This week Surry County announced they would be operating a trio of collection sites for food, water, first aid supplies, clothing, and hygiene items to residents in the hardest hit areas of Western North Carolina. The county sites will be collecting between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. through Friday at the Surry County Farmers Market in Dobson, the Surry County Resource Center in Mount Airy, and the Elkin Center in Elkin.
Thursday afternoon at the Mount Airy collection site, located at the Surry County Resource Center on U.S. Highway 601 at State Street, a pickup truck was just arriving with cases of bottled water, paper towels, and other items to be added to the growing trailer full of items.
County employees at the collection site said they had only just begun their shift manning the donation site but had seen nearly 20 vehicles with all manner of different supplies being dropped off. Inside the trailer there were already several shrink-wrapped pallets full of nonperishable food, hygiene items, diapers, and case upon case of bottled water.
At Temple Baptist Church off U.S. Highway 601 in the White Plains community, there was a small squad of volunteers in the parking lot receiving donations and loading what will be their fourth trailer full of goods to be sent to groups they are coordinating with in Asheville including Hearts with Hands and Ralph Sexton of Trinity Baptist Church.
They were informed by their pastor, who had been in to see the damage for himself, that the situation “was much worse than what people have seen. He said the news can’t get in there to take any pictures... He said there was a huge need to help.”
Two truckloads of supplies and one of water were already sent West with the fourth trailer filling up as the day went by. A recurring theme at collection sites was to bring whatever one could donate whether that be water, supplies, clothes, blankets, or a financial donation and the groups organizing and sending the supplies to the mountains can filter out items that are not appropriate.
Down at the Surry County Farmers Market in Dobson, 903 E. Atkins Street, the song remained the same. It was evident with just a glance inside the trailer that locals heard the call to action and have taken it seriously. Next to the trailer sat a second trailer, currently empty, that the county has on standby should there be a need for it.
Surry County Commissioner Mark Marion was on hand volunteering his time and noted that another collection truck was parked just a few blocks down toward the downtown area. Both collection sites would pool their efforts, he said, and the collected items were being sent to Lincoln County where they would then be airlifted into the disaster zone.
Joanna Radford of the N.C. Cooperative Extension said a flight was taking off from Lincoln County once every eight minutes to airlift in donated goods. Marion said there were over two dozen pilots in helicopters and planes flying supplies to North Carolina residents in the mountains who were ravaged by the months’ worth of rain that fell as a result of Hurricane Helene.
Meteorologists said that an astounding 40 trillion gallons of rain fell on the Southeast during Helene. State officials said the highest rainfall total in the state was found in the mountain town of Busick, Yancey County, where they received 31.33 inches of rain. Boone saw 20.12 inches and closer to home in Alleghany County, Sparta was soaked by 14.35 inches.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.’
As of 3 p.m. Thursday there were still 283,332 total reported power outages across the state with many in the Yadkin Valley still affected. ReadyNC.gov reported that in Alleghany County there were 1,008 reported outages, Wilkes County had 680, while Surry, Stokes, and Yakin Counties no longer had any reported outages as per the state website.
However, residents in the worst impacted regions cannot say the same and the largest number of North Carolinians still in the dark are found in Buncombe County, home of Asheville, where 87,480 outages were still being reported. Henderson County reported over 47,300 outages, Rutherford County had 17,320, and Watauga County still had 10.606 outages of their own to deal with.
Appalachian Power, which serves Southern Virginia, reported they found 583,000 feet of fallen wire and damaged equipment, including 885 poles and 285 transformers. “More than 1,500 unique locations across Southern Virginia and Southern West Virginia need repairs,” they shared online.
They reported 21,941 outages in the state of Virginia with over 2,500 of those outages are in neighboring Carroll County and 3,873 in Grayson County.
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