hometown of Hendersonville and dropped him off at Petree’s Lake Norman home, a house with its own helipad, near Charlotte.
For his penultimate trip, Petree flew to Black Mountain, where he rescued a family of three and their dogs.
Now Petree loads Pampers diapers, Similac baby formula, his wife’s PB&J sandwiches and a Charlotte Observer reporter into his private helicopter and takes off from the runway that’s about three football fields long.
The 66-year-old is one of 37 pilots offering their private planes to Operation Airdrop, a nonprofit organization that sends volunteer pilots and their planes with essential supplies after a disaster.
In Asheville, Swannanoa, Lake Lure, Marshall and many parts of western North Carolina, people can only be reached by air. Roads, fragmented by the floods, have turned into narrow dirt paths, riverbeds or cliffs in the orange, murky water below.
Hickory, a city of about 40,000 in North Carolina known as the furniture manufacturing capital of the United States, is about an hour’s drive from Charlotte, Asheville and Boone. That’s about 30 minutes in Petree’s helicopter.
We’re heading to Lake Lure in his Robinson 44 Raven 2 – a four-person helicopter he bought to get from his home in Hendersonville in western North Carolina to the NASCAR tracks in the center of the state, near Concord and the home of Lake Norman, where his son now sits with 200 pounds of gear.
Three days ago, as Helene passed through his home state on Friday, Petree was in Port Canaveral, Florida, and canceled plans to travel from where he and his wife were about to board a cruise ship.
He had to help, he said.
The rest of the volunteers, some who drop off supplies and clothing and take people outside, have similar stories. Some wear matching black pants, black shoes, and black shirts that say “Academy of Aviation,” some are in military camouflage, and some wear jeans and T-shirts showing their neck tattoos.
Hodgepodge helicopters help Helene’s victims
There are areas of devastation between Hickory and the Appalachians. Some areas seem fine, with outdoor furniture unmoved or at least reset. Then a smear of fallen trees that will die before their leaves turn into a cluster of colors this year.
Then a river. Then a lake. Then an entire city fell to pieces.
“That hurricane basically swallowed the entire Gulf of Mexico and put it there,” Petree says, pointing to the thick layer of branches, roofs, umbrellas and siding where Chimney Rock used to be.
I tell him this summer, on a trip back to Charlotte from Topton, a town further west that escaped total ruin on Friday, that I was considering stopping at the quaint lake town. I didn’t.
“Now you’ll never see it again,” he says.
Those with houses still intact will not be able to reach them, he says. Those whose homes and belongings were swept away will not see them rebuilt. The dead in the ruins won’t be found for another few days, months, perhaps years, he says.
On Monday, officials said 100 Americans had died in the 10 states affected by Helene. According to Governor Roy Cooper, there were more than 30 deaths in North Carolina. Hundreds are still missing.
Petree, who was sitting among the rubble earlier Monday talking to people, said people there are just in awe. The devastation is unimaginable. And for those who don’t have to imagine it – those who heard the freight train’s water and woke up at their neighbors’ houses in the water – it is incomprehensible.
At 6:45 p.m., after circling above the coordinates on Petree’s index map, finding no place to land and seeing no people to wave us down, we land on a bridge next to the Bat Cave Volunteer Fire Department between the demolished Chimney Rock and Gerton, the next unincorporated community west. The makeshift landing pad is marked with two orange X’s. The next bridge is marked with black capitalized words: DO NOT LAND
The people who asked for diapers and baby food aren’t there, but a volunteer firefighter with blue eyes, muddy camouflage boots and a gun in his waistband is. He’s with a few others.
Their eyes are all the same. Wide open, glassy, processing the monster storm that hit their city – a city once called a ‘climate paradise’ by some due to its long distance from the coast and relatively high elevation.
“Everyone is gone,” said Marie O’Neill, a woman in butterfly boots who lives on a slope above the fire department. “The people, the animals.”
We don’t have time to stay long.
She waves as we take off, the setting sun shielded by clouds – remnants of the storm that has passed and ravaged the state.
We fly back over the ruins and land back in Hickory at 7:27 PM. In one of the airport’s rooms, 50 volunteers – pilots, golf cart drivers, regular people – are eating pizza and hot dogs when an executive enters.
Lt. Governor Mark Robinson’s niece is out there somewhere. She asks who is certified to fly at night. One person does. It takes two people.