(Transcript) Here’s How You Can Help the Victims of Hurricane Helene

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[00:00:00] Kay: Hello, everyone. My name is Kay from Chaser Chat, and I am going to be doing something a little bit different. And you’ll notice that Gabe is also doing some different things here. This is a whole brand new way that we’re doing our episode today because of the issues that have come up and the disaster relief efforts that have been coming to light as far as Hurricane Helene. We wanted to get some information from people who are actually boots on the ground out there in North Carolina, Florida, and everywhere else in the South to try to help out as much as possible and down in the description box below you’ll be able to find a whole link to a bunch of different resources and relief efforts that you can either donate to, volunteer yourself, and anything along those lines. And tonight, I am actually joined by Josh Griffith, who is out in, you’re in North Carolina, right?

[00:00:44] Josh: Yeah, that’s right.

[00:00:44] Kay: Alright, perfect. Yeah, he’s in North Carolina. And I wanted to know, first off how things are going. And second off if you are doing this personally, are you with a company? And then otherwise, how people can best help, do you think?

[00:00:57] Josh: Yeah North Carolina, Western North Carolina, specifically, is just a disaster zone right now. I’m currently running a GoFundMe to try to get as much food and water up to these hard hit areas as possible. It’s just me. My fiancee is helping a lot. We’re just getting as much as we can up to these people that have been hit so hard by the hurricane.

[00:01:22] Kay: That’s really wonderful that you guys are doing that. Where specifically in North Carolina are you? Are you all over the place right now?

[00:01:27] Josh: Everywhere. We’ve been everywhere from Silva to Waynesville, Asheville. We were in Fines Creek or Crabtree- excuse me yesterday. We’ve been into Biltmore a little bit. All sorts of different communities. We handed out as much food as we could while we’re waiting on the donation funds to come through. And then we can really get things ramped up. But I’ve just been all over trying to figure out who needs it the most where we can help out.

[00:01:56] Kay: That’s really awesome. Being all over the place and whatnot, I’m sure that you’re seeing quite a bit of what’s going on. Can you just go into a little bit more detail so people can understand just how bad things are? Don’t have to get into anything super specific or graphic but it seems like the news, it’s very easy for us to really separate ourselves from what’s going on, and that’s one of the reasons that we’re trying to chat with people who are actually there, so that we can get people to be like, hey, this is an actual thing. People really need these need the help. And the best way to do that is by talking to people who are actually truly out there. So if you wouldn’t mind sharing some details as to what’s going on out there specifically, I’d appreciate it.

[00:02:28] Josh: Yeah… I think for the most part, people just really need water. That’s the main concern I’ve seen all day today. There are, after we handed out all the food and supplies we had and the local officials had run out of water, we had run out of water to give out at the Asheville mall. So we were driving back to our house in Leicester, North Carolina. We were watching people on the side of the road, pick up water out of standing water left back from the floods using cut out milk jugs, whatever they had to try to get some of that water off the side of the road to hope, I guess they were going to boil it. I don’t know, but people are desperate for water right now. We’ve driven through a lot of communities that the floods ravaged. Where it’s hard to even get to some of these places. We couldn’t get to a lot of them because we get to one part of the road and the bridge would be washed out or there would be two ft of mud in the road. We’ve just driving through neighborhoods and seeing a semi truck parked or just washed into the middle of the road. It’s unreal. It’s unreal what’s happening right now. So people really need help.

[00:03:39] Kay: I appreciate you meeting with me. This is going to be a super quick interview. I appreciate you hopping on send me to your go fund me and we will make sure that water becomes really high on the list of things that we push people to try to help get resources to.

[00:03:53] Josh: I really appreciate you taking the time to do this too and get the information out because people need to hear it. Yeah, I’m glad to do it. It’s something that I told Gabe when he brought me on to chaser chat that I wanted to start doing more of is trying to help coordinate some disaster relief and try to help get words out for people to help afterwards.

[00:04:12] Kay: Thank you for meeting with me. I really appreciate it. Take care of yourself. I wish you and your fiance luck. And again, really thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking care of everybody the way that you have been this week.

[00:04:22] Gabe: Hey there, folks. I’ve got Shawn Hendrix on the line right now. He is part of the Mr. Beast crew, and he is also from North Carolina, as that’s where Mr. Beast operations are ran out of. Shawn, how’s it going today?

[00:04:34] Shawn: Good. We got DOT starting to catch up to us where we’re at on these rescue efforts and getting the roads open. We’ve been focused on getting life saving supplies up to people that are up in the mountains. There’s just, there’s no roads left. This isn’t something you can in a couple of days, but they have been building roads for us and getting us closer and closer. Supplies are starting to roll in. We’re no longer limited to one bottle of water a day. So that’s great. We’re actually starting to see some food and water come in. Water’s actually pretty good today. Not seeing much of an issue. But yeah, big, huge swing. This is the way it is always in these areas. It’s really bad. And then it starts to pick up really fast as everybody gets here and all this stuff starts rolling in.

[00:05:18] Gabe: So it sounds like it’s a momentum play where things start to snowball in the right direction.

[00:05:22] Shawn: That’s right. Yeah. It’s there’s no water and it’s Oh my God, we need to move more water, get more trucks, get water out to people, but the thing to remember is when we’re doing good down here. We’re still trying to get people who are, living way back in these mountains. This is a pretty mountainous area. It’s rough and the amount of water up here was over 30 inches. And we’re talking about it carved. Oh, there’s no it’s not that the road pavements gone. The road beds gone, right? It’s now a canyon. There’s not even a place to clear off, right? This is we’re talking. I don’t know. I’m speaking out of turn here. I’m not a transportation expert, but I’m my cover. The first has been reshaped by this water flow.

[00:06:02] Gabe: Now, a couple of things that I wanted to ask you about, because I’ve been following along your Twitter timeline and there’s been some really interesting stuff that I think we haven’t seen before with disaster recovery efforts in the past. Gabriel Could you speak a little bit about how Starlink is helping everybody this time around?

[00:06:18] Shawn: With something that’s so catastrophic, there’s no cell towers, there’s no electricity, we’re back to the stone ages, right? HAM radio is wonderful. It still is radios are for point to point team to team local communication, but HAM radio is much harder to get out of word, to get information out of what we need in this area. So local comms point to point, HAM radio, Starlink gets us out and tells you what we need to come in with. And a Starlink, the size of a backpack, and it does more than these huge EMS trailers that have the satellite dishes on them. It’s faster, it’s easier to set up, and it uses less power. You can’t hike a trailer back up into the woods. It’s given us high speed comms. The fact that I’m able to post videos is because we are traveling around with Starlinks everywhere we go. So people are getting real time updates of what’s going on. And, I’m able to literally ask for supplies to the entire world at a moment’s notice. Hey, we need baby food. Hey, we need porta potties. Hey, we need, I needed batteries flown from Florida and we got them. You know what I mean? It’s been incredible what Starlink’s allowed us to do.

[00:07:24] Gabe: Yeah, it really seems like some of the better aspects of modern technology, social media, really shining through during this event.

[00:07:30] Shawn: A hundred percent. Yeah, social media for social good. And also the other thing too is in, I’ve Not, I’ve got a little bit of influence on the internet and what is it worth other than like self gratification? But then all of a sudden now you can turn it into really helping people So I think that’s the good side of it. I think maybe that’s what you focus on more. But it’s been wonderful to see how people, they reshare and they messaged me. I got a friend of a friend who has a private plane that’s willing to loan it to you. Wow, I just got a PJ for free because of X and that’s the power that social media has. So it’s I think it gets demonized, but here it is. It’s saving lives. There’s no doubt I can say that without a doubt it’s saving lives, period. And then again, at the Starlink side they’ve been great actually at Starlink reached out to me. They’ve made my account, any Starlink dish I add to my account is free now.

[00:08:18] Gabe: Oh, awesome.

[00:08:18] Shawn: Yeah, Sarah at Starlink reached out. They talked to whoever they need to talk to at their side and got it done quick. So now we’re just able to have these pre set up and I don’t have to worry about it. I don’t have to worry about typing a credit card number in or, all that. It takes time and it’s minutes matter. And since I can just turn it on and it’s just on my account and paid for, it saves us 10, 20 minutes every time. Don’t know if I can explain how massive that amount of time is.

[00:08:42] Gabe: Oh, it absolutely sounds like it would just add up if you had to keep doing it over and over again. And the last thing I wanted to ask you about before we talk about how people can help if they’re so inclined is drones. Because I see you guys are working a lot with those and I imagine especially given the terrain and like you mentioned, it’s not just roads that are gone, it’s like literally the entire roadbed that’s gone. Gabe How are drones helping you guys to actually get supplies out there, help find survivors, that sort of thing?

[00:09:08] Shawn: Two ways. Thermal drones tell us what houses have people in them, right? We see warm pipes, we see people out, cleaning up their yards so we go through with thermal drones and tag them, and then we can send a drone that has a speaker and a microphone on it. And they come back to me, they, we basically fly it down there and they talk to the drone and tell us what they need. I need baby food, I need heart medicine, I need oxygen, so we don’t just bring them protein bars and water when a guy needs his heart medicine. So we’re able to target lifesaving, because we just can’t get these people out. There’s no getting these people out of the situation. We’re talking miles and miles of washed out roads. The other way we use it is let’s just say there’s a downed bridge and we get the community to gather on the other side of the bridge while the water is just ripping through and we can use the drone to hop it over the bridge over and over again. We can move a pallet, every, 15 minutes or something. And so it lets us that last hundred feet that we can’t cross, get stuff to people. So that’s been pretty helpful. The main thing is there’s people get frustrated with FEMA, or with National Guard, whatever the government response is, they have to understand that’s recovery, like that takes time to get moving. It’s a big machine. Rescue really is you first, right? Self rescue is the thing you have the most control over. Then once you’ve done everything you can do, it’s your local PD, your local firefighters, and your local people that are really going to affect day one rescue. It’s just not realistic to think the government is going to be there for you on day one. And to be frustrated about it and worse plan on that happening is how you end up in a bad situation. Expect a self rescue and then expect your local community rescue secondly. And the more people that self rescue, the less burden it is on the local PD and fire departments and people to get people out of there. Does that make sense?

[00:10:56] Gabe: That makes perfect sense. I think that’s a good lesson for everybody to keep in mind moving forward for maybe how to plan for situations like this in the future.

[00:11:06] Shawn: 100%. Yep. I’ve never got to see a catastrophe on this level, and I consider myself well prepared. This changed my mind about a lot of things.

[00:11:16] Gabe: Oh yeah. I’m hearing from people that this is like biblical proportions in terms of just how devastating some of these events are to these communities.

[00:11:25] Shawn: Yeah, one in 1000 year. I would say it’s probably more one in 10, 000 year. You look at the amount of change to the terrain that happened. If you came out here in a year, you would say, Oh, this canyon was formed over a million years. I’m like, nobody that was 33 minutes on a night in September.

[00:11:41] Gabe: Crazy. All right, Shawn. We know you’re busy, so I won’t hold you any longer, but before I let you go, could you number one, tell people where they can find you on social media so they can continue to follow along with the efforts and then number two, and most importantly, what they do to help right now, someone’s listening, they got their debit card out and they want to direct their assistance in a particular direction.

[00:12:03] Shawn: Yeah. You can follow me. I’m mostly posted on X: @TheShawnHendrix V, Shawn Henxcks. Look for the verification. ’cause there are people out there trying to raise money under my name and it is a scam. The way to help is Samaritan’s Purse donate to them or to go to your local distribution centers and drop off what they’re asking for. Please don’t go to the store and buy cases of water if your distro center is being asked for baby food. It actually puts a burden on us to try to move all that water when we have people begging for baby food. So talk to your local distributions, local church, whoever’s doing that and just meet the needs, meet whatever they’re asking for and stick what they’re asking for yourself.

[00:12:44] Gabe: Excellent, Shawn. Thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to join us and talk to the folks that listen to Chaser Chat. You stay safe out there and God bless all of you that are helping out with the recovery.

[00:12:54] Shawn: Hey, thank you so much.

[00:12:56] Kay: Welcome back, everybody. This is Kay from Chaser Chat, and I am joined with James Brierton from the Carolina Weather Group, and we are continuing our discussions on the relief efforts for Hurricane Helene, and he has a pretty unique opportunity to tell us about some stuff that’s been going on in North Carolina, specifically as a local, you’re a news anchor, correct?

[00:13:16] James: I guess you could say journalist or producer, yeah .

[00:13:19] Kay: So can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on in North Carolina right now?

[00:13:22] James: The situation that no one ever wants to come to your own backyard has come here with what is very likely to be North Carolina’s deadliest and most expensive disaster. We’ll wait to get that confirmed, but that seems to be how things are shaping up. The unique thing that is happening here, because I know so much of the Southeast is recovering in their own way, North Carolina and portions of our neighboring states are very mountainous. And so what we ended up having here was a predecessor rain event that came in even before the storm got here, and it just completely soaked the high country. And then, when the tropical rain got here, it just had no place to go. And we ended up with a lot of communities that remain cut off from the outside world without phone, without cellular, without Internet. And some of these towns are one bridge in, one bridge out kind of places. So we’ve seen stories where those bridges are washed out and without communication and without the road, there are efforts still underway to reconnect people back to civilization.

[00:14:24] Kay: Yeah, thank you for going over that with me because I don’t think really a whole lot of people understand why this is as historic as it’s turning out to be. Because I personally didn’t even know that there was a predecessor rain event. I thought that this was all entirely from the hurricane. And speaking from experience living in Washington, if you have rain for a long period of time, that’s going to saturate the soil. That’s going to cause things like mudslides, rockslides, things like that. And that alone can cause issues. And then you have a lot of lakes, rivers, streams and just waterways there. I think I heard something about a dam collapsing as well.

[00:14:54] James: Yeah the good news is as of right now, all the dams are holding, but what you heard was accurate reporting that some of the dams were feared to be imminently breaching. It happened on more than one occasion, and each time it happens, another wave of evacuations have gone out. Probably the one that is most famous for being nearly imminently breached is the one in Lake Lure North Carolina. This is a very small little mountain town that has built itself up around tourism. They created the dam in the 1920s in order to make a recreational lake for people to come and boat in the mountain community, and that dam is still standing. But there were fears early on that dam might breach. What has also unfortunately happened is upstream of that dam, where all this water was coming from, is another little cute town called Chimney Rock. A lot of debris from Chimney Rock flowed downstream into Lake Lure. So when you see pictures of Lake Lure on the news, down trees, pieces of homes and vehicles, a lot of that is being washed to Lake Lure from the town upstream. That’s just one example of what is repeating itself across western North Carolina.

[00:16:02] Kay: Yeah, it’s very intense up over there. I mentioned it just before we started recording that I spoke with Josh Griffith and he has been out there trying to get as much resources to people as he can through his GoFundMe. One thing that he mentioned is that there’s a critical need for certain supplies that I would say that most of us take for granted on a day to day basis. Water, in particular, is one of those.

[00:16:25] James: Water and food, of course, jumped to the top of the list, as does medicine. As a parent of two young kids, I’ll tell you the other thing that has come into mind for me is for all the parents that are out there who need diapers or formula or things to take care of their family. While across the country, anyone can make a financial donation that is beneficial. The other thing that’s happening here locally in the region is a lot of the local airports in what has essentially become known as the outside world, where I am in Charlotte, for example, people are driving supplies to drop off locations near airports and then it’s being airlifted into the cut off communities in the mountains via helicopter and airplane. Some of this is military coordinated, some of it is civilian coordinated, so you have both of those efforts underway.

[00:17:09] Kay: Yeah, can you tell me a little bit more about those efforts? Because like you said, some of these places are one bridge in, one bridge out. It can’t be easy to access these communities at all.

[00:17:17] James: It’s not easy to access. And we’re very lucky that folks with aircraft again, both military and civilian have shown up to help. Part of their struggle, as I understand it, is where to land in some of these communities. We’ve seen the National Guard and FEMA be able to fly their larger aircraft into airports that are still operational in Asheville. But there are smaller communities outside of Asheville that either have a damaged airport or don’t have an airport at all. So we’ve seen pictures of helicopters landing on roads or in fields just to be able to reach some of these communities. Other thing that comes to mind that has really sprung back to life in this digital age that we live in is amateur radio. Because when the cellular networks went down, when the wired internet went down there were HAM radio operators on the inside and Ham radio operators on the outside, and they’ve been running an emergency net, as they call it, a communication two way on the radio to help funnel information back and forth. And what that has turned into is a lot of family and friends here on the outside, where we are just outside of the bubble of the disaster are finding ways to connect with HAM radio operators and then saying, I’m looking for Susie. I’m looking for Mary. They live at yada place. And then somebody on the inside might be able to say, Oh, I’m within walking distance, or that’s just a safe drive away. And somebody on the inside is able to go and check on loved ones. And I think that has been a welcomed bridge for folks in this cutoff world.

[00:18:41] Kay: I’m glad that you brought that up, because I was actually going to bring that up myself. It was, do you know what radio station that is specifically that people can call in, or did you mention that?

[00:18:48] James: Oh, sure. So outside of amateur radio, which is a hobby group that people can be licensed to operate their own, handheld or desktop radios at home or on the go, there is a radio station, as you mentioned, in Asheville, North Carolina, the biggest and one of the hardest hit towns there in the mountains. I believe it’s AM 570 WWNC. They are a news talk radio station, as I understand it. And they have just opened up their phone lines. And same idea, they’re using their over the air wireless analog transmitter, and allowing people to call in and say, I’m James, and I’m alive, I just wanted my family to know. Or, I’m looking for Bob, he lives at this place, and then, again, maybe a neighbor can go check on Bob, or maybe Bob hears it and calls back in. And they’re using wireless technology in one form or fashion or another to really bridge things. And I’m sure as you guys have been exploring a lot of Storm chasers are showing up with arm loads of Starlinks, which is another way to get information.

[00:19:40] Kay: Which has been super beneficial because cell service went down as well for quite a while. I know that much. I don’t know if it’s been restored in those areas completely, but I know that with Starlinks, they’ve been able to get the Internet access. And since a lot of people nowadays, phones allow you to call or text over Wi Fi, even androids let you do that. It’s been able to help people get contact with the outside world a little bit more.

[00:20:00] James: I know one of the things you’re probably familiar with is, these lovely mountainous communities don’t have good cell service on a sunny day. And so when you start wiping out the power, it doesn’t take much to go from one bar to no bars. My understanding is that cell phone companies are moving in with portable mobile backup emergency transmitters. How many have been set up, how quickly or how widespread they will be, I think is still to be determined.

[00:20:27] Kay: Do you have any final little notes to chat with from your perspective as working with the local TV as a journalist? Anything that you would like people to know about from now on?

[00:20:35] James: The thing that comes to mind that I think we’re seeing both in our newsroom and in our community is there’s a lot of exposure. There’s a lot of attention to this right now, which is very nice. It comes with, I think, a mental health load for people who are watching a lot of this trauma unfold on TV or longing to reach their loved ones. I feel that as well. The other thing that I’ll just remind folks is, if you can’t donate now, that’s okay. This will be a long and prolonged effort. Even after a lot of the TV cameras move out in the weeks ahead, these communities are not just recovering, they are rebuilding. And don’t forget that in the months ahead.

[00:21:09] Kay: Definitely, I think that through the recovery efforts North Carolina and everywhere else, we’ve seen a lot of the humanity just come together and try to help their fellow man, which has been wonderful. And yeah, it’s exactly like James said, once the TV cameras move out and stop covering everything, there’s still gonna be recovery efforts going and, once the news moves on, It doesn’t always cover the final aspects of things, so there’s still gonna be help that’s needed long after the TV crews move out. Thank you very much for joining me, James. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for joining me, and we’ll talk to you next time.

[00:21:37] James: Thanks a lot for having me