Private Drone Operators Deliver Aid After Hurricane Helene

Volunteers use heavy-lift drones to bring life-saving supplies to isolated communities in North Carolina’s mountainous region after roads are destroyed by the storm.

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

After Hurricane Helene, a powerful and deadly storm, cut off almost all major roads serving western North Carolina, isolating thousands of people, a small group of private drone operators stepped in to deliver life-saving supplies.

Jeff Clack, chief supervisor of operations for Bestway Ag, led a team of volunteers who flew heavy-lift drones to deliver food, medicine, baby formula and other much-needed supplies to about 100 people who were cut off from other help in the mountainous region. Clack and two other drone pilots from the Hopkinsville, Kentucky-based agricultural technology company, landed in the region within days after the storm hit and began coordinating with first responder teams on the ground and other drone pilots volunteering their services, in order to begin providing aid.

“Once we coordinated with the air bosses and gotten the clean air space … we began flying [Search and Recovery] missions almost immediately,” Clack said in an interview. The Bestway employees were joined by other volunteer drone operators from the Ashville, North Carolina region. The team flew a fleet of eight DJI drones, including FlyCart 30 heavy-lift drones, Matrice 30T mapping drones, and Mavic 3Ts, equipped with public address speakers used to communicate with the people on the ground.

 

Helene, which slammed into the Florida Panhandle on September 26, continued to tear a path of destruction through a wide swath of the southeastern U.S. One of the hardest hit regions was the Appalachian region of North Carolina, where the torrential rains caused landslides that washed out mountain roadways, leaving entire communities isolated.

“We found a lot of people out there that were cut off, although otherwise healthy.” He said once the people in need of supplies were located, the team could determine the GPS coordinates of the appropriate drop zones and relay this information to the emergency operations center coordinating the recovery efforts.  “Once we determined where air assets were needed for heavy lift, we began flying those missions almost right away,” he said.

With its UAVs capable of carrying 230 pounds, the airlift relief team delivered almost two tons of food, water, medical supplies, baby food and formula right to the homes of the desperate people. Because of the mountainous terrain, the team often had to fly over mountains and ridges, putting the cargo-carrying drone beyond the line of site of the operator. The team used their smaller drones to fly above the terrain to create relays that kept the heavy-lift drone in constant radio contact with their operator.

Once the heavy-lift drone approached the drop site, Clack said the team members used a 3T drone equipped with a loudspeaker to communicate with the stranded people on the ground. Aid recipients were warned to stay clear of the drop zone and to give a wide berth to the FlyCart as it conducted its delivery operations, just in case something should go wrong. “Safety is paramount, and we don’t want to create another problem,” Clack said.

Russell Hedrick, a North Carolina farmer and former professional firefighter, used his contacts with the emergency management services in the hard-hit area surround Asheville to help launch the volunteer drone response.

 “We started hearing about all the devastation and destruction and I called a few local fire departments, and none of them were deploying,” he said. “I started calling the county non-emergency numbers, to their comm centers, and all of them were down.”

Hedrick, continued trying, offering his services and those of some of his private fellow drone operators, to any agency that could help mount a drone-based response to the people in the region’s most devastated areas. After about 200 phone calls, he was able to connect with an emergency operations center near the small community of Marion, about 35 miles east of Asheville, that could deploy the drone assets.

Using his drone trailer to carry a DJI T40 drone, a Mavic 3M equipped with thermal imagery technology to locate disaster survivors, his drone-related support equipment, as well as emergency supplies of food and water, Hedrick and his team headed to the disaster relief site. He also eventually joined forces with Clack, whose company was able to lend the use of its heavy-lift drones, suitable for emergency supply deliveries.

Every morning the volunteer drone operators received an assignment from the local emergency management officials, giving them an area to search for storm survivors in need of assistance.

Both volunteer drone operators praised local emergency management officials for their effective response to the disaster. However, Hedrick was more critical of the federal disaster response in particular that of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT).

On Oct. 1, the FAA posted a notice on its website, warning pilots of the potential safety hazards imposed by the increased presence of unmanned aircraft in the disaster area. Then on Oct. 2, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigiegposted a brief videotaped statement to social media urging private drone operators to obey all temporary flight restrictions in the disaster area.

Some social media users incorrectly stated that the DOT and FAA were seeking to ban volunteer drone flights in the disaster area, causing confusion among those drone pilots who were operating according to all the rules.

For his part, Hedrick said he thought Buttigieg’s statement implied a criticism of the volunteer drone operators who were using their own time and resources to participate in the recovery operations.

“He should have been more clear in how he made his statement about drones hindering rescue operations,” Hedrick said. “Because, our team and then a secondary team that we helped put together operated in seven of the 11 counties that were really devastated.”

However, Hedrick acknowledged that the federal officials were right to be concerned about the fact that some drone pilots were operating in the disaster areas without properly coordinating with local emergency officials on the ground.

“I agree with Pete that you should not just show up in a disaster area and start throwing drones up in the air,” he said. “The fact is that you need to go through the proper channels to be an asset and not a liability as a drone operator.”

In fact, both Clack and Hedrick acknowledged that they observed a number of drone operators who were flying in the disaster area, without first coordinating with local officials. Hedrick said on the evening of Sept. 29, his team was operating in a called Little Switzerland that had been heavily impacted by mudslides.

“We were supposed to be the only drones in that entire area of the county,” he said. “And we saw six other drones in that area, sometimes even within 1,000 feet of our drones.”

Read more:

• SkyfireAI is On the Ground for Hurricane Response: An Inside Look at the Mission
• Mississippi State University’s Drones Aid FEMA’s Hurricane Relief in Georgia
• Airborne Response Onboards Over 100 Drone Pilots to Help Combat Rapid Intensification Threat from Hurricanes  

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.