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do it there. Thank you. All right, everyone, I'm here
with Danny. Danny. Hey, what's going on?
Speaker 2: Man?
Speaker 1: How are you hey?
Speaker 2: I'm doing good, brother. I appreciate you having us all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no problem. Who else is there with me with you?
Speaker 2: Hey, yeah, I'm Wilsome, the swift guy that you got
the boat for there. Yeah, he's are one of our
our swift water rescue regards. Yeah, we uh really appreciate
that boat. That is what I have been using. I
did prout of the trash. So, yeah, their gear and
all their refs got swept up in the flood there
yet slam having pretty hard where they're at Tennessee. So
they actually pulled the raft out of the trash to
go rescue people off their rooftops.
Speaker 1: Man. You know, you you think if we were under
a different government, if if we were rolled by people
who were like your neighbors, this would get taken care of.
You'd have they'd be out there helping you and at
least providing you with the best possible things. And like
we were saying before we started to recording, it's just
neighbors taking care of neighbors at this point.
Speaker 3: You yeah, yeah, well that's what it's been from the start,
because go do that.
Speaker 4: It was just me and a group of my friends
going to e and and getting getting to work.
Speaker 2: You know, there was no thought of this or that
it was just go do work. That's what I didn't do.
Speaker 1: It let me a lot of that. Yeah, I know,
when this started, the living we're obviously going to be
the first priority. And now as I understand it, you're
at the recovery stage. How's how's that going?
Speaker 2: Well? You know, he he was here the day of
the flood, you know, in Tennessee doing the rescue side
right there with the Star teams. I got here just
after the flood, kind of just doing my own thing.
Cowboy ended up basically, and then assisted some guys from
Fairview far and got roped in as a volunteer alongside
the U Star teams here in West North Carolina. And
that switched over to recovery pretty quick, probably about end
of the first week, beginning of the second week went
into recovery and it's been that ever since. And then
the eoc's Emergency Operations centers got stood down on the
search by the governor here in western North Carolina. So
then after that point, the entire responsibility of the search
we fell onto the family's shoulders with no resources. So
that's when WILL send myself and Rain and all these
guys here with me, the whole team all came together
to coordinate and provide resources on the search cine on
a purely volunteer basis because there was no county resources,
no public safety. National Guard here in North Carolina wanted
to help us, so did the one oh first Airborne,
but the governor here had stood down all emergency management
in West North Carolina on search, so they weren't allowed
to help.
Speaker 1: Before we go any further, canal in your day jobs,
what you guys do, if you're okay with them As.
Speaker 2: A Ribor guy, yeah, he pretty much does the same
thing that he's been doing right now for a living.
It's just a few less dead bodies. Myself, I did
the seir instructing thing for a while for they got
the Marine Corps and right now apparently I'm just doing
disaster response full time because we've been here for what
what is it now, twelve weeks straight? All all the
days are blending together. I'm not even sure how long
we've been here, but yeah, we have a coalition of sorts,
it's called the Coalition Project of organizations have kind of
formed around us seeing what we've been doing, and they
all came together. They liked our ethos, you know, every
time Info Wars are somebody who come out here and
interviewed me, they'd always ask what organization I'm with, and
I'd always say, you know, I'm just a guy. And
that whole saying it's caught on. You know, there's got
people doing a pair of lines about it now because
we don't have egos. You know, I shoved mind to
the bottom of a whiskey ball twelve weeks ago and
it stayed there. Yep. Everything that we saw on the
first days here a little humble the fuck out of you.
And Uh, we don't have room for egos out there,
especially when you're when you're out there looking for someone's relative.
You know, it's all about a sacred duty to bring
them closer. There's no room for egos. Yeah, you know,
we just keep saying doing the right thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when Wilson, when Wilson talks, make sure he has uh,
he's close to the mic because I'm having trouble hearing
him and we want people to hear him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, scooting room. Yeah, we're having to share a mic
off my laptop that's been covered in a silt from
being out there in the debris piles. So excuse our
setup here. Being a little bit redneck. Yeah, the big
thing out here is, you know, we depend on each
other in every way imaginable. You know, when I'm in
a raft, I depend on Rain Wilson and keep me alive.
They're in charge the moment we get in the raft
until we get out. So it's really tight knit. We
live together, we work together, we depend on each other.
And every time that we don't have canines to go
out there in search, we just ask ourselves what's the
most important thing that we can do for the people here?
You know, what's the next right thing to do? So
getting people in the hot tents they don't freeze to death,
working to try and do rebuilds, get them supplies. We're
kind of like triage, you know. Whatever the most important
need is to keep people alive and to bring them
home is what we do. And then we'll hand them
off from another organization to a higher level of care,
get them into a camper or a tiny home. You
wouldn't believe how many people are displaced out here. It's
well over ten thousand. It's an insane number. If you
count all the folks in all the affected counties in
western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee. Just on our end, we've
probably put about seventy families in the hot tents out.
You're just keeping from freezing today.
Speaker 1: Describe the first the first days, Describe the storm and everything,
and well, if you've never been in a flood, you
don't know what water it can do. So can you
just describe that?
Speaker 2: I can't.
Speaker 3: I can describe it in pretty good detail.
Speaker 2: Can you hear me?
Speaker 5: Good?
Speaker 4: I just want to make sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, come in a little closer if you can.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I woke up on the twenty seventh to some
of my friends actually called me to ask if I
was all right because the road behind my house is gone.
Speaker 2: A bunch of those houses.
Speaker 3: There they got fully flooded out, destroyed, and just down
the road down the mountain for me, the end of
my road there was a small community called Denton, and
they got hit hard. Like, well, I live right on
the Pigeon River. Thanks you hard Ford Harper, Tennessee, Newport, Tennessee.
All that, and and so my friends were calling me
to see if I was all right, Like, well, yeah,
I'm fine.
Speaker 4: Why what's going on? I had no idea that it
had gotten that bad that fast, but overnight, the foot
had built to the point were well we started seeing
the destruction that we see now. But it was starting
to get to that point.
Speaker 3: In Hartford, I know, along the Pigeon River, we were
probably looking about somewhere close to one hundred and forty
to one hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet of water
per second.
Speaker 6: And to give you some perspective, one cubic foot of
waterways sixty seven pounds, and it's about the size of basketball,
So one hundred and forty thousand and sixty seven pounds basketballs,
and that water is going to take everything that's in
there and shut it wherever it wants.
Speaker 4: Okay, it's not that the water is pushing, it's what
the water is pushing because it already has the force momentum.
Speaker 2: So what it does.
Speaker 3: It strips entire islands, mountain sides, whatever it wants it takes.
So get you an idea that there in Harpard, my town,
I was watching entire giant trees rootball and all that
have been stripped of, all the limbs off of them.
You know, we're getting tossed into the side of the
bridge or tossed over the bridge. Yeah, that that kind
of force is not to be messed with. It's it's
definitely something that so it's got a hold of you.
It's gonna take you.
Speaker 4: And the last call that I did there on the
twenty seventh was my actual that little.
Speaker 2: Town and then that little community. We could not get
in there. It was coming through.
Speaker 4: It had just eat the entire mountain sides and you know,
there's objects in the water, all that kind of stuff
that we're in the dark.
Speaker 2: We can't see.
Speaker 3: We've got like half a flashlight and a trash raft,
you know. So we rarely risked it on that one.
Speaker 4: But again it's it goes back to doing the right thing,
and yeah, you're gonna have to take a risk if
you have the ability. You know, if you have the
ability to do something and then you don't, well that's
on you. No you I can't imagine having to live
with myself wake up in the morning knowing that I
could have could have done something better, put into something more.
Speaker 3: So that's why, you know, like you said, on.
Speaker 4: Days, so we aren't actually out there looking for people
who're out here putting people on tents.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the first days and when had about week after
the flood, and it is like swann Noah a fair
View Backcave was. I don't think they've invented words for
it yet, to be honest. People walking around just into
complete days down the middle of the road because there's
houses in the middle of the road in some places
still forty fifty foot high to breed piles in the
middle of the town like its wanna know. We called
it zombie land because it just looked like a new
k had gone off and everyone wandered around like a zombie.
People were having to get cut out for about two
weeks out of their homes or to get access to
their homes to get them out. Fairview Fire Department, you know,
and a bunch of guys were out there and volunteers
helping cut that cave fire department out, you know, meeting
in the middle so they'd come up with four wheelers
and get supplies and evacuate people out. Areas like that
like Chimney Rock and Back Cave. All the roads in
were gone, so you had to hike in for miles
to get anywhere to get people supplies or to get
them out. The few people that were able hiked out
of their towns because there was nothing left chimney rocks
at the bottom of Lake Lure now communities like Pensacola, Minneapolis.
It is kind of a running joke up here. All
these haulers are named after some big city. Those are
a little holler communities outside Burnsville. They got hammered really hard.
All the roads were gone covered boulders. You couldn't get
in there even with four wheeler, so you either had
to hike in or they had to fly in with
helicopters to get people out and get them food and water.
It was intense, and we had martial law here for weeks.
I want to say it was well over a month
after the event. We still had martial law because all
the looting. I never myself saw the looting until more recently.
Early on, we were too busy running around trying to
help people. We heard about it all the time. People
would walk around with guns, mostly out of Staters who
come in here look like they're invading Iraq with plate
carriers and long rifles. And we tried to stay low
pro you know, ma cio hoodie concealed carry, tried to
look like we're here to help instead of here to
e g I Joe invade because a lot of it
here in the early days, it was winning hearts and minds.
You know, we're not from here, We're a guest in
someone else's backyard. So there was no power, there was
no water, there was no cell phone service. So we
would get out far enough to get service on our phones,
and we'd find someone in one of the local groups
on Facebook that had a relative that they needed helped,
and we'd talked to them and then we'd screenshot the conversation.
We'd sneak past the checkpoints that the locals had set
up to keep everyone out, and then we'd find that person,
show them the screenshot because there's no phone service, get
them some food and water and supplies, maybe a generator,
and then have them vouch for the rest of the community.
You know, we were there to help and not there
to loot. That we weren't with FEMA, you know, the FEDS,
because a lot of the locals and the smaller communities
would set up these little checkpoints. The media called them malicious,
but it's not actually true. It was just locals that
had heybale checkpoints set up, and what was left in
the roads that had big plywood signs that said locals
only are emergency personnel. Everyone else to keep out, and
they meant the National Guard too. They didn't want the
National Guarden there. Some of them were concerned that FEMA
and the Army was going to come in and do
things they didn't want to do, so they just kept
everyone out. So we would either dare them to shoot
us and just drive through, or to hike around them,
sneak around them and get in there. So it was
the Wild West for weeks. Yeah, we're still getting used
to using stop lights and traffic laws and all that stuff.
It's weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean basically all infrastructure was wiped out, right.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely, it was all gone. It's still coming back.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: There's plenty areas without civil service still, some areas of
that power, a lot of areas that aren't going to
have potable water for a long time, so there's they're
still having these bald water. We joked about the folks
that came in from out of state a little bit
late with all the water. We called them water goblins.
They just show up with water and there's already mountains
of it here, so there was nowhere that wanted it.
So they would just go to a random house, drop
it on the doorstep, take a picture for Instagram, and
then leave. And we made jokes about that for a
long time. But it's going to be a need again
into their future because they're having to use it to
brush their teeth, they're having to use to wash their dishes,
they're having to use it for everything. You know, we
go through gallons of water a day with coffee, so
you imagine what that's going to look like two, three,
four months down the road. For now, those mountains of
water are gonna get small really quick. So all of
the infrastructure was completely gone. You didn't even have public
safety being able to talk to their sister departments in
the next town. In the initial days and first week,
it was all yeah, low things. Yeah, everyone had a
balfing little Taliban radio to talk to each other. The
sheriff's department would have trouble talking to emergency management. At times,
nobody was talking to each other. We actually part of
our job was going out there reconing, getting the volunteer
fire departments linked up with the emergency operations centers so
everyone can start coordinating. And now it's come back a lot.
In the last twelve weeks. But it's actually kind of
spooky how much it hasn't you know. I'm used to
the Gulf Coast. If an entire city gets wiped off
the map, the very next day, waffle house is going
to be open with a generator out here. I think
the nearest waffle house that we had that we could
actually go into is in Marion. And uh, it's still
just really fucked, you know, for lack of better words,
it's just absolutely a mess out here. Still heard in
the water here, we we had uh, what we called
beer water for a long time. That's finally going away.
It's Anheuser bush sink cans of water and beer cans,
and you'll still see those floating around and restaurants and
stuff every once in a while. Yeah, the truck, it
tastes out off.
Speaker 1: As I got chalking it, I had heard that, you know,
water treatment plants like I guess the what the main
water treatment plant for Ashville, you know, big city like
that was just they're just washing down the river.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the North Fork is just gone. They're gonna
have to completely rebuild it. Swoller Noah and Black Mountain
I think finally got drinkable water. I want to say
a week ago. If I'm a little bit off on
my timeframes. We haven't gone home or really taken time off.
Because everything is kind of blending together. Our memory is
a little bit fragmented at times. You'll have to forgive
me if I get a fact wrong of when something changed.
The locals, you know, will probably be listening to this
and be like, we've had water for a week and
a half, not a week. But it's twelve weeks out.
You know, they finally got drinkable water, maybe two weeks ago.
They're gonna have to rebuild entire treatment facilities, flush up
the sewers and everything, and there's been so many possible
contaminants and all the ground water and everywhere else that
they've been having a test. We have no idea. Everything's
a rumor out here. People are still kind of an
information vacuum here because a lot of folks are so
focused on survival mode they don't have time to find
out what's going on in the news. Like I don't
have any idea what's going on the outside world. I
know Trump won the election. I guess something to do
with Syria, but we don't really know what's going on there.
We never have time and we have to get somewhere
where there's internet. Usually we're too busy working. But the locals,
a lot of the them are in the same boat,
especially the more rural areas outside of Asheville, So it's
life is different here. It's kind of surreal when we
go far enough out by supplies somewhere like Hickory or
Winston Salem where things are normal and they think everything's
fine here.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about this. So you mentioned like tents that
you can set up heaters for people, and you also
mentioned like ten thousand displaced people. I mean, yeah, yeah,
what's happening to them?
Speaker 2: I don't know the exact numbers. So you know, it's
just all part for any of the armchair quarterbacks out there,
just the sheer volume of people that other organizations are
having to house that we've had the house with temporary
shelters between East Tennessee and West North Carolina.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's still in my own backyard.
Speaker 5: Like I said, we got hit pretty good. We didn't
get hit like these guys got hit, but it took
about four weeks for us to get Suppose they drank
a little water, but it still wasn't right. It wasn't
right for weeks and weeks after a number of effected people.
That's a reasonable assumption.
Speaker 2: To make right right there, It's definitely the thousands, you know,
maybe I'm guessing somewhere between five and seventeen thousand people displaced.
FAMA puts some of them up in hotels with vouchers. Yeah,
for a while a lot of organizations have been getting
them into campers. United Cajun Navy partnered with us has
been helping us get some of the folks who put
in a hot tents into campers when we're trying to
winterize them. The hot tents is something that a couple
of locals friends of mine cooked up out here. These
two ladies, we're looking at long term winter shelter that
would be quick and affordable, and they talked to a
guy from Norway and he came with this idea for
the hot tents. The yurts. So it's a large belt
and you can fit probably four to six people in it,
and it's got a little hot stove. It's built to
have a hot stove in it, and it gets real
toasty even when you get into these lower temperatures and
the higher elevations in the mountains, it'll keep you warm.
So as a quick fix is a sort of band
aid until we can get them into something little more
durable and stable. It's great. You know, they're not cheap,
like twelve hundred bucks, but they work. And these two ladies,
I think it was Brooks Sullivan and Christina Gray, they
came up with the idea, raised a little bit of
funding for it, and then the Red Cross copied their homework,
got either donated or bottle of the whole supply pretty much,
and then hoarded it and added all these stipulations to it.
You know, they were telling us when we started running
low on them, we were trying to get him from
the Red Cross, and they said, well, don't worry. We
have five thousand we can give to you, and we
have more than enough. Next thing, I knew, it was seven,
and then it was five, then it was two, and
then it took four days to get one. And then
they said, well, if they were homeless before the flood,
we're not going to give them a hot tent, or
if it's a single individual mail, we're not going to
give him a hot tent. So essentially we had a
conversation with a guy from Red Cross that I literally said, so,
what you're telling me is if a guy's not married
or with a woman, or he was homeless before the flood,
you're gonna let him freeze to death. And they wouldn't
answer me because it was, you know, a pubexciting, but
they wouldn't say no. It's pretty much a confirmation there.
So we just started kind of using whatever loopholes we
could to get hot tents from them, and then we
started doing gofundmes and raising funds however we could and
getting tents donated to us. So one of the side
gigs that we do between going out there doing searches
is doing recon finding out where everyone is that needs
a hot tent so they don't freeze to death, and
then going out there and setting it up for them.
And then we circle back and bring them firewood and
reach out to the partner organizations to get them into
a camper as fast as we can. I know, we've
put probably eighty families in the hot tents so far.
And then we're like an eight man crew, you know,
we're a little humble organization. We're not some big NGO
or like the Red Cross. So the eight of us
have gone out there and put eighty families at least
into hot tents, and I think we have a waiting
list of at least twenty more. I put a post
about doing the hot tents out and it it went viral,
So I'm having to go through like five thousand message
requests on Facebook to try to filter them all out
and see who still needs one. It's become like a
second full time job.
Speaker 1: Have you considered telling FEMA that all of these people
are illegals so that they could put them up in
five star hotels?
Speaker 2: We definitely have. You know, I found fourteen illegals freezing
to death in the first week out in Spruce Pine.
They didn't have sleeping bags, they didn't have coats, the
didn't have anything, and we didn't have cell phone service.
So I was the one GREENO that could speak decent
enough Spanish, and they were terrified they were going to
get deported because Ice was out there helping with the
search and rescue, and everyone in the outside just saw
Ice there in the ATF so they made a bunch
of assumptions. But the fourteen illegals that I came across,
they were more afraid of getting deported than they were
freezing to death. So that was a complicated situation trying
to figure out how to save them because the few
personal items they had left, you know, all of their
homes had been swept out, they'd been looted twice, and
every time they'd go to take a leak in the
woods or go find water, they'd get looted by their neighbors.
So they refused to leave without their stuff. So we
had to find a trailer for their stuff and get
them into a place with FEMA. It's been interesting and
we have to work with them, so it's you know,
it's kind of hard. We have to watch a little
bit of what we say because we work with Emergency
Management on the searches. I do know they haven't been
out to a lot of the worst hit places yet
to assess the damage. A lot of the locals that
brought that up, you know, people were they're in an
area where out of twenty houses, maybe seven or eight
er left and FEMA hasn't made it out there yet
to assess the damage so that they can get the
process started. We did meet with the guy from Emergency Management.
It's part of FEMA up in Tennessee today about search
related activity, and he was actually awesome. He's the one
guy with FEMA that I have respect for. He's just
a good old boy, you know, a former firefighter. And
he looked at me and he said, I don't care
if these people are missing from North Carolina. I don't
care about imaginary lines between us. There are people and
we're going to bring them all home. What can I
do to help? And we told him, myself and the
family member and every single thing we asked for. He
immediately took care of it and he just got to business.
You know, what can we do to help? How can
I help the family? What do they need? He was outstanding,
But that is a rare okay, you know, he's an outlier.
So I don't want to see they're not doing anything
as I have seen FEMA do some good stuff out here,
but there is almost a sense that they are in
some ways afraid of the locals to the point where
they are they don't want to go into the more
rural comedy and ems like haulers and stuff. I did
watch Bob the constable up in Pogy Road almost arrests
some lady from FEMA that was pretty entertaining. So I mean, like,
I've seen them do some good for the people, but
a lot of it's fallen short. And these people didn't
have insurance they would cover flood damage. So a lot
of them are getting that six seven hundred fifty bucks,
which they get taxed on, by the way, they're getting
that seven hundred fet dollars check from FEMA, and it's
just pissing them off more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that all you have to do is
if you were watching the news before this happened and
you're being handed a seven hundred and fifty dollars check
while you know, Haitians in Springfield, Ohio have you know
reportedly like twenty five thousand dollars on their EBT cards. Yeah,
I mean, oh yeah.
Speaker 2: The locals have had these conversations with us, you know,
and they all they're pretty upset about it. You know,
it's mainly a very red state outside of little hot
spots like Asheville and Raleigh, they're blue. So these people
they knew all about that, and they've been bringing that
up repeatedly to local officials and the Senate and the governor.
Very few people here have a good opinion on the governor.
But a lot of them have this opinion that Trump
and JD. Vans are going to save them come January.
And I, you know, I'm not here to argue or
judge or tell them what to believe, so I just
kind of nod my head. But they already won the
presidency and the vice presidency. They could start turning all
their donors towards this place. They could start doing something now.
They don't need to wait to assume office before they
have the power to do something about this. You know,
they can come out here and shake hands in glad
hand all day. That doesn't build anyone's house back, That
doesn't keep someone from freezing to death. So I hope
that they're right. I would hate to be I would
hate to be proven right in this case. I want
to be proven wrong. I hope that JD. Vance and
Trump do poor money and resources and manpower to this
place come January. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
I'll stay out here and Wilson and I and the
guys and Melon everyone will do it ourselves. You know,
our motto for weeks out here has been nobody's coming.
It's up to us, and we're not going to change
that sop anytime soon, because I just don't see a
politician coming out here and fixing this place. I think
either the people here are going to do it for themselves,
or the people that have come here for the right
reasons they're going to help them do it. I don't
think Trump and JD. Vans are and to come back
here and turn this place around. I just don't see
it happening.
Speaker 1: Well, I think the point you made was these are
people who These are two guys who, yep, no billionaires.
I mean, you know, Trump's a billionaire, but they know billionaires.
This could have been taken care of, the the water
treatment plant could have already been rebuilt. I mean, the
these are things that could have been could have been done.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk has done a lot more worse than Trump
and JD. Vance. You know, I'm not like a fanboy
of Elon, but those starlinks have been a lifesaver out here.
Billionaires don't become billionaires because they're like, so, yeah.
Speaker 1: We're not going to come up on unt. Yeah, well, Wilson,
come up on the UH on the microphone, because I
want to ask you this question and I want you
to answer this since you know this is your business,
you know, River River recovery, things like that in your
just in the area you're working in. How many people
are missing and presumed deceased?
Speaker 4: Yes, get accurate thing, but I would say what he
as many as eight hundred out very high end.
Speaker 2: I don't know that's he has that. Okay, a lot
adjacent to the EOC in the early days and uh worked,
you know, alongside the USR guys. I know that in
the area that we're searching there at least five we're
looking for three. I know that what the official figures
are for the areas about two hundred are based on
the illegals and the at hikers and the homeless encampments.
I would say probably all together four to six hundred.
It's not going to be a thousand or more because
the math wouldn't work out it If it was that many,
we would have personally been stumbling across more people that
are out there that aren't being looked for. Just plugging
in the half of how we do this job, and
the sheer number of miles that we've combed of riverbanks,
along the elk, along the toe, the cane, the Nolachucky
the pigeon. You know, we would have found someone by
now that wasn't listed missing if there was some huge figure.
So there's a lot of misinformation from both sides. The
liberal side and some of the local officials out here
downplay it because they want it to seem like everything
is under control, and then on the other side of
the spectrum there's these crazy conspiracies. One of them the
guests heard this kind of interesting. So FEMA sent ten
thousand body bags down here, and everyone said, I mean,
ten thousand people are dead. Then what happened was the
firefighters U saw teams were worried about running out of
body bags, so they requested some from FEMA, And I
think FEMA's minimum order quantity was ten thousand, So that's
what you know. I've got like four hundred in the
back of my car right now. We're never going to
need them, you know, which is a good thing. If
I had to put a number on how many you're
actually missing, I'd say probably four to six hundred. So
I hate to ruin it for all the Alex Jones
listeners and the people that think there's tens of thousands,
but it's still a considerable number. You know, you're talking
about hundreds of people lost their lives. Hundreds lost their lives.
There's still people missing that only the families and volunteers
are looking for, you know. And we're lucky on Tennessee side,
a lot of local law enforcement there hear more about
getting the job done than they do about politics, so
they're helping us out a lot over there. It's a
little different in North Carolina side because of the politics
and because of the governor. It's not that local county
guys and public safety don't want to help, that's not
it at all. A lot of them are great guys.
They'd love to be out there. They're just they got
to get back to policing and putting out fires. And
the ucs from the governor have been stood down on that,
so it's not their fault. I do think that the
number of two hundred is a little bit conservative, just
based on the amount of devastation instruction we've seen out
here and the fact that there wasn't a whole lot
of effort put into looking for the many homeless camps
in Ashville and Swarnole. You know, there's a lot of
people that we got out there that we've put in
a hot tents that were homeless before the flood that
woke up the next day and half their friends were gone,
and no one reported those people missing.
Speaker 7: Okay, you know what I'm saying. It's still the issue
with the homeless encampments and stuff. I know there were
several on the side of the Pigeon things like that
out there that they're just gone. No one knows that
they're still or any of that.
Speaker 8: No one knows if the professionals that were going out
there to try and warn people and get them get
them move, you know, to evacuate, they don't.
Speaker 2: No one knows if they actually got down into those
homeless encampments or if they just let them wash away,
or there's there's still a lot of questions. So some
people got an hour to evacuate, some people got three minutes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know down in some of the smaller communities
on the Pigeon River that maybe just two guys came
through and try to tell people y'all should leave.
Speaker 2: And then no one's going to listen to that. They
didn't tell them that, you know, this is what's coming.
We also didn't know one hundred percent of what was coming.
Where the dams had been at flood level for two
days before the actual flooding happened, and they didn't release
any of that. So on Friday you had probably trillions
of gallons of water come ripper or down those rivers.
Poggy Road I know, had like a sixty five foot
wall water came down. It just channelized. There's a picture
I've got, but it doesn't do it justice. You have
to see it to really get the scope and scale
of it. An eighty foot high bridge just got ripped
out and floated down the river by a sixty five
foot wall of water. In one area outside Burnsville that
we're searching for some folks, seven people got swept out.
They had minutes of warning, probably, and they had no
idea what was coming. They didn't know a forty foot
wall a water was coming their way, and they had
run off coming down the mountain behind them in one direction,
and then a wall of water to the other direction,
so they had nowhere to go. There was no time
to react. Either you were lucky or you weren't, and
most people got lucky and some didn't. There's some pretty
heartbreaking stories out there in that area because they lost
so many people in such a small community, a couple
of which still haven't been found, where entire families got
swept down the river while everyone had to watch. And
you know, I was going around with a family member
collecting witness videos so that we could use frame by
frame rate to estimate the water velocity, so that we
could try to narrow the search corridor using some mathematics
of what we're doing. And those videos were tough to watch,
real tough. So one of the old guys that had
him on his phone, he's like, you know, I've been
waiting for you, for you to show up to come
see me. I said he had seen on his phone,
and he just broke down crying. He couldn't even watch
it again because he's like, you know, these people getting
swept out and screaming for me to come help him,
and I couldn't because I would have drawn too. And
we've seen a lot of that out there.
Speaker 1: How bad is the Has it started freezing up there yet?
Has it started getting to the water start I sent
up yet.
Speaker 2: Opening Spruce Pond In the areas of higher elevation, it
definitely has. We've had snow a few times over the
last couple of weeks, So the need for getting people
into some somewhere warm is very urgent right now. It's critical.
While these reporters keep coming out and talking to us.
We've been on interview by TV stations numerous times about
hot tents, and it builds awareness, but it doesn't seem
to produce any resources. It doesn't seem to change the
situation on the ground as far as hot tents getting
donated or fund's coming in or manpowerful volunteers coming in.
So you know, we're getting close to January, it's going
to get even colder than it already is. There's already
been people that have died of hypothermia out here in
the last few weeks. And we've got a waiting list
right now, people waiting on us to come out there
and set up a hot tent form. So we're getting
as fast as as we can, and we're getting out
there as quick as we can to get them set up.
But you know, there's eight of us, and there's hundreds
of these people. A lot a lot of other groups
are trying to help us out, but it doesn't seem
like the the urgency of the situation is understood by
anyone outside the affected area.
Speaker 1: On that note, what can if somebody wanted to like
buy up buy a few of these yurts and send
them to you. Obviously we don't want to give the
address out on the air and everything. I mean, I
have the address that we sent the uh we sent
the raft to. What would you be able to get
me exactly what you would need so we could possibly
get some more ordered and uh and get them sent
up there is that? Is that something you'd want?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and i'll uh, I'll get you an updated address
for shipping to a staging area that we have. It's
kind of more centralized because we're having to go between
East Tennessee and all the way down to the south
end of West North Carolina. We don't care where they are.
We don't care whether they were almost before the flood
after the flood. You know, the only stipulation that we
have is that they be a human being as cold
no matter how far away we got to drive, we'll
get out there. A lot of well meaning people from
out of state started donating the wrong hot tents that
we're actually having the inventory all of those and figure
out what we're going to do with them. So I'll
shoot you the information for the right one and the
address to ship them to. That'd be a huge help.
We picked this one specifically because not only is it
big enough for a whole family and not always it
actually capable of keeping them warm in the higher elevations
up here in the mountains, but also because it's safe.
You know, it's the manufacturer has been making these for
a while, so they're not going to burn and the
occupants down. Some of the tents that people have seen
us are some TMU brand knockoffs of the tent that
we have, and we can't use them because I wouldn't
feel safe putting a family in it. If I wouldn't
want my kids in it, and I'm not going to
put someone else's in it.
Speaker 1: And I was saying, those yurts, I've actually camped in,
camped in those before in the middle of winter, and
they do heat up, and they do. I understand why
you're using them because if they're good Yeah, if they're
a good quality, they will keep people warm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they get toasty. I actually stay didn't want a
couple of nights and while it was snowing pretty hard here,
really cold, and I was warm the entire night. You know,
a lot of these people out here, we've been giving
them buddy heaters running on propane are only good for
a few hours and then they're cold again. These yurts
are the easiest solution that actually works. And all we
got to do is supplying with fire wood. And you know,
there's an abundance of that right now. We're surrounded by it.
There's mountains of it in every direction. Anything involving pro
paine and kerosene is not sustainable. We can't run every
single family propane every day for ever, but we can
keep sending dump truck loads of firewood to every community
and make sure they have plenty of that.
Speaker 1: That's great. How many would you say you need right now,
as far as yours.
Speaker 2: Go, I'd say at least eighteen. That's just to knock
through the rest of our waiting list, on top of
the few that we're picking up tomorrow.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, if you get me the address, If
you get me that address for the staging area and everything.
When I release this, I'll also put out to my
mailing list information about that and try to get people
to you know, if I give them that address privately,
they can have it sent directly there. If I need
to take if I need to take donations for it
myself in order to send them, I'll do that too.
So I'll do whatever I can to make sure, because yeah,
I mean, I live in Alabama and it's it's already
getting cold at night, so I can just imagine what
it's like up there.
Speaker 2: Same here, man, I live in Enterprise.
Speaker 1: But I mean, I really really don't know, don't know
much more to talk about. What's to talk about unless
you guys have anything on your mind that you want
to you want to express.
Speaker 2: I just think it's it's astonunding to me because I mean,
I live down by the Gulf Coast. Some eastern hurricanes
slamming into my backyard every season, and I know what
the response looks like down there. We're prepared for. It
happens every year. The city's down there are essentially designed
to drain quickly, so the water receeds and the logistics
is much simpler down there. You're not in the mountain,
you're not the Hollers, it doesn't get cold, there's plenty
of roads in It's on flat land. Up here. Is
definitely a test, a stress test of our ability to
be able to react and help each other in a
time of crisis without very much government intervention, or at
least not with very efficient government intervention. It's astounding to me, though,
to be twelve weeks out and to have so many
families having to look for their dead relatives by themselves,
no resources being committed to this whatsoever. They're just out
there looking on their own. And you know, one of
the family members we work with, Kelly, she's doing what
she calls redneck math, where she's calculating where her cousin
might be based on with the river and depth of
the river at the time that her cousin was swept out,
and water velocity and the mass, you know, the weight
of the person, and plotting on a map with me
where all the other people were found, and then plugging
that into AI and doing a bunch of math. And
we showed that to emergency management. They were really impressed.
They're like, wow, you've been quantifying the search area with
you know, we're talking like geospatial and geotechnical engineering and
hydrology stuff that's way out of my wheelhouse. And she's
having to do this all by herself. She's having to
take off days off of work, every day to go
meet with emergency management with me and go out and
talk to local law enforcement and go do site surveys
areas for us to search. And it's strange to me,
like why is she having to do this as her
second full time job? Why is there no resources? Now,
it's great when we go on the Tennessee side, there's
some law enforcement partners and a ust our team and
emergency management that are outstanding. You know, they go above
them yon to help us out. But in other areas,
she's just out there doing this on her own. And
some are these other families, And there's plenty of families
that were not helping that we don't have enough resources
for that. You know, they are having to rebuild their house,
mourn their lost loved ones, work a full time job,
and then around that they have to go look for
their missing relative on their own. I've never seen anything
like it before.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I just I can't tell you how
much I appreciate what you guys are doing, and you know,
allowing our guys like Melon and Everything's come out there
and help you. And you know, I know that he's
he can't say enough nice things about you guys and
you know, he's he's part of a fraternity that you know,
we're all part of a fraternity, and he's, uh, thank you,
thank you for allowing allowing us to help. And you know,
if there's any other way, like I said, well, I'll
do as much as I can to get you more
tense and hopefully this will if you need more, if
you need more hands up, there might be able to
might be able to pull that off too. So yeah,
I mean, I just don't know what else to say
at this point. It's I knew when this happened, knowing
what the political climate's been like for you know, the
past four years, that y'all are going to be on
your own, and that you know, Americans, we're gonna real Americans,
We're gonna have to do this for ourselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of same like it. Yeah, well, you know,
it's just neighbors, open neighbors. If the situation was reversed,
they would do the same for us. I'm confident in
that based on the great people I've met out here,
and Melan's been awesome. I can't speak highly enough with
him and all the guys with OGC that have been
out here helping us. Every single one of them has
been outstanding a huge asset out here to us, to
the community, to local public safety and government. I know
a couple of the OGC guys basically coordinated the entire
town by themselves with a couple of laptops out of
the Visitors Center and Black Mountain and got all the
organizations tied in talking to each other. Probably saved a
lot of lives. To be honest, a lot of the
things happening out here, we wouldn't be where we're at
without guys like Melon. So I know, like we're doing
the shiny cool guy stuff which fizzles out quickly and
doesn't last, but stuff like what he's been doing supporting
us as a huge impact is why we've been able
to stay out here for so long. And it's guys
like you, Pete and your audience, and you're getting us
a raft that wasn't salvage out of the trash. That
thing held up phenomenally, patched and pulled out of the
trash over rivers that are filled with debris and that
have had the railroads pushed into them by cus X.
But we were pushing it beyond the capacity what it
was designed for, so that raft you got us. That's
actually for the job that we're doing. That's that was huge.
So we really appreciate that. And we appreciate everything Melon's
been doing out here for us and all the guys
from old Glory Club. They've been a huge help to us.
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to keep trying, and like I said,
we'll only sign off. Get me that information, and you know,
we'll see about getting getting those tents up there. I'll
see we'll try to pull off some magic and get
that up.
Speaker 2: It would be awesome. Yeah, that'd be outstanding. Thank you, Ben. Yeah,
we don't want a bunch of money, We just want
hot tents.
Speaker 3: We appreciate it as to get a raft, that is saying,
and that's all we really needed.
Speaker 2: We're all all everyone in here is already in the
hole in their bank account. We're not working about that.
We just want to make sure we keep everyone warm.
Speaker 1: All right, Well I'm gonna sign off. Don't don't disconnect
because I can get that information from you. But thank
you and thanks for talking to Thanks for talking to us.
Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having us on. We appreciate you. Man.
Speaker 3: H