ExclusiveHeroes of Helene: How Appalachia United in the Aftermath of Disaster | Special Feature

We're out here in Asheville, North Carolina, where Hurricane Helene recently hit and trying to get a sense of what's been happening on the ground. We're seeing two sides of this. On one side, we're seeing terrible stories of loss. People who've lost their homes, who've lost loved ones, really terrible things, long-term damage. On the other side, we're seeing a lot of stories of hope. We're seeing people coming together in ways that I've personally never seen before. Incredible stories of people taking it upon themselves to band together and help each other out. One of the hardest hit areas was Swannanoa, a small mountain town located 20 miles east of Asheville with a population of just over 5,000. Hurricane Helene left a scene of devastation in its wake, with many people displaced and homes and businesses destroyed. Just lit two miles from here and I listened to battery radio as much as I could. We knew that it was coming. Nobody believed it. Water was, from what I saw, bottom of that three-quarter block right there, the water was that high. It was that deep in here. It blew the whole back wall of the building out. It was like watching an episode of The Walking Dead. Everybody that was down here walking around trying to see what they could see, they were like zombies. They couldn't, they didn't talk to you. They were just walking around with their mouths hanging open. They just couldn't take it in. Our big sander was right there. Our mantel rack was there. You can see our parking lots gone too. Hey, I might need these. I hadn't seen that. I hadn't come in here until the gas was broken off out there and it was just spewing natural gas. What was back here? It was a showroom. We had probably a hundred items. Charcuterie boards, cutting boards, signs, everything that our people make. These are your remaining pieces, huh? Those were test pieces. This is a nice thing to have left. What do you do? You can't, you can't fight mother nature. You can't fight God. Wouldn't want to anyway. I found one, one of our slabs over there in a tree and there's one, one up the street. That's all I found. What kind of support have you gotten out here? The goodness of people that want to help. That's the largest part. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being here. Well, thank you. Like I told you earlier, I don't feel like I lost anything. Not compared to others. Next day I had a change of socks. I had a place dry to sleep. Didn't have power, didn't have water, but you know, these, there's these people, they got nothing. The people of Appalachia have united together. How did your involvement with this begin? I was in Texas going to speak at another veterans non-profit down there and the storm was coming in Thursday night and the last message that I got from my daughter's mom was Thursday night at about 10 p.m. So Friday morning I sent a text message and there was no answer and we drove all through the night and I got in town at 3 30 in the morning and we tried to get access to the mountains literally like we're looking at the mountains we try to get into right here. All the roads were washed out, all the power lines were down, mud slides everywhere and we couldn't get in. Well luckily on Friday I pushed out a bunch of phone calls and emails and text messages and power social media and gracious and wonderful people. We were able to arrange a fly-in to the house and see if they were okay. At that point I just kind of assumed the worst. I didn't know, but we landed. There she was barefoot running in the flowers in the field and was having a great time and she was okay, her mom's okay, the few houses that are in that area were okay, but the biggest problem that they had was that they had no outside contact. That moment we see she's okay. What was that like for you? Well I thought she was dead. So seeing her not dead and seeing her healthy and happy and her mom healthy and happy was the greatest feeling of relief I've ever personally felt in my life more so than anything else I've ever experienced. You immediately went from that to moving to help others. What was that kind of click for you? We flew around and we saw there was other cut off people so I thought okay well I can help them. So let's come back and get more supplies and then let's plan to come back out to that spot and drop off supplies there and by the third day we were out here. By Sunday night we had six pallets of water and we had a little bit of food right over here and by Wednesday we had 650,000 pounds of supplies on the ground and by that time we had three dedicated air assets on the ground, three helicopters and we had another 12 to 15 helicopters that were in here on a regular basis and by Friday we had 800,000 pounds of supplies on the ground and we had delivered over 350 or 400,000 pounds of supplies into the region and people just started showing up and drones people showed up. It's not just veterans helping out on the ground either. Local communities have been banding together. It is the best of humanity that you're seeing. I mean we have all these really expensive supplies sitting out and no one is fighting over them like you know Black Friday shopping or anything like that. People are really respectful and people have been so so generous and they have given so much and we just comes in and we send it out. I think a lot of people they think they're going to see the worst in humanity when times get hard where people start to want to cling to whatever they can for themselves but we've just seen the opposite. It's been so beautiful to see people's generosity, to see their joy, to see them taking care of one another even leading repairs on each other's houses, sacrificing the water they had. All of these items have been donated from generous people all over the country. So some of these things have come in truckloads and trailers from as far as Texas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and also a lot of local groups even in North Carolina. It's incredible seeing so many people here and seeing all the cans. I mean where's all this coming from? The supplies if you have coming in are coming from all over the country. Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Department out of Charlotte, North Carolina. The New York Fire Department was here this morning. New York Fire Department called us last night at 10 p.m. and said they were bringing dump trucks of Gatorade, four or five truckloads coming from New York to pay it forward after what happened then with Sandy. So that's who's coming here. We got families coming in. We've got individuals coming in. We've got non-profit organizations, for-profit organizations all coming here just to lend a hand to see what they can do to help. We just moved into this space three months ago. We bought this building for expanding for lots of services. We have a pretty robust food program but we really didn't know what we was going to do with this space and three months later this happens and so we're making the best utilization of this now and I'd like to take credit for it but we did not get to take credit for it. So I think it was divine the way that it worked out that we were able to do this. This right here is the Veterans Restoration Quarters in Asheville, North Carolina. It's a 250-bed facility for homeless and otherwise vulnerable veterans. This facility sits right on the banks of the river so after the storm all the flood waters came down, rose up, went right through the building. So you can see right there the water line on the door. It came up about six feet. This is the front of the building, back side of building. It came up a little bit higher. What is the actual relief effort would you say? We're a cog in a big machine of help. You know there's a lot of people who have come out to help. It's police, fire, active duty military, national guard. Those guys have really big equipment, a lot of big toys. The things that we can do that they can't is a lot of them can only work on public property. So like their focus is you know roadways, infrastructure, get the power back up, get the water back on. That's that we can't do but the stuff that we can do is we can go you know hey we can get people out of their driveways. We can make sure that they can get to the power panel on their house to hook up a generator and get power back in their house. So we can help individual homeowners in a way that some of the state and federal agencies can't. I wish we lived in a country where everyone worked together all the time. Where everybody saw the humanity in each other all the time and a lot of times people talk past each other but everybody here sees folks in need. Despite the work being done there's still a long path ahead for recovery. Many of the towns where businesses have been lost are facing an unknown future. We're heading down to the town of Hot Spring. This is one of the big tourist towns in North Carolina. Of course they have hot springs here, whitewater rafting. We were told this is one of the areas that was hit pretty hard. Look here you have people serving food to each other out here. Post office. Oh man yeah now you see the sandbags and good stuff in the river there. Store here everything washed up from under it. Jeez look the entire foundation's destroyed in this place. Everything's gone. Yeah you know it's not a big town. I think the population's around like 500 people. So these businesses go wiped out that that's the whole economy in this area. It's everybody's work right there. The building that was right along the creek across from the post office, the whole land broke away. Then that building then spun and hit the deck, knocked the deck out. It was devastation like in a matter of 30-40 minutes. The foundations have been affected, the floors. We've had warm weather so now you have to worry about mold and all the other things. Many of them will be probably torn down. I don't know how you can clean up all the debris. I'm sure it's going to take months and months and months to find everybody. So I'm talking like 30, 40, 50 feet of piles of debris and islands where big trees were on are like just they're gone. What does it mean for the businesses here? Most people here lost their job in their livelihood. I don't know. And where are you going to go? I mean Asheville's in the same boat we are. So I don't know. I mean I don't know. I really don't. I think a lot of people will probably at some point leave because you can't you can't make it. It's hard to make it here throughout the winter anyway. And there's going to be a lot of people looking for work. E.J. Snyder, you're a survivalist. You've been here in North Carolina with this disaster about two weeks now helping people. Based on your experience and based on what you've seen here, you know people don't always see a disaster coming. They got to get ready ahead of time. What can people do to prepare for something like this? Well a few things they can do to prepare and get through something like this. First thing is it's all about your plan. Planning to get through it but you're going to weather it out. And then an escape plan if you got to get out of here. You know covering all the basics. Shelter security, water, fire, food. The next thing is if I can't weather it out here I got to go. Yeah get the water level up here. Yeah right there. You can see where the water level went. These folks were under it for sure. You want to have an escape plan. If you're going to the attic in a flood make sure you have an axe, a crowbar, a hammer, a way to get a hole in the roof so you can get up to the next level of survivability. Once you get on that roof you're going to want to have a self-inflatable raft. You want to rather be in a raft going down something moving very quickly but it gives you a fighting chance in a flood. Well obviously they're collecting these because these mean something to them to somebody. Little bottle cars. You know so to me it doesn't mean much but to the person that put these in this box you know it means something to them. This is something in their life that they took the time to collect. Now they have them still. They survived the storm and that might just give them enough hope to get them through the next steps of their life and put back here where I found it. So I want to be respectful but that little thing right there is what might keep somebody you know keep them going in life. Now we've seen two sides of this disaster. On one side there are stories of just horrible loss. People have lost their homes. Some people have lost loved ones. I mean the worst things you can imagine for some people. On the other side though you found a lot of hope and you see people coming together in ways that I've never seen before to be honest. You have people who despite the hardships and despite what they're going through you go up and you talk to them and it doesn't matter what your political views are. It doesn't matter what your race is. None of that matters. They see you as a fellow person who has been going through something terrible just like they have. They're happy to see you. They'll offer you food even if they have nothing and while they've lost many things on one side it seems that a lot of them have found something else. They found community. They found their neighbors. They found these support groups and the coming together of people in Appalachia has been incredible.