The rumble of all-terrain vehicle engines echoes across the valleys and hollers of the remote western North Carolina wilderness. Two teams of American Red Cross disaster workers bearing critical supplies navigate narrow, rubble-strewn paths where paved roads have been destroyed by hurricane flooding.

The teams are participating in Operation Mountain Hope, an effort that deviates from the Red Cross’ normal mission after a hurricane, which is sheltering those who have evacuated from disasters, to delivering critical supplies to those that are not able to evacuate. These supplies include generators, ready to eat meals, water, water filtration straws, power banks and more. Items that someone in such remote areas may need to survive cold temperatures.

Our team met Stacey Randolph, a local resident near Bee Log, an unincorporated community in Yancey County. “I’ve lived here all my life. It’s something else, we’ve seen blizzards and floods, but nothing quite like this. It raised Cain,” he said.

“This has brought people together more than anything in years. People that have lived next door to each other for years, they didn’t know each other. Now everybody’s side by side, we’re all friends and buddies. It’s brought a lot of people together, I know it has. The hurricane happened on Friday, and by Saturday we were working on putting roads in and getting people out, and we were going across the mountain cutting trails – and that’s one of the things that saved a lot of time and a lot of people, that’s how people got in and out.”

Randolph has been working with his friends, neighbors, emergency responders and local volunteers to clear new trails for people to use to evacuate. With his deep knowledge of the terrain, his efforts have undoubtedly helped rescue many.

“Once they had those marked, people would use them and say ‘HEY NEIGHBOR!’ We’ve met more of our neighbors, that’s for sure, ” remarks Ellen Redenbaugh, a retired nurse and neighbor of Randolph’s.

Redenbaugh spoke about the outpouring of support from the community, from emergency responders, the Red Cross, and even the marines who had come to drop off supplies, as well as her neighbors including  Randolph who had picked her up on his four wheeler, “If he’d not come and got me on the four wheeler, I would have got caught crawling through the rain over the hill.”

Being a retired nurse, Redenbaugh has been collecting medical equipment to use her expertise to help her neighbors. She gladly accepted a pair of fully stocked first aid kits.

The team reconvened at the Bee Log resource center a school building which has been repurposed to be a community resource center. Here, local residents are assembling food, clothes, tarps, diapers, pet supplies and more. The Red Cross has been working to acquire resources for the center, including an Automatic Electric Defibrillator (AED). Chrissy Adkins received this lifesaving device from a Red Cross disaster responder and expressed her elation, “Oh, awesome! That’s so exciting!”   

Adkins is a nurse who has been establishing the resource center, and has managed the monumental task of sorting, organizing and storing the mountains of donated goods that have poured in from surrounding communities. Other groups, such as John 3:16 Ministries are working to build a new clinic just outside.

The Red Cross has provided and plans to provide Adkins with life sustaining items such as smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, fire extinguishers, well testing kits and water filtration systems, equipment that aid in the logistics of sorting out the Bee Log resource center such as shelving units, and intangible but all the more necessary resources such as disaster mental health support so that impacted residents can talk to a trained Red Cross mental health worker about their disaster related trauma.

The American Red Cross North Carolina Region serves local communities every day, helping people prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies.

The Red Cross stands on the frontlines of the climate crisis with families and communities — responding to rapidly intensifying storms, extreme heat, record floods and widespread wildfires. The Red Cross is evolving to meet the needs of communities in new ways, but our lifesaving mission remains the same.