By Stephen Appezzato and Sunayana Prabhu
With Sandy in Mind, Highlands Unites to Provide Relief in North Carolina
HIGHLANDS – Residents of the Sandy-hardened town are banding together to provide aid for one North Carolina community battered by Hurricane Helene late last month.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, the Highlands first aid, police and fire departments and the Montecalvo Family Foundation are urging residents to help support the Lake Lure and Chimney Rock communities in North Carolina, which were all but wiped from the map in late September. The support group will send supplies, food, gift cards and donations to the storm-battered region that suffered mass destruction, displacement and loss of life.
For “all of these people living in the mountains, everything is gone. You just look and think how horrible it was for us (during Super Storm Sandy), and it looks like it’s 10 times worse for them,” said Highlands First Aid Squad president and Hope for Highlands chair Rosemary Ryan, who is overseeing the relief effort.
After watching news coverage of Helene, Ryan contacted the Highlands first aid, fire and police chiefs, asking if they would like to raise money and goods for the people of North Carolina, “because we all worked together during Sandy.” The team was immediately onboard.
“They said, ‘You tell us what to do, we’ll do whatever you say.’ Everybody’s chipping in to do whatever they can,” she said. Four other first aid departments in New Jersey have also pledged to help.
Hurricane Helene made landfall Sept. 26 as a category 4 storm around Florida’s Big Bend. The storm, which clocked winds above 130 miles per hour, was downgraded to a tropical storm as it moved north, leaving a 500-mile trail of destruction. At this time, estimates place the death toll above 200, with damages potentially upwards of $160 billion.
As Helene traveled along the Blue Ridge Mountains, communities in western North Carolina were particularly hard hit. The damage was “profound” in the Lake Lure and Chimney Rock region, which is approximately 50 miles southeast of Asheville.
“I have heard the term, ‘the landscape has been biblically changed forever,’ ” said Tammy Tappan, a resident and volunteer in the area.
“Things that were once there just are no longer there, and it has impacted so many families… how they make a living and where they used to live,” she said. “It’s a little bit hard to wrap your head around.”
Tappan and Jenni Wallace, another area resident and volunteer, are helping the Highlands effort to funnel aid to the region. Through her work as an artist, Tappan was contacted by Valerie Montecalvo, a friend of Ryan’s and a Montecalvo Family Foundation trustee, whose charity pledged to match up to $50,000 in donations to the effort. Tappan recalled Montecalvo calling and offering the foundation’s help to ensure the money reaches the people in need.
Through the Força Foundaton, a charity headquartered in Western North Carolina, the Montecalvo Family Foundation is moving aid to ensure donations make it directly to those in need.
During the storm, photo and video coverage of the destruction in the region went viral as the small towns and natural beauty in the scenic destination were pummeled by raging floods. Countless homes and businesses were washed away as rivers and streams overflowed and poured down from the mountains. The lake, which was once a popular tourist destination and even an iconic location in the hit 1987 film “Dirty Dancing,” is now filled with debris.
On the morning of the storm, Tappan recalls watching “100-foot-tall trees fall over like toothpicks.”
“I have neighbors who’ve lost employees. You know, they tried to get out in vehicles, and they found the vehicles with the people and the children still in them,” she said. “There’s reports of people that are missing and it’s really hard to say what that means because some of it is a lack of communication and some of it is that the place they live no longer exists.”
“Nobody is really talking about the casualty side of it versus the rescue side. So it’s very hard, difficult to know what those numbers look like today, or what they’re going to look like a month from now,” Tappan said.
Amid the chaos, residents are orchestrating search and rescue efforts, traversing the terrain on four-wheelers, in pickup trucks and helicopters and even on mules.
“It’s being orchestrated by people who live here, not government agencies,” said Tappan.
While immediate relief and supplies are making their way to the Lake Lure and Chimney Rock region, Tappan is concerned about local families’ long-term needs.
“How do we help individual families who have been displaced from their homes or businesses and lost everything? How do we help them get back on their feet and rebuild their lives?” she said. “That is going to require financial input.”
The relief effort recently started taking applications for need and adopted a 10-person family from Tryon, North Carolina. After losing their home and vehicles, the family spent seven days sheltering on a gymnasium floor.
As Lake Lure and Chimney Rock residents begin to reconcile with the destruction of their community, the Highlands community gears up to deliver goods and aid.
Currently, Highlands Police Chief Rob Burton has two trailers ready to be filled with supplies, which officers will transport to North Carolina. Ryan also said if enough donations come in, Highlands Fire and First Aid departments are prepared to make additional deliveries.
Two River-area residents can donate supplies at the Highlands Police Department through Oct. 15 to help the people of Lake Lure and Chimney Rock. Items in demand include blankets, sweatshirts, toiletries and personal hygiene products, diapers, cleaning supplies, bottled water, nonperishable food, baby formula, flashlights, gift cards and battery packs.
“These are very resilient folks, but their loss is tremendous – we are all in this together and we can provide lifesaving assistance to those who need it most,” said Montecalvo.
Middletown Man Spearheads Donation Drive for Tennessee Flood Victims
MIDDLETOWN – While governments and nonprofits are rallying to bring relief to families in parts of Tennessee and North Carolina ravaged by Hurricane Helene, one Middletown resident is taking it upon himself to organize a large-scale donation drive to support the affected communities. Danny Spreiregen was inspired to act after seeing the heartbreaking images and videos of destruction on social media. “I just looked at my wife and said, ‘I can’t sit back and do nothing,’ ” he recounted.
“I lived through Sandy,” he said. “I lost power for eight days and I thought that stunk. But watching these houses float down rivers, I knew I had to do something.”
Spreiregen took to social media, asking his neighbors to donate essential supplies. “Remember Sandy,” he wrote in posts to online neighborhood groups. Within days, the response was “incredible,” he said. As of Tuesday, Oct. 8, he had collected nearly 90 separate donations that filled a 16-foot trailer.
On Sunday, Spreiregen will make the 10-hour drive to eastern Tennessee, where a friend has helped him identify the hardest-hit, lower-income mountain communities that are in urgent need of aid.
“These small, little mountain communities – where the mountains meet at the bottom and the valleys are called hollers – a lot of low-income families have had their homes just washed away,” Spreiregen said, noting that relief is coming more slowly to these smaller, remote areas. “We’re going to try to get there where the stuff really is needed,” he said. His friend, who also lost everything in the floods, has been instrumental in guiding him to the areas with the greatest need.
The donations will be delivered to a church in one of the villages. The list of items he is collecting includes diapers, baby formula, sleeping bags, blankets, tents, water, nonperishable food, clothing and tools like chainsaws and shovels. He plans to make multiple trips there in the coming weeks to continue supporting the relief efforts as the communities begin to rebuild. What’s driving Spreiregen is a belief that Americans should come together to help one another, regardless of political or religious differences. “There’s just so much turmoil and drama going on in our society right now that I think we can all put that stuff aside and just help each other out,” he said.
The Middletown community has rallied behind Spreiregen’s cause, his phone “not stopping” with calls and texts from people wanting to contribute. “I had someone donate a brand-new generator yesterday,” he said. He hopes his efforts will inspire others to set aside their differences and focus on the shared humanity in times of crisis. “America should take care of its own.”
Middletown Sends Relief Efforts to North Carolina
The township has initiated its own relief efforts in response to Hurricane Helene. Volunteers from the Middletown Township Fire Department (MTFD) – Daniel Kelly, Kevin Morrissey and Marcelo Aguirre – along with Middletown Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Deputy Chief Marco Fernandes, are currently deployed to assist in the affected areas of North Carolina.
Kelly, Morrissey and Aguirre are part of New Jersey Task Force One (NJ-TF1), one of 28 federal FEMA Urban Search and Rescue teams in the United States. The team is dedicated to searching for individuals and pets in structures, vehicles and along river areas in Asheville, North Carolina.
Kelly serves as MTFD’s first assistant chief and is a member of the Belford Independent Fire Company. Morrissey is MTFD’s second assistant chief and is affiliated with Middletown Fire Company #1. Aguirre is a member of the Port Monmouth Fire Company and also works as a paramedic.
Fernandes is deployed with the New Jersey All-Hazards Incident Management Team (NJAHIMT), a resource coordinated by the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management. In this capacity, Fernandes is helping to coordinate the state’s relief efforts in response to the hurricane’s aftermath.
The article originally appeared in the October 10 – October 16, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
