Hundreds of special operations personnel in North Carolina have formed their own homegrown rescue and supply operation in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene after they grew tired of waiting for the federal government to get its act together.
The Post found an all-volunteer operation being run out of a Harley-Davidson dealership with ruthless efficiency and military precision.
“Who’s FEMA?” ex-Green Beret Adam Smith derisively responded when asked about the agency’s presence on the ground since the deadly storm ravaged the rural western part of the state.
“This disaster has definitively proven without a shadow of a doubt FEMA’s incompetence and incapability,” he said, noting that the agency didn’t even show up until Thursday — almost a week after the storm that has killed at least 232, nearly half of them in the mountainous west of the Tar Heel State.
Unwilling to stand idly by after feeling his community was languishing with inadequate support from the government, Smith enlisted the help of a few good men and women to take matters into their own hands.
This Harley-Davidson dealership has become a forward operating base, complete with a fleet of 35 helicopters that have flown hundreds of rescue, reconnaissance and resupply sorties.
Organizers are calling the effort the “Savage Freedoms Relief Operation,” but Smith says they’ve proudly adopted the alternate moniker — “the Redneck Air Force.”
The dealership teems with current and former soldiers decked out in camo pants and army boots with handguns strapped to their chests and hips. Crop duster pilots, helicopter tour guides and special operations pilots — most of them off-duty or retired military — have answered the call from Smith and others in North Carolina’s extensive military community.
They’re using their own aircraft to fly doctors, medicine, generators, fuel and food to isolated residents cut off from the world by the unprecedented floods to washed out mountain roads and wiped entire towns off the map.
Supplies and fuel for an operation of this magnitude don’t come cheap, but the group has relied entirely on donations, including around $190,000 raised through a GoFundMe page, Smith said.
The whir of helicopter blades provides a continuous soundtrack to the action on the ground, as private aircraft touch down and take flight on a large lawn beside the dealership.
Inside the garage, under a window covered in topographic maps of western North Carolina, is the nerve center of the entire operation, where a former US Air Force combat controller and a local firefighter direct relief flights based on intelligence collated at an adjacent table by a team of men and women who are scraping social media and manning a tip line.
Two military trucks were parked outside the garage, loaded with reservists from the North Carolina National Guard, awaiting directions from the volunteers.
The well-oiled machine began when Smith, 41, was unable to reach his daughter or her mother in hurricane-hit Broad River — located between the devastated communities of Black Mountain and Bat Cave.
Smith, who was in Austin at the time, drove 18 hours through the night to get back to his family, only to find there was no road access to his home or theirs. So he did what any concerned father would do (who also happens to know a lot of people with helicopters) — arranged his family to be airlifted out by a private pilot.
Since then, the flights have been nearly constant during daylight hours.
Now that the effort has taken on a life of its own, Smith and others leading the operation have gone from cursing FEMA for its absence to hoping they never come back.
Smith said he fears their carefully calibrated rescue mission will be bogged down with governmental red tape if the feds show up.
“Nobody out here wants the federal agencies to come in. FEMA has walked into operations centers like this and has attempted to just take over and tell them what they’re doing is illegal and they’re not allowed to keep going. I’ve seen it firsthand in this area,” Smith told The Post.
“My biggest fear is they’ll move into the area and in the process they’ll reinvent the wheel and rebuild the entire process.”
Smith said he’s even directly told agencies to stay away.
“I’ve respectfully told FEMA individuals on a couple of different occasions, ‘don’t come to our location, we don’t want your help.'”
In just a few days, the “Redneck Air Force” has evolved from surveying road damage and going door-to-door on horseback to the military-scale operation that stands today.
With the group’s rescue operations now complete, they’ve turned their attention to flying supplies to communities cut off from communication and electricity.
They’ve amassed around 100 brand-new Generac GP200i portable inverter generators, all neatly lined up and ready to deploy, each with its own full five-gallon gas can.
With temperatures set to drop into the low 40s in the coming days, Harley choppers — the two-wheeled kind — have been buried under piles of warm jackets set to be distributed.
To assist with the sick and injured, they have a nurse on hand who measures and dispenses medication, with three paramedics, two nurse practitioners and even a licensed physician rounding out their medical team.
They’ve also partnered with a local pharmacy which has been filling prescriptions for those still isolated in more remote areas, which volunteers then fly out to the intended recipients.
Kevin Hill, 42, from Moore County — just north of Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) — is a former Air Force combat controller who retired a little over a year ago. He decided to throw his lot in with the group when he heard about the operation from some of his ex-military buddies.
Asked what he did in the military, he said, “This. This is my comfort zone.”
He said of the effort, “This is the hub, the brain, where we try to make sense of the chaos.”
Hill then detailed the dizzyingly complex intelligence operation, which much like the airborne operations, runs like Swiss movement.
“We’ve got a group over here in cyber, scraping anything they get from social media, scouring for information. They put that intel into a shared document we have access to, updating the priorities for air or ground ops and matching that with assets, supplies and personnel,” he shared.
“This guy,” he said, pointing to a plain-clothed firefighter, “also vets the information we get because he’s a local fire department guy. He’s been indispensable in making sure we’re doing the right stuff at the right time.”
In addition to the nearly three-dozen helicopters enlisted in the effort, Hill says AeroLuxe Aviation out of Tennessee has been “incredible” — flying missions for the group “non-stop.”
They even had some National Guard CH-47 Chinook helicopters dropping in to help airlift some of the larger generators, the volunteers directing the massive choppers to where their cargo was needed.
So far the feds seem to have heeded Smith’s call to leave them be, with one notable exception: a visit from President Biden, whose presence shut down airspace in the area and stopped the volunteer effort in its tracks.
“You know that President Trump hasn’t been here? Trump’s team called and asked us if we wanted him to come in. We said we’d love to have him come in, but we don’t want a temporary flight restriction in the area,” Smith said.
“So they said ‘OK, we’ll wait.’ You know who didn’t do that? The current administration.”
Smith said Biden’s visit — and a later one by Vice President Kamala Harris — prompted a 30-mile temporary flight restriction, which grounded the group’s choppers, forcing the group to devise a workaround, the details of which Smith kept close to the vest.
Smith was adamant that telling the government to butt out isn’t about a power struggle.
“I don’t care who runs it. Three things have to happen: support and stability operations have to be efficient, they have to be effective and we have to re-inject capital into the local population.”
