In a time of need, Aviation Department staff stepped in to lend a helping hand after the devastation of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina.
Aviation employees assisted Asheville Regional Airport (AVL) with clearing trees and debris, communication efforts and airfield operations. “It was rewarding in the sense of seeing what our industry is capable of during a disaster. When you have an airport like Asheville, which is limited on personnel, ramp space and things like that, it is difficult for them to recover from something like this alone,” CLT Airport Planning Program Manager Mirza Rustemov said.
Hurricane Helene caused flooding, fallen trees and debris, washed out roads and loss of power throughout western North Carolina. Rustemov, like many of the other CLT volunteers, made the two-hour drive to AVL during the first week of October.
Upon arrival, he manned the Federal Emergency Management Agency phone at the airport, established a slot system for scheduling and assigned parking positions for general aviation aircraft on the airfield. For perspective, the Asheville Airport has only one runway and approximately two-thirds of its available general aviation ramp was utilized for military hurricane response efforts. This necessitated the enforcement of a schedule to assist the airport's FAA tower, which had phone communications knocked out due to the storm and was managing record levels of aircraft movements due to the disaster recovery operation.
Rustemov was in Asheville for three days, working from around 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. He emphasized he was not the only one working long hours to ensure the airport was operational.
“It’s the whole group working together who made that possible, it wasn’t just one person here or there,” Rustemov said. “The whole principle of community, especially in the south, is help your neighbor out. To me, what we did was an embodiment of what that means.”
Locally, CLT volunteers from the Airport Operations Center and Airside Operations traveled to Concord-Padgett Regional Airport to assist sorting and loading supplies headed to western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, some of the hardest hit areas of Hurricane Helene.
This involved filling pallets and weighing items to make sure they were not too heavy for aircraft to carry. From the moment he heard about the damage Hurricane Helene caused, Airport Operations Center Coordinator David Neal wanted to help. He has a strong connection to western North Carolina, having often visited his grandmother and his grandmother’s sister there growing up.
“It was heart wrenching to see all the damage. My grandma lived in Spruce Pine and her sister lived in Little Switzerland, so I felt wanted to go there and do my part. Smaller cities like Spruce Pine, Burnsville and Little Switzerland got hit really bad,” Neal said. “Some lost everything.”
He also became involved with the Lake Wylie Christian Assembly, which has been gathering supplies and making trips to western North Carolina. Neal plans to travel to western North Carolina with the group in November.
Airport Operations Center Supervisor Brandon Blackwell has visited the area many times and wanted to do his part as well. “It is devastating to see areas I was at just two or three weeks prior, and where I had taken my kids for a fun trip, now gone. We had even done several family picnics at Chimney Rock along the river, and that whole area has just been demolished,” Blackwell said.
He is proud of his team and other CLT staff who traveled to Concord to help with gathering and flying in needed items. Many of the products they packaged were usual things you would expect, such as bottled water and canned food, but some pallets they filled had other important needs that were surprising to him. “We had some specific requests for bar and chain oil for chainsaws,” Blackwell said. “That is something I never really thought of when donating products. It opened my eyes to what people may really need at the moment.”
Blackwell was glad to see so many CLT employees give their time. “It felt good to give back to a community that is neighboring to us - that is really going through a difficult time. And it was fantastic to see my work group pull together and do this as a team effort to assist our neighbors to the west,” he said.