In off-the-grid Egypt, NC, not even helicopters can get close enough to deliver relief

Egypt, North Carolina, doesn’t show up on most maps.

Less than 800 people lived there before the floods of Helene rushed roads and widened rivers on Friday. How many survived? Unknown.

On Wednesday, five people could be spotted from a helicopter lowering toward the township’s tin-roofed volunteer fire department. A shoulder-width hole was sawed out of the top.

“Oh, so that’s how the firefighter got out,” said pilot Gary Heavin, who hovered above the cracked, cliffed road now caked with orange paste — a mixture of mountain dirt and water.

“This is a job only helicopters can do,” Heavin said. But his black chopper with a United States of America seal stickered on couldn’t do this job.

The ravished lanes below — the only border between total ruin and semi-salvageable devastation — were too narrow to land on. The closest field was too sloped, the next clearing too far away.

Heavin pulls up. None of the five people flag down his helicopter that’s holding three others — an N.C. fire marshal, a friend and a Charlotte Observer reporter. He assumes the people visible down below have what they need to survive, for now.

He flies south, to Burnsville, to drop the supplies stacked in his “bird,” as he and everyone else flying supplies west out of Hickory via Operation Airdrop call their copters.

Everyone is ready to pivot.

“The mission is to do whatever needs to be done,” says Sam Parks, Heavin’s friend from Statesville.

Bringing people out of flooded areas

The day before, they rescued a woman with Stage 4 cancer and looked for two kids. The kids were gone, possibly dead somewhere beneath branches and sludge, he said.

In Burnsville, Gordon Higgins, a volunteer firefighter of nearly 30 years, waves the chopper into a field adjacent to powerlines. Heavin unloads some of the 300 Starlinks flown in by Ivanka Trump hours before.

And the water in the back will go to the 50 rescued from Pensacola, N.C., — a town next door, where Hurricane Helene’s remnants pushed houses into rivers, says volunteer Kayti Ledford.

“It’s just horrible in Florida, too,” she said. “But at least there it’s flat. Here, there’s no quick rebuild. The landscape isn’t just changed. It’s gone.”

Heavin, the founder of Curves fitness franchise from Waco, Texas, volunteered to fly with Operation Airdrop , a nonprofit that drops supplies and leads rescues to help those stranded in disasters.

He and most of the other 50 volunteer pilots at Hickory Regional Airport were ready to rebel against a no-fly order as President Joe Biden descended into Asheville on Wednesday.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a temporary flight restriction Wednesday afternoon over the area, with some exceptions. Matt McSwain, the nonprofit’s Hickory organizer, said he wouldn’t abide by it. He wasn’t going to stop pulling people out of the rubble for one person to visit it, he said.

A U.S. official told The Charlotte Observer flights coordinated with the North Carolina Emergency Operations Center or that otherwise make it known they intend to deliver aid could proceed without any delay. But the restrictions could have affected other types of aircraft that were “freelancing,” the official said.

Heavin lifted off 10 minutes into the modified no-fly order, spotting military helicopters not showing up on his radar. Minutes after he lifted off, his radio went down; no one could hear him trying to get approval to touch down.

He called the tower on his cell, an unlit cigar between his bottom lip and the phone’s microphone. They told him to land anyway, and the 73-year-old woman and her dog stepped out and into nurses hands.