Arlington fire personnel plunged into a high-stakes rescue mission on Friday as Hurricane Helene swept through parts of Southwest Virginia.
The Arlington County Fire Department’s water rescue team arrived in the town of Damascus, about two and a half hours from hard-hit Asheville, N.C., to find a person trapped inside their home and surrounded with “fast moving, debris laden water.”
“Upon arrival the team immediately performed a boat-based rescue of the person trapped in the house by launching a swift water boat into moving water and breaching a window of the house to reach the occupant,” ACFD said in a social media post. “They had the occupant don a life vest and assisted them out of the window into the boat where they ferried them back to the meeting location.”
At the same time, two local sheriff’s deputies were going from house to house, warning people to evacuate from the rising floodwaters, ACFD said. By the time first responders had assembled evacuees, waters had risen over the only bridge leading in or out of the area.
“They watched as a home floated downstream and smashed into the bridge, leaving debris everywhere,” the agency wrote.
With no other way out and air support unavailable due to fog, 10 evacuees, two deputies and five water rescue team members piled into a vehicle and trailer.
A final obstacle arose just as they were about to cross the flooded bridge. That’s when “a large log became wedged on the right side of the bridge in a position that could pierce the windshield of the vehicle and no doubt injure or kill its occupants.”
ACFD personnel exited the vehicle and video captures them wading into floodwaters, preparing to chainsaw the log to clear the path. Before it came to that, however, the log shifted, creating a path for the team to rapidly cross the bridge to safety.
“Their quick thinking and the efforts of the rest of the team and 2 Sheriff deputies undoubtedly saved lives,” ACFD wrote.
As the death toll from Hurricane Helene rose to at least 91 people over the weekend, authorities struggled to get water and other supplies to isolated, flood-stricken areas across the Southeast, the Associated Press reported.
A North Carolina county that includes Asheville reported 30 people killed due to the storm, and several other fatalities reported in North Carolina Sunday pushed the overall death toll to at least 91 people across several states. Supplies were being airlifted to the region around the isolated city.
Buncombe County Manager Avril Pinder pledged that she would have food and water into Ashville — which is known for its arts, culture and natural attractions — by Monday.
“We hear you. We need food and we need water,” Pinder said on a Sunday call with reporters. “My staff has been making every request possible to the state for support and we’ve been working with every single organization that has reached out. What I promise you is that we are very close.”
Hurricane Helene roared ashore late Thursday in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane with 140 mph (225 kph) winds. A weakened Helene quickly moved through Georgia, then soaked the Carolinas and Tennessee with torrential rains that flooded creeks and rivers and strained dams.
There have been hundreds of water rescues, including in rural Unicoi County in East Tennessee, where dozens of patients and staff were plucked by helicopter from a hospital rooftop Friday, the AP reported.
More than 2 million homeowners and other utility customers were still without power Sunday night. South Carolina had the most outages and Gov. Henry McMaster asked for patience as crews dealt with widespread snapped power poles.
With at least 25 killed in South Carolina, Helene was the deadliest tropical cyclone for the state since Hurricane Hugo made landfall north of Charleston in 1989, killing 35 people.
Moody’s Analytics said it expects $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage, according to the AP’s reporting.
Video of an ACFD rescue operation in Southwest Virginia is below.
ACFD’s Type 3 Swiftwater Rescue Team has been involved in multiple rescues while deployed to SW VA, including rescuing 10 civilians and 2 police officers as raging waters surrounded their town. To date, these personnel have made over 30 rescues. Thread to follow pic.twitter.com/11YgKk6R6a
— Arlington Fire & EMS (@ArlingtonVaFD) September 28, 2024
