Latest / APD Pod Squad / Season 2, Episode 2; Lifesaving Stories From Helene, also Lt. Brian Hogan, and the History Minute with Hannah Silberman

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Season 2, Episode 2; Lifesaving Stories From Helene, also Lt. Brian Hogan, and the History Minute with Hannah Silberman · APD Pod Squad

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_07: This is the APD pot squad.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_07: One year ago, our lives were turned upside down by Hurricane Helene, the after effects of which we'll be feeling for years to come.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_07: But along with horrible tragedy came stories of bravery and heroism.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_07: We'll be hearing some of those first-hand stories in this episode, as I'm joined by senior police officers Bo Bailey, Jose Amaya, and William Woods, and detectives Sam DeGrave, Albert Ball, and Phil Allen.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_07: All recipients of lifesaving awards for their efforts at this year's Asheville Police Department Awards Banquet.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_07: In the History Minute with Hannah Silberman, a different Asheville flooding event, this one on Memorial Day weekend in the year 1976, and the heroism of Officer Porter Fowler.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_07: And Lieutenant Brian Hogan from the community engagement division looks back at his first week as a lieutenant one year ago.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_07: Yep, it happened to coincide with the arrival of Helene, and we'll hear his memories of that hectic time.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_07: It's all coming up on episode two of season two of the APD Pod Squad.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_07: Getting to know Senior Police Officer Bo Bailey.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_07: Officer Bailey, thanks for joining me.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, no problem.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, so if you've heard the podcast before and you told me you are a regular listener.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: I do, yeah.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, so you know the two questions that I usually ask.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_07: I do.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_07: So we'll start with where were you born?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_07: I was born in Queens, New York.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_07: Two now that are from that general area?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_07: A Detective Parker.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_07: Was also from, I'm not sure Queens, but the General the Borough is one of those.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_07: And then was kind of raised in New Jersey.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_07: So I'm guessing you are also a pizza lover.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was, yeah, yeah.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_07: You got to be if you have to be.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_07: You grow up there, right?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_07: Yes.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Best pizza is in Manhattan.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_07: Manhattan.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: It is in Manhattan, yes.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_07: I wouldn't have thought that.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_07: So I think Manhattan, I think the rich folks, I think the financial district.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's just like Prince Street.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's this pizza shops have been opened for 60 years.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Best pizza in the country.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_07: Well, so who's the best here that you like?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_07: Ooh.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Black Bear, uh Sweeten Creek.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's not even close to everyone always talks about the other places.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Black Bear, best pizza.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_07: See, that's a new one to me.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_07: So I gotta try that one.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_07: I would say favillas is kind of my goal.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: I had favillas.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: It is very good.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is a little better.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_07: I promise.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_07: So that's that's over in Sweeten Creek, huh?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, Sweeten Creek and Millsgap.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, reason to go over that way.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_07: I guess my uh physical therapist is over that direction.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_07: So like next time I'm going to get my adjustments, I'll get some pizza.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_07: Perfect.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_07: All right.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_07: Second question what's one thing that most people don't know about you?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I wanted to be a cop.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: I went to school for two years during high school.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I finished that at 18, so I graduated high school with like 20 college credits to become a cop.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Did not become a cop till I was 38.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: So what happened in between?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Life, you know, working, getting married, having kids, doing all that stuff.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_07: So what did you do before becoming police officer?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: I was a district manager for Sprint and T-Mobile.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I did that for most of my adult life.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_07: So what prevented you from going immediately into law enforcement?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: When I graduated high school, I got a really good job in the union, did that for a few years in New York, and then moved to North Carolina.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the first job I got and kind of just stuck with it for 15 years or something like that.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Ross Powell So did you move here for this job or for the other job and then this came later?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: I lived in Charlotte, so I moved to Asheville specifically to be a police officer.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_07: Fantastic.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_07: And how long have you been with the Asheville Police Department?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh almost four years.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_07: Let's talk about the thing that's absolutely unavoidable here and now as we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of Helene.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_07: No matter where you turn, people are talking about it, whether it's in podcasts like ours or on the news or in the newspaper or online social media.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_07: Let's face it, it was uh something that changed our area, changed people forever.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_07: And in a way, and I'm not sure how you feel about this, but it seems like forever ago, yet also just yesterday, yeah.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_07: Some of the images, some of the memories, and some of the experiences, they're still so fresh.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_07: And we recently had our Asheville Police Department's awards banquet, and we had several people that won life-saving awards, and you were one of those.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_07: I was.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_07: Yes.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_07: Uh let's let's talk about what happened that day, if you're comfortable with that.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_07: Uh so let's just set the stage with at what part of the storm was it?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_07: When was it?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was pretty early on in the day.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're talking Friday.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: You're talking Friday, early eight or nine in the morning.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not a hundred percent sure.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_07: So that's when the rain was coming down.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was coming down.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was weird because this was in Biltmore Village, and I had just drove through there maybe a half an hour before, and there was no water.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then they said, Hey, go down by the McDowell Bridge, closer by the McDonald's, and just make sure people don't drive through the water.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Water?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: What is it?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I drive back and it's essentially a river.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it was flowing right, you know, right down right into Biltmore itself.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_07: And that is an area that has been prone to flooding over the years.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_07: It is real it's flooded frequently, unfortunately.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_07: Uh and most people know where we're talking about.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_07: For those of you that don't, McDowell Street is essentially there's a McDonald's entrance to the Biltmore estate.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_07: Uh, that is one side.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_07: And on the other side, if you go up the hill, is the Asheville High School.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_07: Yes.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_07: So that is the McDowell Bridge.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Powell, Jr.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I was basically in front of, you know, the the entrance to the Biltmore.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, which side of the waters were you on?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I was on the north side.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I was on the city side.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_07: And so what happened?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I get there and I see cars kind of getting washed down, you know, kind of bumping along in the water here and there.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I just remember going, man, I'd be so mad if that was my car.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I look out and I'm my job is just to make sure people don't drive through the water.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I look out and I see lights go on, brake lights on a car.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_07: The car's floating.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's not this one isn't.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: This one's staying still, but it's it's up past the door.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_07: I gotcha.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: But it's out in the water.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember going, wow, it the lights were on.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was like, oh, that means there's someone in the car.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: Someone had stepped on the brake.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_07: So they were closest to what?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_07: What's the closest landmark?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was right in between the Grand Bohemian and McDonald's.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, so down that far into Biltmore village.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in the Biltmore village.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: I got it.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: I could see that there was at least one person in the car.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing that was kind of weird that I didn't think about until later is they did a bolo on the radio.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: So essentially saying that the water was going to rise rapidly because some something gave out, you know, higher up.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so I go out into the water, I take my belt off, I go out, I opened the door, and thankfully it was only one person.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was a nurse.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: She worked probably 13 or 14 hours, just exhausted trying to get home.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: I was able to get her out, get her up to the McDonald's.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I called for an ambulance, but one never came.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I ended up just driving her back to the hospital myself.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_07: So she was she couldn't get out of her vehicle?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: She couldn't get out of the vehicle.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_07: The pressure of the water was keeping those doors closed.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_07: Did you break a window?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_07: Did you manage it?
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: No, I just put my foot and pulled it open.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_07: We pulled it open a little better than that way.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_07: And she must have been just completely relieved.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, uh, obviously her life was probably flashing in front of me.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_07: She was pretty shook up.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_07: I could imagine.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_07: How did you feel at that time, though?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_07: Obviously, the waters were swift.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it wasn't it wasn't great, but um, I was just glad that there was no one else in the car.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: She was able to help me get her to shore.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like I could, I was holding her, but she was able to walk with me.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: It would have been worse if there was a lot of kids in the car, you know, multiple people that needed help.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: I was glad it was just one person and that it worked out.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_07: You know, most people have seen the videos of how much water was down there uh once it really peaked, right?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_07: If you drive down there today, it's hard to imagine that little I mean, it's a creek.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_07: It really is.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_07: It's called a river, but it's it's really a creek.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_07: It is not deep, it is not wide, but that thing became this raging, roaring river.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_07: And I heard estimates that it was the force of the water was the equivalent of the Niagara River when it goes over Niagara Falls.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: At one point, someone from the state came out and I had the bridge closed down at that point.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: This later in the day, I had it closed all the way down on the n on the north side.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, I have to go out, I have to check my equipment.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Well, where's your equipment?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he said, Well, we do readings on the river.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's on the bridge underneath the railroad bridge.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: I said, It that that bridge isn't there.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he didn't believe me, and he walked all the way out and he comes back like 10 minutes later.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, Yeah, all my equipment got washed away.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, Yeah, what do you think?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just told you the bridge.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: I just told you the bridge is bridge isn't there.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like your equipment was on that bridge.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: That bridge does not exist.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_07: Well, I mean, the devastation was so total uh because of that storm that things, you know, happened that had never happened before here, here or anywhere.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_07: So I I mean a lot of us knew something was coming, but it was impossible to tell that that was coming.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Earlier in the day, when I first got on at 5 36 in the morning, a car pulled in the Biltmore 18-wheeler.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: He was lost.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually blocked traffic and helped him back out and drive away.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then an hour and a half later, if that was five feet of water.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, he wouldn't have had a truck.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's just you know, we weren't expecting that.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't did not think I would be back there pulling people out of the water or blocking traffic, or it was just so so quick.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_07: So you mentioned uh you have a family, wife, kids, all that.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_07: I do.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_07: So you had to go home and tell them that story.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_07: Um I'm sure at some point.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: I did, yeah.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I you know, we were so busy it was hard to to communicate really throughout the day.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: My wife is a teacher.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: She was home, they canceled school, and I have two kids, so she was home with them.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: When I actually, this is a kind of a weird story.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: When I went home later that night, there was there's a bridge to get to my house that did not exist.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: I live in Fairview, the bridge was washed away.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's actually a lieutenant whose father lives down the street from me.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I parked my patrol car in his driveway, borrowed a ladder from his neighbor, put it across the bridge, crawled across out in the pitch dark.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: There was no lights, there's no streetlights.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then went home, showered, and then took a bath out of, you know, buckets, and then got dressed, climbed across the ladder, put it back, and then uh went back to work the next day.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_07: Do you have your bridge back?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: I do now, yes.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: I actually it was pretty quick.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was maybe two months.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_07: So many bridges were were washed away.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_07: And of course, communications at the time was were you able to get in touch with your family that day and and make sure they were okay?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is gonna sound even weirder.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in the middle of the day, there was it slowed down a little.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: I went home and the bridge was out.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I yelled there was a guy across, he walked to my house and told my family I was okay, and then I walked up to his family's house on the other side and told them he was okay, and then I went back to work.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_07: And that's the part that's that's crazy in in a way is the went back to work.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_07: It's like, you know, saved a life, checked on the family, went back to work.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_07: That's that's our job.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_07: It is.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_07: And so many people did it so well.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_07: Is is this something I mean, you couldn't have imagined this happening when you thought about getting into a career in law enforcement, but because you have good days and bad days.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_07: But saving a life is one of the good days.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it is.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, everyone, when I mean everyone in the department stepped up, I mean there was guys that day, because that was the day we all changed just schedule-wise, everything was changing that day.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't know the storm was coming, so I got moved to a different part of town, people got moved around.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: There were people who got were made detectives, and then they were out in uniform that day because they knew we needed help.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: People came in from from everywhere on their days off to help.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was awesome.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_07: And we had law enforcement from all over the state, all over the country that chipped in as well.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_07: But those especially from areas that are prone to it, from the south, from the Gulf.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_07: We had people from Mississippi, we had people from the east that knew exactly what we were going through, and they they helped.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't know if it's true, but I heard every state, excluding like two, we had people come from.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: So 48 states showed up to help us.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_07: I saw the list.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_07: It was pretty extensive.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_07: I'm not sure what states maybe didn't, but maybe some of the smaller ones, maybe Montana, maybe Idaho, I don't know who it was.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_07: Don't want to call them out if they sent them.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: No, yeah, I don't know which one, but I heard 48 states showed up.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_07: That sounds right.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_07: That's awesome.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, I was here, you know, at 81 when all that was going on, I was looking at the list and seeing people getting checked in, and I'm I was shocked by how many people sent people that day.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_07: But it was uh, you know, like you say, with the with the bad comes the good, and now we look back a year later.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_07: What's your memories besides that of the whole storm and afterwards?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Honestly, like I mean, how close everyone got.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I met neighbors, I never knew.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: I got to meet a lot of people in the community that just bringing them food.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: We were doing food deliveries, we were just dropping off boxes of food.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I got to meet so many people, and people were just so happy to help each other.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was that was really cool.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_07: Has a way of bringing people together, doesn't it?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know what a cool thing?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um every month I go to a school and I read to the kids.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: I do it every I do it probably seven months out of the year where I go and I read the kindergarten to fourth grade.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: And uh after Helene, uh in October, it was scheduled.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: School was still closed, didn't have water, all that stuff.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: So uh my wife's a teacher, she put it on the dojo, which is communications between parents and kids.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we did it at the park down the street in uh South Asheville.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking, man, if ten kids show up.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: It was like a hundred kids showed up.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, it was awesome.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: It must have been great.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was so much fun.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_07: What was the story you read that day?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: You remember?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: I read four, I read two or three.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I got some firefighters to come out.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was a lot of fun.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Kids got to play again with other kids because they hadn't been able to do that.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a really cool day.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_07: Officer Bo Bailey, thank you for your efforts and your life-saving efforts that day during those storms.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_07: No problem.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you so much.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_07: Senior police officers Jose Amaya and William Woods join me now as we continue to look back at last year, this time, Hurricane Helene and the life-saving efforts that were performed by several members of the Asheville Police Department.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_07: And those efforts were celebrated at the recent Asheville Police Department Awards Banquet.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_07: First of all, Officer Amaya, Officer Woods, thanks for joining me.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_07: Of course.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_07: I appreciate you guys sitting down with me and telling your story about a story that's been pretty highly publicized.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_07: A lot of people are familiar with the tragic story of Megan Dry and her family as she lost her son and her parents, but survived thanks to your efforts in that of the Asheville Fire Department.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_07: Let's start with you, Officer Amaya.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_07: What day was it and where were you when your role in this began?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_03: It was my day off, and I had come in just to help out around the road.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: In the morning, I had I had woken up and went for a drive and saw how bad it was.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_03: So I had messaged uh one of the sergeants to see if I could come in if they needed help, and he said yeah.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_07: So And so the activity uh that you guys were involved in was basically that kind of tunnel road area of town, right?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_07: The the the bridge there, and which is like near the Lowe's and uh I I guess the U-Hall that got so flooded that was that people so it was that general area, right?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_07: Yes, I was right uh Swananoa River Road uh by South Tunnel.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_07: And also uh Sergeant Faust was also with you guys that day as well, right?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_07: Yes.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_07: So it was the three of you, and I'm sorry he couldn't join us for today.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_07: But what day was this?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_07: With the storm arriving the 27th, what day did this incident occur?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_06: So that happened that I believe it was a Friday.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it was the day of the storm?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_06: The day of the storm.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, as the water was rising and the the flood waters were so fast.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_07: Walk me through what happened that day from like you knowing about what happened, uh, seeing someone.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_07: I think it was Faust that saw her first, I believe.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_06: Uh so Faust actually heard her.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_06: Um at this point, I think we had already uh Officer Amaya and I had already been pulled back and forth to help with the Swiftwater Rescue by deploying drones all the way down by Porter's Cove, uh different parts of the city, just back and forth.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_06: At this point, we weren't needed at that moment.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_06: Uh we had some onlookers on 240 bridge trying to look at all the floods, so we had to keep them off.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_06: At this point, I started seeing people in the water being swept through the white water at this point, you know, underneath the bridge.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_06: Started calling it out.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, unfortunately, there were quite a few of them.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_06: Uh we saw them go under and never saw them surface again.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, I do remember seeing the female uh in the water and called it out um because I was on the I guess I'd be on the west side of the bridge, so the water's flowing east.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_06: And I called it out, I believe Officer Maya was on the other side.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_06: No, um I was like in the target area.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_06: Okay.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_06: So you were in route, I think, to the area.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_06: So Faust was on the east uh side of 240.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_06: And I called out the female, saw her go under the bridge, and then Sergeant Faust never saw her come out.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_06: So we thought she just had gone under and never resurfaced.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_06: I'd probably give it another 10 minutes or so when he heard someone crying out for help.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_06: Uh at that point, I deployed a drone to see if we could locate someone under the bridge.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_06: That's when uh Officer Omaya arrived with his drone, and we just kept going back and forth, switching out batteries because it took us a while uh to actually locate uh the female.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_07: From what I understand uh from reading some media reports, she was on the roof of her house with her family.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_07: I guess there's a mother and her father, and also her son.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_07: And tragically, all three of them didn't make it.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_07: And at one point, she decided to lighten her load.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_07: I guess she had a backpack or she had some other things that were pulling her down, and she actually, I I guess, went into the water and then ended up between those two trailers.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_06: Correct.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_07: So this is where we kind of pick up the story where the saving begins.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_07: So, which one of you wants to kind of walk me through how that worked?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so we were on the on the bridge.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_03: I was on the 240 east side, uh co-located with Sergeant Faust and several other officers.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_03: Fire department had been charging our batteries because we had the portable battery case.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: We were swapping out batteries like that.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: With the drones?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: With the drones, free drones.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: We kept on looking under the bridge.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_03: We were trying to figure out where it was coming from.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_03: At first, I didn't hear it.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: We so Sergeant Faust was the only one that was like, I hear somebody, I hear somebody.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I believe you saw like a rag, but his drone couldn't zoom in close enough.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: So I brought my drone pretty close uh and try to zoom in as much as we could.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: I think it was at that moment where like just out of the corner of my eye, I just saw somebody waving.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, that there she is.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: And I think I called it over the radio, I believe.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: I believe so.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I was I was like, she's over there, but since that part of the bridge is too long, like where I'm pointing, they were looking, they couldn't see, but I was like, I just brought my drone over there to over up top of her, and we started bringing attention to where she was, and she basically was pinned between two conicses, just holding herself like in an L shape, trying to just hold on.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_07: Some of the swiftest waters from some of the videos that I've seen was occurring right there, right near that Walmart, right near that, you know, the Lowe's and uh Walgreens or CVS or whatever that was.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_07: That was an area that was heavily damaged.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_07: Um it blew out a bridge, which they've recently replaced uh just recently.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_07: I remember seeing a photo uh the Chief Lamb actually took us.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_07: He was either on his way in or somewhere from 240 of that scene from the U-Haul that day.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_07: So, Officer Woods, how about your role in this?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_06: So at this point when we located her, you know, we're calling it out, they're trying to get swift water rescue to her.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_06: Uh, there's so many obstacles, and like you said, the water is moving so fast in that area, it probably took 30, 45 minutes for them to even deploy into the water.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_06: And at that point, they're keeping an eye, you know, Officer Amaya, Sergeant Fowls keep an eye on the female, making sure she's not, you know, lose her footing or something and get swept away further down uh the river.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_06: I'm actually looking, sending my drone up the river to look for obstacles.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_06: Because at this point, we we have tractor trailers, we have all sorts of debris being swept down.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_06: And uh, I think at one point when she is when the female was kind of uh you know in between the two connexes trying to keep her balance, uh we actually had another trailer go and go underneath, and we thought, you know, she was going to get knocked, you know, loose from you know her area.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_06: So I was trying to call out the obstacles that when they were coming.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_06: And also that helped with the swift water rescue because at the same time they're trying to get to her, but then they have stuff being swept down the river that was proving very difficult for them to even get to her.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, people have seen video of the things that were floating in the water, and it wasn't just you know logs and such, it was entire tractor trailers.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_07: And we had houses actually for houses used to be swept.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_07: So, about how long was it from the time you heard her until someone was able to reach her?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_07: Any idea?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_07: It was probably close to an hour, I think.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_07: Uh which was a miracle that she was able to hold on that long.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_07: Was she in a position of kind of where strength where she could kind of leverage herself against something, or was she just holding on?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_06: If you can imagine having your back propped up against the wall, and then you have this gap, you know, four feet in front of you, and you have your feet in front of you, and you were just holding yourself up for an hour.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_06: And I don't mean I don't know what the temperature of the water was, but obviously shock and you know, everything is setting in, like for her to be able to have the strength to do that was pretty amazing.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, it certainly wasn't like you know, you go down to the beach and the water's like 80 degrees.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_07: I'm sure it was probably closer in the 50-60 range or whatever, and you were there for hours, it's going to affect your body as well and your muscles.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_07: So when it came to the rescue itself, were you guys uh like with the drones or were positioned to help the Swift Water team?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_07: Is that how that worked?
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_06: Aaron Powell Yeah, we just had the drones deployed and we just kept switching out batteries and trying to make sure we still had a drone just in case, you know, either rescue team or the female got, you know, swept away that we'd be able to at least keep eyes on whoever was in the water at that time.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Powell Have you spoken to her since that day?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_07: Have you had a chance to talk to her after the fact?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_07: Have not.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_07: I I mean I'm sure everything was in shock, I guess, for her.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_07: Uh I mean she lost family members and she survived, which so I'm sure incredibly difficult for her.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_07: How about for you guys?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_07: Do you still look back at it and think about it even a year later?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Powell Um I mean I do.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_06: Uh I mean, even talking about it right now, I can feel the temperature in my face uh like you know, it getting warm.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_06: Um it took a long time to process it, uh, of course.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_06: Um but yeah, thinking about it, yeah, it it it still affects me to a certain extent.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_06: But I think, you know, luckily with the police department having therapists and We've uh talked with a lot of people, but it just took a little while to process, you know, everything, all the destruction and, you know, the death that we saw.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_07: Office Jeremiah.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I still think about it, especially the way that she that she was doing it, like um hanging on.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: If you think about it, it's like remember back back in school where you had to reach to stretch out to see your flexibility.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's basically the position she was in, just between two connexes.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: And then when the um semi-trailer collapsed, it just kind of like crunched under her.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: Just like everything just kind of like it's hard to imagine like that.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_03: You just saw a whole semi just get suctioned under her.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I think she somehow Velpa like managed to like pull herself up.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_03: Because she pulled herself up onto the connects at one point.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's just the way it got hit.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, it just it happened to turn the right way to for gravity to help her to pull herself out.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_06: But seeing other people swept down the river and you know, seeing the fear in their eyes, and you're powerless to do anything about it, and you're just yelling at them to try to find something to hold on, and then you see them go under, and then kind of like in the back of your mind, you're like, I was the last person they saw while they were alive.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_06: So yeah, that was a little difficult to accept and survivor's guilt, I guess.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_06: Uh they call it.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Powell, How about you and your family?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_07: How did you guys fare during it?
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_07: Everything okay on the home front as far as personally?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_06: We do we did pretty pretty well on my end at least.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_06: Same.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_06: You know, I'm in a different county over, and you know, while we did get hit hard, my area, we were blessed, I guess is the right word to say.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Powell How long have you uh been with the police department, Officer Mile?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I've been with the police department since 2021 and on the road since 2022.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_07: You mentioned the Baltimore Ravens when we sat down in here.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_07: As a Bills fan, I hesitate to bring that up based on the recent results, but okay, who's kidding who?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_07: I had to bring that up based on the recent results.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_07: But you guys got a heck of a team.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_07: So I I think you're gonna be fine this year.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I hope so.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_07: Officer Woods, where are you from?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_06: Uh originally south of Charlotte.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_06: So uh North Carolinian, you know, regardless.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_07: But upon Is there a south of Charlotte that's still in North Carolina?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_06: Uh a little bit, yeah.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_06: Uh Union County, all right.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_06: Uh below Mecklenburg.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_07: So how long have you been with APD?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_06: Uh a little like about nine years now.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_07: Well, thank you very much for your service, both of you, and for the efforts of that day and uh the efforts that you continue to make.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_07: I appreciate your service.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you for having us.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_07: As we continue with the life-saving stories from Helene, I am joined now by Detectives Sam DeGrave, Albert Ball, and Phil Allen.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_07: Let's start with Detective DeGrave.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_07: On the day of the storm, when it arrived, Friday, September 27th, you were not scheduled to work that day.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's correct.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_02: I typically work Monday through Thursday, but in advance of the storm, the emergency response team, uh, which I'm a member of, had been put on standby in the event that we were needed to assist with whatever the storm threw at us.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't know what that looked like yet, but I recall we had a mission the night before, early Friday morning.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: I woke up at about six and my cell service had already gone down.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's how we get called in.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I was concerned that if we had been called in already, I wouldn't have known it because I didn't know how long my phone had been without service.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: And if we were going to get called in later and I didn't have service, I wouldn't know it.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: So I got in my car and tried to make my way into the station, encountered water over the road, trees down everywhere.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: So my commute, which is usually about 15 minutes, took me more than an hour and took me through parts of the city that weren't the hardest hit, but were hit hard enough that I was starting to get a picture for how bad it was.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_07: Is that your first indication of how bad it really was to the fact that you just had such difficulty getting in?
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I had never seen the roads that were flooded, I didn't even know there was water near some of them.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: There were trees down that looked like they'd probably been up for a hundred years and weathered storms well before this one.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: It really looked bad, and then as I was driving in, I could hear the radio traffic, and it sounded like everything was happening via radio, and I ended up hailing one of the commanders on the radio to say, where do you need me?
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because I have no service, and that was when I was told nobody has service.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: We are completely calms down, other than radio at this point.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I was told to assist with the evacuation that was in progress.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I went first to CID at headquarters to enlist the help of whoever I could find there and to get my rain jacket.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_07: And you found Detective Ball and Detective Allen, I guess, right?
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_07: I did.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_07: All right, guys.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_07: So that let's pick it up with you guys.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_07: So you were there, you're here at the building, you're here at 81.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_07: Yes.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_07: And then Sam comes up and says, hey, we need to get out there and help.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_10: Right.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_07: Is that essentially how it worked?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_10: Yes.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_10: Uh we had been uh Detective Ball and I s myself had uh had been there that morning.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_10: We we both scheduled to work Fridays.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_10: So uh as we were there, we noticed it was uh limited staffing.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_10: Some people had come in, but then had to leave to go home for different reasons.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_10: Uh during that first hour or two in the morning that we were there, Chief Lamb had come down to the office saying, Hey, I need some help upstairs.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_10: And uh we go upstairs and notice that there's leaks throughout the building.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_10: Though so we're having to grab buckets and trash cans to try to capture the water.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_10: And uh you know, we we did that for for a little while as best we could, and then we went back down to uh to our office, and that's where uh we met with uh uh Sam.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_07: I remember the bucket brigade well.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_07: We had quite a few of the uh leaks in uh in our building and third floor, fourth floor, which led to a big repair here in the building not that long after the storm.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_10: Right, right.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_07: Okay, so after that, of course, uh Detective Ball, then you guys got all together and headed out toward I guess the location was near the veterans' restoration quarters, is kind of where you guys located at.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_04: We went right behind, I guess, Sam, probably five, ten minutes after me and Detective Allen got out there.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we basically stationed ourselves on the other side of the bridge from the VA quarters and was waiting as they were getting I think they finally got everybody out and the water I don't know, it didn't take it but probably ten, fifteen minutes.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_04: Not long.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_04: It didn't seem to take long before it went across the bridge and it was getting becoming very questionable if anything could get across that bridge.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_04: I I remember that the fire and everybody else was having to go everywhere.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_04: Couldn't stay stationed, and so they were leaving trying to get to other places.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_04: Me and Detective Allen went over to the hotel because there were several people standing by there.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_04: And then I think what was it mean you went behind?
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, we had drove everybody was towards the front of the hotel, and by that point the river had just started coming over the bridge when we got down there.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_10: By that point the water had really had really swelled up.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_10: Um so the point where we had our vehicles, they would have been in the water.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_10: So we had to move our vehicles all the way back to the uh exit ramp right there off of uh I can't even remember the exit number.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_10: Fifty five.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_10: Okay.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_10: Uh and yeah, so yeah, everybody had cleared for the most part, uh, because the fire department was having to go all over the place.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_10: And Detective Ball and I decided to drive around the hotel, and as we did that, we saw some people through the woods that were trying to wave us down.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_10: So at that point, you know, we get on the radio, we could hear one of them mentioning there was somebody coming down the river, like they had gotten swept down already.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_10: Um and during this time, I mean, there's like debris just smashing up against the bridge, and it was like I said, it had gotten to where it was well overflowing at that point, and it was like a river coming down through there really swift.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_07: So this is exit fifty-five.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_07: Right.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_07: I guess that's where the Harley Davidson is located.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: No, that's fifty-nive.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: Fifty nine, okay.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: Fifty-five is the edge of our jurisdictional boundary, and it's got the Super 8 and the quality in a couple of hotels up there in the VRQ.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_02: I gotcha.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: So initially, the entire evacuation for that part of the city was being conducted by patrol, and the VRQ was, I think, mostly evacuated prior, but that was a staging site for everybody.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: So anybody that needed to catch a bus to go to one of the shelters was gonna do it there.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: And it was remarkable how quickly the water came up out there.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: The bridge they're talking about is Gudgers Bridge, if locals know it by that.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: We joined to relieve night shift patrol because at that point it was probably around nine, getting close to ten in the morning.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: And our night shift officers had they were due to go home at six.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: So they'd stayed that long over.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: As they mentioned, there was a fire truck there that was blocking the road.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: And we were mainly just cleaning up the very end of the evacuation.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: It was we had to move the evacuation site from the VRQ across Gudgers Bridge toward the highway because the water, as Detective Ball and Allen had mentioned, had started going over top of the bridge, and we weren't sure how long it was gonna hold, and it really rose quickly.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: But as they mentioned, once we got there, patrol all cleared because they had to go home.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: They were on 16 hours in their shift, and fire was getting called elsewhere.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: So we were just waiting for the street department to show up and put up barricades, and then we were gonna leave too.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_02: Everything was mostly done there, or so we thought, until by the grace of God or whatever you believe in, these guys encountered people who needed help.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: So did you see or did you hear somebody at first?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_10: Mostly just saw them waving.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_10: One of them had like a bright pink or red sweater on, a female, and it was in the water?
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_10: No, no.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_10: She was like on a land part, you know, right next to the water, a little elevated ground.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_10: Moffat branch.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_10: That's the Swannanoa River that comes down through there.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_07: So what happened from there?
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_10: I believe we we we went down just to see if we could see somebody coming down.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_10: We we started seeing the guy, a male subject who was, you know, just kind of going in the water and and you know, at one point Sam.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_04: I think the Detective DeGrave was on the I think he was closer down to the bridge area.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_04: Because we went up and I think started hollering because there is a guy in the water that was run and we were trying to figure out how are we gonna get this guy out of that water.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, pretty much he was in the it it to me it looked like he was in the middle of Moffat Branch, the road.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_04: It was so the road became the river and he was in that part, not actually all the way over at the actual water.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_04: He was over the road in the it was that bad.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: So you managed to get him?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: Not exactly.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: We he started floating and we were calling to him, I think we saw him almost from the back of the parking lot of the Quality Inn, which is back off of Tunnel Road.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: The direction of the Swannanoa River there runs across Tunnel Road.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: And at that point, the water had risen so quickly.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: I think by then we were already seeing whole houses go down and smash into Gudgers Bridge, just smash to pieces.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: We were called because there was somebody floating in the water, and we didn't see anybody at first.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_02: And after a couple minutes, we saw this guy float down, and we started running and calling to him like, come to us, swim to us, swim to us.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know if he was gassed or he couldn't hear us.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: The water was so loud it was difficult to hear anything at the time.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I had my gun belt on because I showed up as if it was we were gonna do SWAT duties, since that's why I was on call, and I remember taking it off, and I gave it to one of you guys and jumped in to try and get him because he had kind of started swimming toward us, but couldn't make it all the way.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I think I could get an arm's length from him, but couldn't get him, and he that was as far as I could go before the water was gonna take me to.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: So he washed up that section of Moffat Road where he was is lower elevation than Tunnel Road.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: So he got washed across Tunnel Road, but hit a patch of bushes at the BP station that's right there, and he got caught in the bushes.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so at that point, it was just us three there.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: Fire had left because they had things, patrol was gone.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: So we started trying to arrange rescue for him.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: We needed Swiftwater rescue because there was no way for any of us.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: I had been into the water deep enough to know that if I go a couple steps more, I'm gonna have to get rescued with this guy if I even make it.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: So we tr started trying to arrange rescue there, but while we were calling for a Swiftwater team to join us, he started playing charades with us.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: And what I mean by that is, as I said, the water was so loud you couldn't hear him.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: So he was just on the other side of the road from us, I don't know, like 20 yards maybe.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: And he was we were yelling at the top of our lungs saying, What are you trying to do?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_02: And he was putting up hand signals.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: He kept putting up a two with his fingers and pointing back the way that he came, and then a one and pointing back the way he came.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, so he's trying to tell you where there were some other people.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's what we suspected at that point, but we couldn't be sure, and we didn't have a good way to communicate with him.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: Because yelling wasn't working, and I've never been good at trades, I don't know about it all.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: But it was it was difficult, and he w he was so, I would imagine, exhausted from what he had been through.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: We we weren't we were trying to get him to do something different since we weren't understanding that and it just it wasn't working.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: So then we began to the three of us went back to try and explore what it was that he might be talking about.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so what'd you find?
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, at that point, uh uh Sam jumped a wall, you know, kind of scaled a wall and was able to find a trail that got to where he was able to talk to the to the original people we saw that were waving at us.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_10: And that's when he was able to get some more information uh about maybe some other people who needed who needed help that maybe had gotten in the water or was it a house that was about to go, and uh he was able to get some more information that we could relay to the uh the rescue team as they started showing up.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: The river had come out of its banks all the way across Moffat Road and was rising up to the parking lot of the quality inn where these where Detective Ball and Detective Allen were.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: But from the back corner of that parking lot you could see a church off Moffat Road that was basically an island at this point.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: And there were about 20 people that were in the parking lot of that church, and you couldn't really hear them either.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: You kind of could a little better because the river had created kind of an eddy there, so it wasn't as roaring as the parts further down.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: But I jumped the fence, went through the woods, and made contact, like waited across the eddy since it wasn't fast moving.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_02: I could get across it, but I didn't have a radio because it would have been destroyed going through the water.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_02: So I made contact with the people there and they said, hey, they pointed out the problem area here primarily was the I think River's Edge condos, which are off Moffat Road or I think River Edge Road or River Edge Knoll.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's an offshoot off Moffat.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: Those condos, I didn't know it at the time, but they sit on stilts and it's like three stories, but really four, because the the bottom story is a stilted 15-foot space.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I have spoken now since with other people that lived in those condos, and they said that they'd been through a lot of floods and that the stilts kept them high up.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: So not all of them evacuated immediately.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the case with our gentleman who had washed down the river and was playing trades with us.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, sure.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he had tried to get out, and the people in the church parking lot pointed me toward it.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_02: One of the buildings, the entire building had broken off of the stilts and floated and was washed up against a bank there.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: And they said that there's people that we saw on this building and we don't know where they are.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we couldn't get to that building because our Swiftwater team hadn't made it to us yet.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: But I went further to look at the other condos that were there and saw a woman who was lashed around, she was holding it for dear life, a a post that was a part of a deck.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: Moffitt Road is outside of APD's jurisdiction.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of parts that are right outside of the city that we don't know as well as we know the city.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_02: I thought she was on a first story.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: She was on the third story of this building.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, so really it's like the fourth story.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_02: I tried to wade over to her because I thought first story, I took one step and was up to my neck and had to back out.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: And at that point, I was communicating through Albert and Phil by shouting from the church to them, and they were relaying how what the time frame was for the Swiftwater team.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: I told them that we have another person here who I suspected might be the person that he was trying to get us to find.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: But either way, it was the only person that I found that was in a position that that could be saved at that point.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_02: So I asked the the people that were in the church parking lot to form a human line since nobody had cell phones.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: I said, Why don't you get where you can see her, then another person where you can see that person, and another person where you can see that person all the way back to where they could hail Albert if necessary, if anything were to change with her.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_07: So everybody did that.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_07: They got in the line, was able to communicate, get some messages to you guys, huh?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_04: I think Yeah, I think probably you reached out to me a couple of times.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_04: I was able finally to get through because communication was hard even with radio to get through.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_04: But I think Probably what after you originally got with me, it was not that long before the first I think it was AFD and uh some of the guys from New Jersey that was down here too started showing up.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_04: It wasn't long before they got back to us.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_04: And I just remember hoisting multiple people up a wall to get where Sam or where Detective DeGrave was originally at.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_04: I got tickled because it was nice seeing some guys from Jersey showing up with their accent.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, look, somebody else without my accent.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_04: But those guys showed up and they really did a number helping those people out.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_04: It was kind of uh it was difficult, you could tell from their angle on what they do to get the boat in the water and be able to respond as quickly as they could, because it was just hearing Detective DeGrieve and how he was trying to tell us, you know, this lady's holding on for dear life, and I mean, not even seeing that, you could tell the lady's holding on for dear life, and you're trying to get people there.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_04: So they got her.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so while all that was happening, also there was a guy that w had been in the Super Eight hotel, and I think that had like five buildings, and three of them got completely washed away, or two whole buildings.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: But he had been parked in the Super Eight and tried to drive through it, and he got as far as the BP and couldn't come across tunnel road to us, and his car got swamped and he jumped out, and so he was then also stranded with the other gentleman, and the water was still rising at this point.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: More houses were hitting the bridge.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: It was becoming dire for the three of them.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: In a prior job, embedded with the Swiftwater team out in Florence during that hurricane, they had told me, hey, the most dangerous time in a water rescue is when they see you, but before you get to them, because all the adrenaline that's helping them to hold on to what they're holding on to starts to dump because they think, oh, I'm saved.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: People are here to rescue me.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that superhuman adrenaline fight or flight response that was keeping them warm, keeping them strong enough to hold on against the current of the water, that starts to go away.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: So once somebody sees that there's rescue en route, like you gotta be on top of it.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_02: And luckily, those New Jersey guys were great.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_02: And AFD, if I recall correctly, AFD was they took point on the rescue of the two people at the BP.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then I took the New Jersey guys with me.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_02: We had to hoist their boats up over the wall and carry them through the woods and then wade across, and they launched from the church parking lot where everybody had gathered.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: And even once they were there, the rescue was incredibly hairy.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_02: They first made it to the woman that was on the third story deck of the Rivers Edge condo.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: They got her and brought her over to the quality inn.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: Then they went back and cleared that structure that had broken off and floated because everybody in the church parking lot was convinced that there were a couple people that had been a part of that building.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_02: So they lashed their boat as it's floating, uh potentially about to break free.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, those dudes are heroes, because if that had broken free, we saw every building that hit Gudger's Bridge was demolished immediately.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where it was headed.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_02: But they lashed off their boat to the deck and they went into the house and cleared it room by room, and unfortunately they didn't find anybody.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_02: But then they decided that they needed to prioritize the rest of the River's Edge condos because they had already found one person there and they were going to try and clear it.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: But the water had risen so much even in the time in the five minutes that it took between when they dropped off her, searched that other house, and then went to it, that their engine could no longer, I think they had like a 45 or 60 horsepower outboard on one of those zodiacs.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: That engine could no longer fight the current.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: And they had it maxed out, it was smoking and screaming, and it was getting they were getting pushed back.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_02: And when they don't have the ability to fight the water, it's incredibly dangerous for them because they're at the mercy of whatever the current's doing.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: And in this case, their boat capsized almost immediately after they were about to bring it back for that reason because they they had no control.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: And all the dudes went into the water again by some miracle.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: Two or three of them, I can't remember if it was three or four people on, but two or three were able to grab brush on the side and pull themselves in, and the boat started going just down the center of the what the river had become at that point.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_02: And one one of the guys was with it, and he was floating away, and they started throwing, they have throwbags, which are a big bag full of rope.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: And you throw it past the person and they can grab a hold of the rope.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think I saw three or four people throw throwbags for him and all missed, and the very last dude who had a throwbag threw what in his profession must be a Hail Mary game winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, because he threw his throwbag and it ran out of rope right when it landed at the guy's hand.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: So if it had been a second later or any less true, that guy would have been down the river as well.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: But he was a they got him back in and at that point.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: The river was so dangerous in that area they had to suspend swift water rescue further up the river.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: Now that was before AFD went and got the other two guys.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: So those dudes again also mega heroic.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: Knowing how bad it was, knowing that a boat had capsized, AFD got in a boat.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_02: And they went across the river and they were able to rescue the two guys that were at the BP.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_07: So three people rescued that were in the water.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_07: And then you also got to talk about the the Jersey Swift water team, which was, by the grace of God, not killed because you know their boat capsizes.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_07: So all those lives saved that day.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, that it's got to feel pretty good, right?
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, it's you know, there's a lot of devastation, you know, and people that lost their lives.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_07: But to know that you guys participated in something that did help save some people, it's gotta feel pretty good, doesn't it?
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, definitely.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, it's something that I'm not used to doing anything hardly out in the field anymore being in CID.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_10: You know, I I work in computer crime, so I sit in office and analyze phones all day for the most part.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_10: And uh so you never know with this with this job where you might be that day.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_10: And that's where we were needed.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_10: And uh, you know, at the same time we you felt helpless in ways because there was certain things you just couldn't do.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_10: But uh getting the people there that that were needed and they were there, they were able to do their job, you know, that was definitely a good feeling about that.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_07: Still lingers with you guys, I'm guessing, though, the images it just kind of is is this bringing it back in a bad way, good way?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell It was bittersweet because in the follow-up that we did after the storm, CID had a a huge role in figuring out, uh identifying who had passed, where they had come from.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: And ultimately, I think that the initial calls for help for people in the water were people that we never saw, and they were people who didn't make it.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_02: We know that three people who per perished passed through that same area.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so on the one hand, there's lives that we couldn't impact.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_02: On the other hand, there's lives that we did.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it was remarkable at the end because we found out when the woman that was saved was being treated by EMS, but this was before her boyfriend or spouse, I don't know exactly what their relationship is.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_02: It turned out that she was who we he was trying, charades guy was trying to tell us to save.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: And she didn't know that he was also in the process of being rescued.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_02: She thought he had died.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so she was hysteric in the back of an ambulance saying, My my boyfriend or my significant other is he didn't make it.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: I d I don't know what I'm gonna do.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: At that point, AFD was coming across the river with him, being able to be there and reunite her.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, she thought she had lost everything.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: And the the two he was putting up was cats, and unfortunately their cats were lost.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: But it might have led to the two people that were saved in some way.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he they were able to reunite, and we got to see that, and that was something that I won't forget.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I don't remember her name.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if I ever knew his name.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_02: I've not talked to them since, but seeing her reunited with somebody who had perished or she thought had perished was was pretty remarkable.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: In the time since too, I've I've spoken with the family members of some of the people that went down that river that we couldn't save.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I was able to tell them, and I think they found solace in it, that had their family member not been where they were at the time that they were, nobody would have hailed us to be on the lookout.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_02: And if we hadn't been hailed to be on the lookout, then there would have been no first responders there with radio access to call for a swift water team for those three people.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_02: So even the people who were lost at that spot, they lost their lives, but they had a direct role in these three people being rescued as well.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so the storm is difficult to reflect on because there's a lot of bad that came of it, a lot of good that came of it.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_02: And there at Exit 55, we saw it all pretty much in that day.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_07: Detective Ball, Detective Allen, any final thoughts?
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, sometimes to the worst of it, you had to find humor.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_04: And so in in life I've now can write on a bucket list that I was chased by a house.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_04: Uh literally a house came off its foundation and started moving towards me and Detective Allen, where we were standing in the parking lot at the motel, and you start realizing, you know, just how small you are in this world.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I can't agree no more with Detective DeGrove with uh it's a sacred place.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_04: Detective Allen.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_10: Yeah, just uh, you know, I guess kind of taken off of what we did afterwards, you know, the the weeks after.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_10: You know, during that day we we saw what what impact it had in that particular area, but then, you know, traveling throughout the city uh where we're trying to make contact with those who their loved ones couldn't reach because no cell phone service.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_10: So we're, you know, trying to reach out to people and seeing the devastation throughout the city, it was just hard to take in.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_10: I mean, it was unreal how much devastation that that it had had throughout the city.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_10: So I mean I'll I'll never forget that.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_07: Detective DeGrieve, Detective Ball, and Detective Allen, thank you for your efforts that day and thank you for sharing your story.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_07: Time again for the History Minute with Hannah Silberman.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_07: Welcome again, Hannah, and thanks for joining us.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: Glad to be here.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_07: So we've had some great stories told this episode, the life-saving stories from Helene.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_07: And obviously, this being a history thing, that doesn't really qualify as history, one year old, but I understand you were able to find something in the history of the APD that at least falls into the same universe with a an experience that we can kind of relate to with this episode.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_07: So tell us about that.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Sure.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's related to flooding that happened in the Asheville area in May of 1973.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Powell Yeah, as people are learning, flooding is not something new to the Asheville area.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_07: A lot of people knew about the big flood of 1916.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_07: And those of us that have lived here for maybe 25 years, like myself, uh the floods of 2004, with uh when it was Ivan and Francis came through.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_07: And there's been other times, too.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_07: I think was it 09, I believe, we had some floods as well.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_07: So tell us about this one.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_07: I'm really not familiar with it.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Sure.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: So on Memorial Day weekend in 1973, there were very severe thunderstorms throughout the western part of the state, which caused a lot of flash flooding.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: This particular story was an officer who was off duty at a trailer park that his dad owned in Skyland.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_09: Okay.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: So Officer Porter Fowler was there with his father when the water started to rise because the trailer park was near a stream or a river.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so as the water started to fill up the park, he saw that one of the trailers, which had a 20-year-old woman and her 12-year-old niece inside, actually fell onto its side and was starting to get washed away.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: So he ran to the trailer, he pulled open the door, but he said as he was trying to pull the door up, he saw a wave of water coming towards him.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um he said, quote, it looked like a tidal wave coming at me.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it actually pulled him under, but he managed to hang on to the door, pull it open, and pull out the two residents so they were on top of the trailer as the water continued to rise.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: As they were waiting on top of the trailer, he swam through the water back to a bank, tied a rope to himself and something on the bank with some help of other people in the park, and then ferried those two people to safety.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_07: If you didn't tell us that this wasn't 2024, that's a story very reminiscent to what happened last year, quite a bit.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um he won a couple of bravery awards for saving those people.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, others in the trailer park were not so fortunate.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: There were four other people, including two children, that perished.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think seven people from across the state died in flooding that year.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_07: And what waterway?
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_07: Do you know what waterway that was?
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: It just said it was in Skyland.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_07: When I think Skyland, the body of water I think about is Lake Julian.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_07: So that wouldn't apply to this, but the French Broad River, not that far from there, so could be the French Broad, but wouldn't need to be.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_07: As we saw during Helene, with enough rain, even a small stream or a creek can turn into a dangerous raging river.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_07: I mean, d anyone that drives along the Swananoa River on any given day, like right now, will look at it and say to themselves, how did that get so big and cause so much destruction?
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_07: It's almost hard to believe.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: I I think about that in North Asheville, you know, those little streams by Beaver Lake.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_07: So I've seen some um some videos that on like YouTube and some people, meteorologists have tried to explain it and then graphically done it why that happens here so much.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_07: It's because it's not flat.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_07: And that's exactly why it happens here, because it comes down from both mountains.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_07: So it'll come down from the east or the west or the north and the south, whatever way the river is flowing, and so it funnels right into it.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_07: So you're getting all of that water from both directions funneling into these creeks, streams, small rivers, and they just become massive, and then you know the destruction ensues.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Ross Powell Yeah.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I was reading articles about this flooding when I was doing this research, and they said it caused two million dollars or more of damage in 1973, which would be a lot more today.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Powell Yeah, I wonder what that would be today.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_07: I mean you can go ahead and multiply it times, I don't know, 10 or something or whatever, but uh but a lot of damage.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_07: And probably would have been more had it been today, because I'm sure whatever area that was wasn't as developed as the areas around our waterways have become because a lot of people like being around the water.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_07: And it's not usually the trailers that are near him now, it's some more expensive houses in some cases.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_07: Not all, of course.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_07: And so you said he did get some uh some awards, some life-saving awards for that?
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we we didn't have any departmental awards at the time for that, but the local FOP did acknowledge him for his bravery.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_07: What was his name again?
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: Porter Fowler.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_07: Okay.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_07: So Officer Porter Fowler, uh, we thank you for what you did back in what year?
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_07: 1970.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_07: I would have been five years old.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_07: You were not born yet, were you?
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was not.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_07: I didn't think so.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_07: I'm one of the older people in the building.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_07: I just it's okay.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_07: I'm fine with that.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_07: I'll wear it all right.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_07: All right, so this is now September.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_07: We have got a few months left.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_07: I know you're saving some of the really good stories for the upcoming months, so we look forward to hearing some more of those as we kind of wind down the the year of the 150th anniversary of the Asheville Police Department.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_07: Hannah Silberman, thank you again.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_07: Lieutenant Brian Hogan from the Community Engagement Division joins me now.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_07: Brian, welcome back.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_07: Hey Rick.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_07: Things coming up.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_07: Citizens Police Academy jumps right out at me as a a true success story since it came back, right?
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely, yeah.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_05: Tonight is the opening night for the fall session.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_05: And this is the first time we've actually had to turn people away.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_05: So we actually have a wait list started for the spring.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_05: Well, that's great then for 2026.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_07: Which is perfect for the spring then, because it gets you kind of jump started on the next one, knowing you're gonna have a few people already signed up.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_07: So if you were thinking about it for the spring, don't don't linger.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_07: You're gonna need to sign up once those things open up again, probably usually January, February is when we'll usually put those applications out, right?
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_07: That's right.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_07: All right, what else we got coming up?
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_05: So tonight at the Texas Roadhouse, 230 Hendersonville Road, it's a fundraiser for the Special Olympics of North Carolina.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_05: And we're doing what's called TIPA COP.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_05: So there'll be officers working with staff at Texas Roadhouse.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_05: And then if you let your server know that you want to help support the Special Olympics of North Carolina, 10% of your bill will go to the overall fundraising efforts.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_05: So officers will be there to help out staff in some capacity.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_05: Um if you appreciate their efforts, um you can uh throw in a tip and that money goes to help support the Special Olympics.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_07: Just make sure you tell our people they're helping the servers at all to not put their thumb in the soup when they're gonna be able to do that.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah, don't do that.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_07: That's that's bad.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_07: It's a probably a health violation.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_07: Depending on when you're listening to this, uh the date in question is the 18th.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_07: So this is when this podcast is going to land so people can hear this for the first time.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_07: But if you're listening some other day, you could still go to the Texas Roadhouse if you would like.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_07: Absolutely, yeah.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_07: We're not gonna stop you from going there because food is delicious.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_07: However, the event is the 18th from five to eight, raising money for the Special Olympics.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_07: One of several things we do with them during the year, including the actual Special Olympics with the athletes, that was a huge success this year as they expanded to two dates in two locations and a lot of fun, and we love participating in those.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_05: Absolutely.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_07: Great calls.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_07: So one of the things we've been doing on this episode is kind of looking back at Hurricane Helene, which occurred about this time last year.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_07: And a lot of people here at the department, yourself included, the roles kind of changed when that all occurred.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_07: So tell us what you did, because I I was kind of working with you a little bit, not with so much as gathering information from you when when people were arriving in town, but you worked with all these outside agencies that dropped what they were doing to come here and help us.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_05: Kind of funny story.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_05: The Saturday, so the storm hit what, Thursday night?
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, we were already getting rain for two days, Wednesday, Thursday, and I think it kind of officially rolled in on the 27th is the date they say.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_07: Aaron Powell Right.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_05: So that Saturday, day, I guess technically day one or day two of the storm, however you count it, uh was my first shift as a lieutenant, and I was also the day shift watch commander.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_05: So by the time I made it in, uh, which was uh shortly around like eleven o'clock, that I was able to come in, we started to discover that um a lot of assisting agencies were coming in to help support the police department.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_05: And we started out with a whiteboard in the downstairs room, and that evolved over the next couple months to a full-on operations center that was hosted here at the police department to gather in, order up, support, house, feed, and then staff the various security posts throughout the city that needed extra police security because that allowed us to free up our officers to handle normal business and then also go home and rest and handle their personal lives too from working all day.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_07: So I remember that operation.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_07: So it the check-in area moved up to the third floor, right.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_07: Looking back at all those experiences you had with people checking in, you met all of them, you kept in touch with all of them.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_07: Are there a few characters, a few individuals, a few departments that stand out?
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_05: Uh yeah, absolutely.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_05: I it would be remiss of me not to throw a shout out to the state agencies.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_05: So, like North Carolina ALE, probation and parole, North Carolina Parks, those law enforcement officers were like the first to react.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_05: And they were within the city limits of Asheville like that weekend with teams ready to go out and help us.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_05: So by Sunday, so I came in Saturday, by Sunday we had over a hundred different officers already inside the city limits of Asheville assisting the police department and the citizens of Asheville with security operations.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_05: Ocean City Police Department, if they're listening, thank you.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_05: Uh it was two guys.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_05: They came up and they drove across the state.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_05: They brought everything they needed.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_05: All they needed was a job.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_05: They said just tell me where to go and I'll help you out.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_05: And we'll work as many hours as we need to work.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_05: Um we offer them hotel rooms and they had cots, they didn't want that.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_05: They slept in their car, didn't they?
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, they slept in their car, they had cots.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_05: Those two guys were just absolutely fabulous.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_05: You couldn't work them enough.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_05: And they never had any complaints.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_05: And uh it was just a token of the level of service and dedication that those officers have to help out um somebody else.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_05: Because they go through that same situation a lot.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_05: And so they know what we were going through.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_05: We didn't know it at the time.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_05: Um it was all new to us, but just e every morning they came in with a smile on their face, hadn't had a bath, hadn't had a shower, dirty clothes, and they just looked for some uh for a way to help.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_05: So I appreciate them.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_05: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_07: Of anybody that could relate to what we were going through, it was them.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_07: Storm damage is something that they deal with all the time.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_07: I'm sure they're like, listen, we know what's going on.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_07: We can certainly help these guys with some insight, and they were just invaluable.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, absolutely.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_05: Um probation and parole.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_05: So in total, I think from day one of the hurricane essentially to December 31st, was when we primarily shut down our outside law enforcement agencies coming in.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_05: So we had six hundred and twenty-six different officers come.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_05: Most of them were from North Carolina.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_05: We had 21 troopers from Mississippi Highway Patrol.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_05: Those guys were great.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_05: Fantastic group.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_05: Stayed here for three weeks.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_05: So of the agencies represented, there were 52 different law enforcement agencies represented in that 626.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_05: October 2nd, so this is less than a weekend, we had 206 inside the city working for us.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_05: Wow.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_05: That one day we had we were operating out of like 43 different security posts that we had to staff throughout the city in the floodplain.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_05: Um we also, big shout out to the Radical Hotel and the Hampton Inn, who offered up their facilities to allow officers to come and actually have a bed to lay down in after depending on when we were there.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_05: Um we started out at the Radical with limited generator power and that evolved.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_05: But basically they allowed us to come in and it was a place for somebody who'd worked a twelve, fourteen hour shift to come in and sleep in a bed, which is a lot, you know.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_05: They might not have a shower, but if you have a bed to sleep in, that that says a lot.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_05: Um and then also the Hampton Inn allowed us like two or three floors of rooms to come in and get some rest and recover and then go right back out the next day for these officers to coming in.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_07: And I remember uh so many people wanted to help the recovery, the rescue efforts, all what was going on.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_07: Restaurants that were just coming wanting to feed us all of those donations.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_07: Because in addition to putting these guys in beds, you gotta feed them.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_07: Right.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_07: And so we had a whole operation going on there, too.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_07: And I remember each day I would come in, and honestly, here at this building, we were a little spoiled with the great food that was being given to us on a daily basis.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_07: We had food trucks pulling out back, pizza trucks.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_07: I I mean that was pretty amazing.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_05: If you weren't careful, it was easy to gain weight during that period of time.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_05: I'm telling you.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I felt kind of bad, but yeah, there was never a lack of food.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_07: But you know, but you know, it's people want to help is the uh one of the things that I think we all learned.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_07: Of all the destruction and unfortunately death that occurred during this, the community did come together, and people from outside the community helped us come together.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_07: It was kind of wonderful to experience that.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's actually it's wonderful and it's mind-boggling how many resources can be gathered and shipped and fed into a certain area pretty rapidly.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's one of the I guess the beauties of living in an America.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_05: Not many countries can say that, but we can certainly it might take twenty-four or forty-eight hours, but we're gonna get some food and water to you.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_05: Definitely.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_07: And you know, there were some communities that unbeknownst to us when it was occurring, they were doing fundraising efforts on our behalf, right?
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_07: And so then they would just show up with like a check or with food or a trailer load of stuff.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I remember the guys from uh Kentucky, I think it was one time.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_07: That they came down with presented a huge check from from their fraternal order of police up there and from their organization, food, water, cash.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_07: Yep.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_07: It it was just overwhelming almost.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_07: We can't, if any of those agencies are listening right now, thank all of them.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_07: It would take the rest of the day.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_07: Right.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_07: Because as you mentioned, those numbers, it was just so impressive.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_07: But to everyone collectively, thank you so much for stepping up.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_07: And here we are a year later and still recovering.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_07: And I think experiencing what we did then, it gave you hope at the time.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_05: Aaron Powell Absolut.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it was nice to to meet the faces, and hopefully we'll be able to return the favor.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_05: I don't want to miss you know, like wish ill will on anybody, but we're airmarking.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_05: Natural disasters do happen and bad things do happen.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_05: So please uh hopefully we'll be there to help you.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_05: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_07: In a in a previous episode, uh Deputy Chief Sean Artama had mentioned the relationships built in the past and with Chief Lamb and it's others kind of really kind of was the Kickstarter for all of that, they think.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_07: It's just that we had built so many great relationships that that's why the response was so quick and so swift.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_07: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_05: Started out with uh once phone calls and texts could get out, it was just, hey, we need some help.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_05: And that that's where you got the initial response from so many people.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_05: So yeah, within day three you had a additional hundred people inside the the city to help out.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_05: That's that's fast.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_07: That's really good and fast.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_07: Do you do you hear from any of those guys ever again, Jim?
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, once in a while.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, still hear from uh Major Major Bain over there in Mississippi once in a while and reach out.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_05: I think he's close to retirement now, maybe, but uh yeah, great, great people.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_07: I I remember meeting him uh outside of the building one day, and if anyone out there just has a mental image of what a Mississippi State Highway Patrol officer would look like and talk like and act like, it's him.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_05: And there was 21 of them.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_05: And they were all just every one of them was a character, but it's super nice, super helpful, very proud, very dedicated.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_07: Um They busted some looters in Biltmore Village.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_07: Quite a few looters.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_07: They made some arrests while they were name for themselves.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_07: They're always welcome back.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_07: Yes, they did.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_07: Absolutely.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_07: The day they left, we missed them already.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_07: Yep.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_07: So thank you to all those outside LEOs that assisted during Hurricane Helene.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_07: You'll never be forgotten.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_07: Lieutenant Brian Hogan, thank you for joining me.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_07: Thanks, Rick.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_07: That's it for this episode of the APD Pod Squad, a very special Hurricane Helene one-year anniversary edition.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you to my guests, senior police officers Bo Bailey, Jose Amaya, and William Woods, and detectives Sam DeGrave, Albert Ball, and Phil Allen.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_07: Thank you for telling your stories.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_07: Hannah Silberman with the History Minute, and Lieutenant Brian Hogan as well.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_07: And thank you for listening.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_07: If there's something you'd like to hear discussed, call 828-250-8800 and leave a voicemail.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_07: If you have a specific question for Chief Lamb, you're running out of time.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_07: He's retiring at the end of the year.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_07: So call now 828-250-8800 and leave a voicemail.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_07: That's 828-250-8800.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_07: Or you can email APD Podcastfeedback at AshevilleNC.gov.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_07: I'm Rick Rice, and this is the APD Pod Squad.