From above, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, looks almost serene — the hills’ jagged edges in fog, creeks and rivers twisting through the green like capillaries. From there, you wouldn’t know Gatlinburg’s babies don’t have formula.
But there’s been no running water in the area since remnants of Hurricane Helene tore through the mountain community on Thursday. Many residents still don’t have power.
Gatlinburg’s airport reopened Tuesday for the first time since Helene struck, and Jillian Gorrell was there to greet the seventh plane to touch down there that morning – a small CJ2+ from Concord, North Carolina. It was carrying over 1,000 pounds of diapers, baby formula, clothes and first aid supplies with eight more planes expected to follow.
“We desperately need medical supplies, baby supplies, cleaning supplies, trash bags,” said Gorrell, a resident of the area and lecturer in the school of natural resources at the University of Tennessee in nearby Knoxville.
With roads and bridges in the area devoured and mangled in Helene’s wake, it was the first assistance many in the area were able to get, she said.
“Roads are gone, landmarks are gone…,” Gorrell said, teary-eyed, with her voice beginning to break. “Our area is hurting, but we’re pulling together, and we really appreciate everything people are doing for us.”
The pilots making the delivery were volunteers with Operation Airdrop, a disaster relief nonprofit, that has mobilized to deliver thousands of pounds of donated goods to western North Carolina, southern Appalachia, and other hard hit areas. Some, including Byron MacRae and Owen Williams, take off from Concord-Padgett Regional Airport, just northeast of Charlotte.
“We got to Asheville about 2:45 p.m. on Sunday, and they had just gotten power back about 10 minutes before we were landing,” Williams said of the first trip he took after the storm, delivering 1,500 pounds of goods to the hard-hit Buncombe County city. “The mission has evolved with every trip we take as we learn more about what people need, what areas need us the most and how to spread the word to people that can help.”
‘Look for the helpers’
Operation Airdrop pilots have carried canned food, utensils, cleaning supplies, diapers, bottled water, feminine hygiene products, first aid supplies and more to small airfields in the North Carolina mountains, including Ashe County, Wilkes County and Banner Elk, in addition to parts of Tennessee and South Carolina.
With help from the Experimental Aircraft Association and the Carolina Aviators Network, Operation Airdrop and affiliated volunteers delivered eight tons of supplies from Concord, Statesville and Hickory to western North Carolina on Sunday alone. On Monday, 50,000 pounds of supplies left Concord aboard 75 flights.
Getting crucial supplies to those in storm-battered Western North Carolina remains one of the top Helene-recovery priorities. It’s a massive effort involving federal, state and local governments, along with volunteers with groups like Operation Airdrop.
The organization started in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey dumped over 27 trillion gallons of rain in southeast Texas. Its founders, Doug Jackson and Robert Johnson from Dallas, flew supplies to the greater Houston area.
After Harvey, they launched Operation Airdrop, with the mission of delivering supplies in times of disaster to small communities cut off by storm damage that the Federal Emergency Management Agency couldn’t immediately reach.
“We keep an eye on the weather as soon as hurricane season starts, and when we saw this one coming, we immediately reached out to pilots to see if they could get ready to help,” said Shaun Carroll, a Durham resident who’s been volunteering with Operation Airdrop since 2018.
Carroll weaved through rows of supplies in an airplane hangar in Concord Monday, as around 100 volunteers sorted donations into neat stacks to be weighed and loaded onto waiting planes.
The whole place was humming with purpose. Volunteers loaded supplies onto pallets donated from a Walmart down the street. Pilots from around the country filtered in and announced they had a few hours to spare, as Operation Airdrop organizers huddled around a table in the back of the room, monitoring weather conditions and dispatching pilots to areas they knew they could reach.
“That’s the beautiful thing about Airdrop,” Carroll said. “It’s kind of like what Mr. Rogers used to say: ‘Look for the helpers.’ You’ll find them everywhere.”
On Tuesday, the Concord-Padgett Airport operation had reached its capacity for volunteers by 10 a.m. even as people continued to come in to offer help.
Challenges to the mission
Ben Spells is a local organizer for another airlift effort in Statesville, which a group of local individuals put together in collaboration with Operation Airdrop. Water remains one of the most high-need items in communities impacted by Helene, he said.
“We’ve heard from several people that there’s either no water or there’s a boil advisory or water treatment plants are just completely destroyed,” he said.
However, water can require larger planes to transport it, since it tends to be heavy and planes have a limit on the weight they can move at a time.
“While water is really heavy, we’re trying to make sure we can get water to as many people as possible,” Carroll said. “Water purification is a really big thing we’re trying to get out there: LifeStraws, tablets, filters, that kind of thing, just because there’s a big water issue right now.”
Collecting donations is the easy part, Spells said. They get them from local individuals as well as corporations.
To distribute them, they reach out to organizations in hard-hit areas that can help, and, with communication severely limited in the region, it’s no simple task.
“We try to connect with verified people out there, like churches, nonprofits, food banks, fire departments, just folks that can meet the planes when they get there and tell them where to go. It depends on the location,” Spells said.
“We’ve honestly had a hard time finding people with a lot of people lacking electricity and cell service, but it’s getting easier as more people come back online,” he added.
In Gatlinburg, MacRae and Williams unloaded supplies from the CJ2+ into waiting pickup trucks ready to head to two local churches for distribution. Then, they fueled up, strapped back in and watched the green beneath them turn to white as they rose above clouds.
Time for another delivery.
Operation Airdrop will continue collecting donations of household necessities throughout the week, as long as roads in and out of western North Carolina remain blocked. Supplies can be delivered to the drop-off center in the parking lot of Walmart at 5825 Thunder Road NW in Concord.
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