More than a month after Helene wreaked havoc on western North Carolina, the regional Veterans Affairs' health care system is still sending teams to visit veterans who remain isolated and in need of vital supplies.
Some of the biggest initial issues like road access have improved, said Matthew Bain, a nurse who was part of three VA outreach teams roving the mountains on a recent day.
But things are still far from normal.
“There is less need for food, less need for water,” Bain said. “But the need for medication and supplies is still there, and some of these guys don't have heat still, they don't have water, they don't have electricity. So, we still take blankets and stuff like that, clothing, whatever they need.”
Though road access has gotten better, Bain said almost every trip requires his three-person team to take a lengthy and sometimes rugged detour.
The team’s first stop on a recent day was in the community of Swannanoa, which suffered some of the worst destruction.
Cliff Stewart — a 76-year-old Vietnam vet whom everyone calls Sarge — lives just across the Swannanoa River from the devastated commercial district. Like everyone else here, the flooding caught him by surprise.
"The water started coming down this way," Stewart said. "And then the next thing I know, it's already above the windshield of the car, and it's coming in under my doors and up through the heat vents. ... I was sitting up here in the bed watching it, and I was wondering how long is it going to be before my bed turned into a pontoon boat."
Stewart has back and knee problems and uses a powered wheelchair the VA gave him. It was gloomy inside his mobile home. The power hadn't been restored, and a small generator rattling on the porch was mainly powering space heaters to ward off the morning chill.
A nonprofit company is rebuilding his home. They had ripped out the carpet, cut away the drywall lower than waist height, and yanked out the insulation so the structure could dry before mold starts to grow.
Another charity gave him a motor home to live in temporarily. It was parked out front beside a huge pile of debris.
But his wheelchair can’t fit in the door; he has to leave it outside the motor home. So, the VA team brought him a weatherproof cover for the chair.
“He can go there during the day and be out of the elements while they’re in here gutting this place out,” Bain said.
In a way, Stewart was lucky. He survived. And his home can be fixed.
His neighbors' mobile homes, though, aren’t salvageable. Asked whether his neighbors would come back eventually, Stewart shook his head slowly.
“I don’t think they are,” he said. “I don’t think they are.”
But Stewart said he won’t leave. He was born in Swannanoa and lived there all his life, except for his time fighting in Vietnam with the Marine Corps and a couple of years in Florida.
'The home … wasn't there'
Accompanying Bain on this day was another nurse, Sherrie Byrd, and driver Garth Massie, who has to deal with the backroads that were rugged even before the storm chewed them apart.
Three-person VA teams like this have been crisscrossing the mountains since Helene hit.
The regional VA system centered around the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville cares for nearly 50,000 veterans in 23 counties, including nearly all of the declared disaster zone.
Helene made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane before midnight Sept. 26. Over the next few hours, it moved across Georgia as a Category 2 storm and into the Appalachians as a tropical storm.
Over three days, Helene brought record-breaking amounts of rain to western North Carolina, including Asheville and Swannanoa. In some locales, more than 2½ feet fell in some locales, causing rivers to overflow and producing flash floods, road washouts and landslides.
The VA immediately put together a list of more than 2,600 veterans considered to be at high risk because of serious health issues such as respiratory problems, transplants and needs like oxygen bottles.
Communications were initially almost impossible, and sometimes the VA couldn’t reach veterans or their next of kin. That left one alternative.
“If we couldn't reach them by phone and we didn't hear from them on the email, and they were the high-risk population, we had clinical staff in the vehicles going out,” said chief nurse Patti Campbell, who oversees the outreach effort.
It didn’t always work. Sometimes the veteran was just unreachable. Or worse.
“Some of the areas where we went to addresses there wasn't …” she said, pausing briefly. “The home … wasn't there.”
VA staff members in the mountains have had to care for veterans while dealing with their own storm-related struggles.
Helene rolled into the region on a Friday. Campbell’s basement flooded, and downed trees and power lines blocked her from getting to the hospital until that Sunday night.
“That’s just a minor inconvenience compared to what a lot of people had," she said. "But as soon as we could cut our way through, that’s when I got here.”
When she finally got in, Campbell worked all night.
Bain, the nurse on the outreach team, also couldn’t make it in immediately.
“We tried to come to work on the day the storm hit, and trees were coming down as we're driving down the road, and we barely made it over the bridge back to our house before it was overtaken by water,” Bain said. “And then we had to cut ourselves out from all the trees for the next three or four days.”
He was without power for 15 days, and his kids were out of school for a month.
But others at the VA, he said, had it much worse.
“We’ve got a couple of nurses we work with in primary care that have lost their homes completely,” Bain said. “Some of our staff lost family members. Some people have lost homes. Some people lost nothing. Just like western North Carolina, it's a gamut of everything."
The vets they had to reach early on, he said, included a hospice patient who was cut off when a bridge to his house washed away.
“Me and another nurse had to walk in water, food and supplies in backpacks, about 2 miles in," Bain said. “He had no medicines. They had no power, no electricity. So, he was pretty much just at our whim with what we had that we could give him.”
After a helicopter rescue, a veteran returns home
For the second stop of the day, Bain’s team had to take a long detour to reach 50-year-old Donald Harris of Fairview. They were blocked by road construction, so they backed up, drove on a primitive, one-lane dirt path, then over more roads still under repair with deep ravines on either side, then up a mountainside on Harris’ barely passable, quarter-mile driveway.
The driveway had been all but destroyed by a landslide during the storm, and Harris, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a wheelchair, had to be evacuated by a military helicopter. The terrain was too steep for it to land, so he had to be lifted out of his yard in a metal basket.
After living in shelters and clinics for about three weeks, Bain only recently returned home to his shattered community. Mudslides killed 13 people in tiny Fairview, including 11 from the same family.
Harris rolled out onto his porch and exchanged greetings with the team.
Bain told him the VA was about to bring him a new, powered wheelchair.
“We're just trying to find somebody to bring it up,” Bain said. “It’s ready and put together.”
Bain checked the accessibility of Harris' shower to see if the VA could improve it. The team checked his legs and one of his medicines, which was running low.
Harris said that he and his brother had moved to this remote spot from Florida because Hurricane Andrew in 1992 badly damaged their neighborhood. They had decided they never wanted to face that kind of storm damage again.
From down the mountain, the sound of dump trucks and bulldozers drifted up, but the destruction wasn’t visible from the porch — just views of mountains and trees turning gold and red.
“It's nice up here,” Bain said. “I tell everybody, 'If I ever leave, I'm taking the view with me.' "
Bain thanked the team, and they packed up to head back down the mountain. For now.
"I’m sure I’ll see you again,” said Massie, the driver. “I’ll be back again, I’m sure.”
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
Copyright 2024 American Homefront Project
