Hurricane Helene - Part 2

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Posted by Pete on October 13, 2024 at 15:29:47
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The mood at our lunch time briefing wasn't any more positive. I got assigned to move our ambulance (the vehicle with the lowest ground clearance and thus most likely to get disabled by flooding) to a different town's station on higher ground. Then I'd catch a ride back with a crew from that station, who would be helping us cover calls. At this point, I was still excited to be doing some real work, but was also starting to get a bit nervous. The rain was starting up again as I was driving the ambulance to the next town over, higher up the mountain. And as I was riding back into town with their firefighters, we immediately started catching calls for more flooding. The storm quickly knocked out the power, which only made things worse. I was also immediately soaked - as soon as I put on my still-wet coat and boots from the previous day. Then splashing through flood waters did the rest. I vaguely realized I had now soaked through my last uniform, socks and boxers. But I was still naively optimistic, figuring soon enough I could go back to the station, trade in some favors to cut to the head of the laundry line, and at least get a set of nice warm, dry, clean clothes to change into. Just had to wait for the rain to stop.

Well, the rain didn't stop. A major crisis developed at a campground on the edge of town. It was normally a pretty nice place - a meadow along a river. Families would camp there over the summer, and there were a few permanent residents in trailers and mobile homes. Well, everything was great until the river rapidly rose and flooded everything. Fortunately it wasn't yet the high tourist season, so the place wasn't full. But anything that was there flooded under several feet of water, and while nothing got completely swept away, a lot of the trailers did float away from where they were supposed to be. So we got sent in doing rescues, disconnecting gas lines and electric, and having to do search and rescue once the water started to go down. To make things worse, the septic system had overflowed, and we were trudging through that, mixed in with the usual mud. We then heard that the town's water treatment plant had flooded, so even the people on the town's sewer connections were having sewer water back up into their houses. In other words, me and my fellow firefighters spent about 12 hours wading through literal dung.

By about 5am the following morning, I was officially miserable. The adrenaline that had been keeping me going was wearing off. I was tired, hungry, soaked, cold and ready for a career change. I could feel blisters forming on my feet, and quickly bursting. I was chafing pretty much everywhere that one could chafe. I'd been in my soaked clothes and boots for about 16 hours. The smell was overwhelming. By 9am or so, I was finally allowed to return to the station, and I was dreaming of a warm shower, clean clothes, and a LONG nap.

It wasn't to be, though. The power was still out, the water was out, and flooding at the station had gotten worse. The water had mostly receded by then, but there was a layer of smelly, muddy sludge across the garage floor. We'd also gotten an inch or two of water in the kitchen, and some of the guys were already started to get furniture moved, drywall ripped out and stuff cleaned up. I finally got to pull off my water-logged and muddy gear. My white socks were now stained dark brown - I peeled those off and tossed them right in the trash pile outside the station. I'd heard that we shouldn't drink whatever water came out of the faucets, but I went into the shower room to see if it would at least be possible to rinse off some of the grime I was covered in. Turning on the faucet produced a trickle of cold, brown water. I figured it was (hopefully) cleaner than whatever I was covered in, and tried to rinse off as much filth as I could. In my bunk room I luckily had an old pair of sweatpants and a hoodie that were dry and reasonably clean, so I put those on.

Then I had to figure out what to do next. There was no chance of doing laundry, and little chance of getting any sleep with all the activity around the station. I knew if I stayed put, I'd get put to work, and I was way too tired to do any work. I'd kept my cellphone in my pocket one of the times I had to wade into the floodwaters, so that was shot. Austin's phone was out of batteries, and the station phone was knocked out. Next up, I had to worry about my car. Now, it was a beater car I got for like $100, and on a good day it barely worked, and was literally held together with scotch tape and chewing gum. But, I saw that the lot I parked it in had flooded. I didn't care if the car was toast, but I was hoping it had one more ride left in it, just to get me the heck out of town. Fortunately, it at least started, though the radio, headlights and everything electric seemed to be fried. So I figured I'd just head back to my parent's house, a couple hours drive, and recuperate there. My friend Austin, who'd been working alongside me the whole time, was stuck. He was from a small town in Indiana, and plus he didn't even have a car. I said "Hey man, if you want to come crash at my parents for a couple days, you can come along." He didn't have any better ideas, so we shoveled our disgusting dirty laundry into trash bags, tossed them in the trunk of my car, and we headed out of town. We pooled our money to buy enough gas to make it back to West Virginia, and a few hours later I was pulling into my parents driveway, thankful that my trashy car survived the journey (and that I didn't fall asleep on the drive and crash and burn.)

My parents were shocked to see us. It was just about dinner time, and they managed a loaves-and-fishes style miracle to feed us (and we were HUNGRY) - but only after they insisted that we shower and change into clean clothes. Finally, a proper shower! I noticed that the cuts on my legs were getting sore, red and puffy, so I slathered some neosporin on them. Then we wolfed down some dinner and went to bed early. I think I was in bed, sound asleep, by 7pm. And woke up sometime around noon the next day.

But believe it or not, the ordeal wasn't over. When I woke up, I felt awful, like I was sick. Then I noticed my right leg - my knee was swollen to the size of a volleyball, my ankle was the size of a softball, and my skin was red from my toes up past my knee. Trying to move any joint from my toes to my hip felt like I was being stabbed with thousands of red hot sharp needles. The cuts in my legs and feet were oozing nasty pus. Great. I contorted myself into some clean shorts and a t-shirt, hobbled downstairs, and told my dad that I needed to see a doctor. Austin was having similar struggles, I saw as he was sitting at the kitchen table, with the cuts on his legs and feet looking red and gross. My dad drove us both to the nearest hospital. Austin escaped with just some antibiotic pills, but I ended up spending the night in the hospital hooked to an IV. The doctor was an Indian gentleman who didn't speak great English. I tried to explain what happened, that I was a firefighter doing rescues in disgusting flooding. I don't think the doctor understood, because he kept scolding me, "you shouldn't swim in floods!" - as if I WANTED to! But, all in all, I recovered, I took a couple days off work, my dad kindly bought me a new cell phone and new shoes. And I learned some lessons about not procrastinating about doing laundry. That was, BY FAR, the worst 48 hours of my life - and it was only a couple days! Folks responding to these hurricanes deal with this for days, even weeks at a time.


Back in the present, I desperately wanted to volunteer to respond out to the Asheville area and help out. Both my fire department, and the hospital I work at full-time are sending crews out to help. But, family comes first, and I need to be responsible to my family and stay here. I did pick up some extra shifts at my local fire department, to allow some of our staff to respond out to the flood zone. And I still felt guilty - sitting in the day room at the station, with my feet up in a recliner, staring out the window at a beautiful sunny day, responding to a few routine calls here and there. My family stopped by the station and joined us for dinner. It was what anyone would call a good shift. It was a bit more surreal though, to see crews from the coastal cities in the Carolinas responding to hurricane damage in the mountains. Usually its the other way around. The Carolinas do get hurricanes on the coast. Its usually not as bad as what Florida and the gulf coast gets, but usually once a year or so we'll get a storm that does some real damage. Historically, responders from the mountains would head east to help out the coastal towns. They'd even tease us a bit - "Oh, the hill people are coming to down, they must have wanted a beach day!" I did one of these special assignments once, and it was actually kind of fun. By the time we got there, we were mostly just backing up the local crews and giving the local guys a chance to get some rest and take care of their own homes and families. It was cool to work out of another station for a couple of days and see a change of scenery. So its weird now to see aid flowing in the opposite direction - the coasts are fine, but the mountains are flooded. Weird.

We were watching the news on TV while sitting around the station, most of us quietly watching the horrific scenes from the small mountain towns that got washed away. One guy I work with is about my age, but has a rather loud, negative personality. He's always griping about something. Usually we just ignore him, and every once in a while someone will tease him a bit, which usually gets him to clam up. So he's griping about "risky rescues" (ie, untrained volunteers) going out into the disaster area and getting in the way. Now, to be clear, it is important to give trained responders room and time to work, and it can be irresponsible to drive into a disaster area if you're not properly trained and equipped to help - but having said that, I believe that everyone at least has good intentions if they show up trying to help. So I let the guy rant and rave a bit, but then all the sudden he changes the subject: "And those id--ts a couple years ago who were dumping ice water on their own heads? Thinking they would cure cancer? What kind of id--t does that?"

That brought me back to a much happier memory from my first firefighting job, back when the ice bucket challenge was happening. The interns at my department got "nominated" by another department in our county. So we setup our big folding tank. This is basically a giant collapsible water tank, maybe an 8 foot x 8 foot square, and 2 feet deep. We use it for fires that are out in the country, where there aren't fire hydrants. We have trucks that only carry hundreds of gallons of water. So those trucks will fill up at a fire hydrant in town (we can sometimes also pull water from lakes and rivers, depending on how deep/clean it is), then drive out to the fire scene, dump the water in this tank, then drive back to the hydrant and refill and return. Assuming we have enough of these trucks working, we end up with all the water we need at the scene to fight the fire. So we set this tank up in the parking lot next to our station, filled it up, then bought a ton of ice from the gas station across the street. One of the senior guys filmed us on his phone, and me and my fellow interns all jumped in the tank wearing our uniforms. It was freezing, but otherwise a super fun experience that everyone got a good laugh out of. Even some of my co-workers who tended to be kind of fussy participated willingly, and seemed to have a good time. We were setup across from a playground, and some of the kids in the neighborhood watched us, then asked if they could jump in too. It was a hot day, so they probably just wanted to cool off in the water. We said sure, and I helped supervise for about an hour until everyone was thoroughly cooled off, and we had to drain the tank and put it back on the fire truck.

Now, clearly, me jumping in a water tank didn't do much to cure ALS or anything. But, its what I was able to do at the time. I had barely enough money to buy ramen noodles to survive off of, I wasn't going to make a financial donation to ALS research or anything. But, if I could make someone laugh just a bit my dunking myself in ice water fully clothed, I was happy to!

Which gets me to thinking... man, there's a lot of negativity in the world today. Out in Asheville, my friends and coworkers are saying that there's threats being made on their lives, thanks to conspiracy theories and misinformation spreading on social media. WHY? And what can we do about it? I don't have the answers, I never claimed to be particularly smart. But, I always want to be the guy that at least tries to help. I know I'm not going to save the world, but I'd like to at least leave people feeling a little bit better. And it seems like a shame that others feel the opposite, if you ask me.

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