Two years ago, Hurricane Helene carved a 500-mile path of destruction through the American Southeast, leaving entire communities in the mountains of North Carolina unrecognizable. As we mark the one-year anniversary of Helene’s landfall, we’re sharing what happened when E3RF answered the call.
When the Mountains Fell
On September 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 storm. What followed was something few could have predicted. The storm didn’t stop at the coast. It pushed inland, carving a 500-mile path of destruction that eventually swallowed the Blue Ridge Mountains whole. Roads disappeared. Homes were picked up and moved. Communities that had stood for generations were simply gone.
Like everyone watching, our team was stunned. And like everything we do at E3RF, we couldn’t watch from a distance for long.
By October 5, our team was on the ground at Elk River Airfield in Banner Elk, North Carolina, ready to work.
Showing Up
What we found when we arrived was equal parts heartbreaking and remarkable. The mountains had been gouged with ravines where homes and trees once stood. The stories of families lost to the floodwaters were still unfolding by the minute. The scale of it was almost impossible to absorb.
But there was also this: over 100 fixed-wing aircraft arriving daily, filled with people who simply wanted to help. Volunteers from across the country showing up with no agenda other than to serve. Partnering with Sentinel Foundation, E3RF joined an ad hoc team of roughly 60 volunteers: former and current military, Samaritan’s Purse, local churches, and ordinary Americans who had loaded up their cars and driven toward the need. Together, this group would become the backbone of relief efforts across Avery, Mitchell, and Yancey counties.
The question everyone was asking when they landed was the same: “How can I help?”
Making Order Out of Chaos
One of the earliest and most critical challenges was figuring out who needed what, how urgently, and how to get it to them. In the first days, search and rescue took priority. The team was able to reach dozens of people, provide medical care, and transport them to local shelters and churches for further support.
As the operation grew, so did the need for a system. Using Google Earth, the team began tracking every visit with color-coded pins: red for critical, yellow for moderately urgent, green for needs that could wait. Each pin was documented with notes: who visited, what needs were met, what was still unresolved, and what follow-up was required. It wasn’t glamorous. But it worked.
Volunteers fanned out daily by vehicle, ATV, fixed-wing aircraft, and helicopter to reach families in the hardest-hit areas. A cutting crew cleared fallen trees from roads, homes, and businesses. A cadaver dog team was guided to sites of intense devastation, searching for families still unaccounted for. A separate team monitored social media, church pages, and county emergency sites to find needs that hadn’t made it through official channels yet.
Generators, Angel, and the People Who Show Up
As temperatures dropped and snow began to fall across communities already without power, generators became one of the most urgent needs. They were also nearly impossible to find. Thanks to the generosity of donors, E3RF was able to locate a supplier and purchase more than 200 generators for families across the region.
One of the most memorable moments of the deployment came through a volunteer named Angel. She and her husband had driven from Eastern North Carolina, settled in Bakersville, and simply started cooking and helping wherever they could. Our team spoke with her nearly every day over the phone before making the two-hour drive to meet her in person and deliver supplies. When they arrived, she broke down in tears.
She had a list: families in homes with no electricity, two weeks after Helene had hit. That afternoon, E3RF delivered twenty generators to Angel. By nightfall, she had electricians on the ground installing every one of them.
What We Saw
Our team put in 16-hour days, sleeping on hangar floors, in vehicles, and in neighboring homes. The exhaustion felt like the least we could offer given what the people around us had endured.
What stayed with us wasn’t the scale of the destruction. It was the people. The volunteer who drove through the night to deliver water. The local who showed up every morning without being asked. The hum of an airfield that had become, improbably, one of the largest relief hubs in the region, run almost entirely by people who hadn’t known each other two weeks earlier.
Mother Nature’s wrath knew no bounds when she struck North Carolina. But what struck back wasn’t force. It was people helping people. Humanity at its finest, navigating something impossibly hard. Together.
The Work Continues
Over the last two years later, the need in Western North Carolina did not go away. Neither did E3RF.
Through our Western NC fund, we connected with Zach, a local whose church is building homes for families who lost theirs. Zach introduced us to Celestial and Oliver, a couple running a rebuild program in their community. They haven’t stopped since September 2024: fixing cars, covering propane for heat and gas money, filling Christmas wish lists, and keeping a food pantry going for families still picking up the pieces. People who carry that much for that long need someone looking out for them too, so E3RF directed part of the fund toward a respite trip for the two of them. The rest went to Swannanoa Church and Divine Disaster Relief to keep long-term recovery moving in the region.
Your generosity has also traveled further than we could have mapped. A church group from Fort Scott, Kansas, used an E3RF donation to fund a mission trip to East Tennessee. They unloaded trucks at God’s Warehouse, planted flowers at rebuilt homes, and helped restore a retreat center that now houses other mission groups coming to serve the area. They came home inspired to build a permanent disaster response team of their own, and the card they sent afterward said it best:
“After a great week where we saw God’s hand at work, we returned even more grateful for generous gifts like yours that make mission trips like this possible.”
The road is still long. A year after the storm, only 30% of families who lost their homes had been able to rebuild.
We don’t know where the next call will come from. But with you beside us, we’ll be ready to answer it.
Your support is what puts our team on the ground when a community needs help most. If you’d like to be part of what comes next, we’d love to have you with us.