Not The Press
At Not The Press, we embody a fearless and irreverent American spirit, boldly challenging the status quo and dishonesty of mainstream media, greedy politicians, and rich elitists. With humor, wit, open discussion and a touch of rebellion through conversation, we offer a unique perspective on a wide variety of topics that matter to everyday people. Not The Press champions authenticity, independence, freedom of speech, the right to disagree and ask questions, and a willingness to explore the conventional and unconventional. We believe holding the line to these principles will make a refreshing and engaging platform for those seeking a breath of fresh air in a media landscape dominated by agendas.
Not The Press
Guest Adam Smith - Inside the Chaos of Hurricane Helene - Part 1
Adam Smith's journey through the chaos left by Hurricane Helene is nothing short of heroic. We're thrilled to have him on our episode, sharing his experiences navigating the storm's devastating aftermath in North Carolina. Adam's firsthand insights reveal the stark realities of disaster response while exposing the challenges local communities face when federal agencies, like FEMA, impose bureaucratic hurdles. His story is a testament to the power of community-driven efforts and the resilience of those who stand against overwhelming odds.
Step into the heart-pounding narrative of a father's race against time to save his family, a tale that captures the raw urgency and emotional depth of those critical hours. An 18-hour drive from Texas to North Carolina, breaking every rule to save his loved ones, paints a vivid picture of human determination. With no communication for nearly 36 hours, miracles unfold as unexpected help arrives, leading to an emotional reunion that underscores the lengths individuals will go to protect their families.
As the storm's fury subsides, the spotlight shifts to the remarkable collaboration between special operations and intelligence communities. Witness the extraordinary coordination that secured controlled airspace amidst chaos and the innovative use of technology to bridge communication gaps. The episode closes with a candid discussion on FEMA's inefficiencies, budget mismanagement, and the pressing need for reform. Through it all, we emphasize that true transformation requires unwavering consistency and community support, key to driving meaningful change in disaster response.
All right, here we are again, not the press, and we have a? Uh ridiculous character with us. His name is Adam Smith. I'm just joking, no, um, adam, welcome to not the press. Thanks for coming on. Um, your story is bad-ass with stuff that's happened in North Carolina, uh, with hurricane Helene. I have lots of questions, Um, but I'm, I'm, we're all honored that you're here. Uh, you guys made the trip up here. We know you're even busy, um, but thanks for being here, man, and I know Josh has a lot of questions for you too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, most definitely Welcome. Happy to have you. I'm the co-host on here. We're extremely excited and honored to have you. We think what you're doing is amazing and it's real admirable, honorable and just loyalty to not only your land but the people you love.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that. Yeah, thanks for having me, yeah man. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah man, yeah. So how was the trip coming up here? Long it wasn't so bad though. The closer you get to DC, the worse the drivers get. You know like you definitively know how close you are getting to the DC metro area, because the closer you get, the worse the drivers are. People just start cutting you off.
Speaker 1:They don't really care. There's literally zero fucks given by. What's the time. What the fuck is that? Have you ever? Have you ever driven through annandale? Uh, no, I haven't. Oh, man, I might have, I don't know. It's all little korean ladies, old korean ladies, driving around and it's like they're all doing 10 miles under the speed limit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, All right.
Speaker 1:So, hey, man, I want to kick this off, cause we do have an event tonight that, uh, is for you and your um, the funds you you're raising, all the great work you're doing down in North Carolina. So let's start this question off first. Um, first of all, tell us your story of what happened when that hurricane happened, the reason why you went to North Carolina and what, what was going on with that whole thing. Well, let me start off by saying, excuse me, let me start by saying thank you, like to both of you guys, thanks for having us here, Thanks for bringing us up, thanks for hosting the fundraiser, thanks for putting it together. You know, the fact that we're even having this conversation now means, I think, more than it could have meant eight weeks ago or nine weeks ago. Eight or nine weeks ago it was the talk of the town, right, national media, press coverage everywhere, live interviews on Fox News, the whole nine yards. The country knew what was going on in Western North Carolina and over the last I mean, in reality, probably at the end of the first week, moving into the second week national media coverage dwindled significantly because it was a black eye on the current administration, especially on Vice President Harris's current campaign. It was a true and legitimate black eye. And the first media coverage and the question that was asked to me in the very beginning was you know what's your opinion on FEMA's response? And my, the very first word out of my mouth was incompetent. And that was the first. That was the first national, nationally aired news interview. I mean, what was your, what's your reasoning for? I mean cause. Here's the deal, adam. I know that people are suffering, they have been suffering and the whole thing was a disaster down there. But when you see social media, you see all kinds of stuff coming out. And then you, you hear all these assholes, conspiracy theory, this conspiracy theory, that what is the truth? What did FEMA do? Or what did they not do? I mean what? What did FEMA do? Fema performed exactly as FEMA always performs. They show up late to the game, they get in the way, they say that you're not qualified or certified to do X, y or Z.
Speaker 1:Fema in general has kind of positioned itself or not positioned itself. It's been structured to be the head of the NIMS system, so the National Emergency Management System, as well as ICS, which is the Incident Command System. The ICS process of command is, when a national disaster happens or a major disaster happens, there's a command structure that immediately takes place from the state level down to the county level. That helps to direct effort and FEMA's kind of positioned itself as the head of NIMS in the region. So each region is, the country is broken down into regions, each region has a special team, a FEMA special team that operates inside that region and then the senior leadership of the FEMA special team are kind of the head of the NIMS for that region. On a natural disaster They've always been the ones that have come in and taken over. Right, well, we're in charge. Now we're going to direct effort and action.
Speaker 1:What they found in this instance was that we had already invented a wheel and the wheel didn't have to be reinvented. And if FEMA wanted to come in and take over the operation or the National Guard wanted to come in and take over the operation, they would have not only reinvented the wheel, they would have put us back two, three weeks easy and setting back the operation regionally in a significant manner. And that was one of the biggest pushbacks that we had in the whole process, the conversation that I had with senior county officials, with senior personnel, with emergency management. So the directors of emergency management in the counties that were around the region, including senior leadership at FEMA, was don't come in and attempt to take over. As soon as you do that, it will disrupt the effort on the ground and what has been created will fall apart because you'll want to reinvent the wheel. Don't reinvent the wheel. We've already got it invented. We already have hundreds of special operators in the region right now that own this land. They own it. They claim this land as their own because it's connected to them. It's connected to their homes. This is where their family lives. We already have it in place. It's already there. We're already doing it.
Speaker 1:We've already taken the same model that we use in the United States Army Special Forces and we've applied it real time on the ground for life-saving efforts rather than life-taking efforts. And we did it, which is centralized command, decentralized control, rather than trying to have this one to five command echelon or command structure that ICS or NIMS uses. We have the ability to go. What's your skill set? What gap can you? What value do you provide? What gap can you fill? Cool, this is what the intent is. Here's our big picture. This is what we're working at achieving. How do you fit into that picture? And then that individual, who's already a professional, doesn't have to receive micromanagement. They know exactly what they have to do in order to fill the gap and in order to take their skill sets and apply it real time. And that's what we did on the ground. Yeah, and you were saying reinvent the wheel. But how long was that wheel built for before FEMA even got there? Oh, look man. Well, that's to answer your first question.
Speaker 1:Taylor and I she's my fiance we were down in Texas, in Austin, for a for-profit business conference for her company. And Thursday night what day was that? Was that the 26th? I'll have to go back and look at the dates. So Thursday night this is just before the storm hits or the storm's pushing in that Thursday night. So this would have been September, I think 26th.
Speaker 1:Right, we lose contact with my daughter and her mom, and my daughter and her mom live right next door to Taylor and I on highway nine, on the South portion of black mountain, right in the middle of the mountains, right along the broad river. Her house is about 30 or 40 yards off the Broad River. Our house is about 80 yards off the Broad River or so, and the Broad River is the river that washed out Bat Cave and Chimney Rock like washed them off the face of the earth, wow. And so we lost contact. We had no tech service, we couldn't make any phone calls. Thursday night, friday morning, we woke up, and we woke up early because we had to get from Austin to Dallas to go speak at a nonprofit called the Texas Valor Project. Now the Texas Valor Project and Coast to Coast and Defenders of Freedom are on nonprofits that work together to send veterans to traumatic brain injury treatment, and so December of last year they sent me and I love those guys. They're all amazing, they're just spectacular human beings and they're doing such great work for veterans all over the country and we want to support them. So this would have been the third year that I got to speak at the Texas Valor Project and it was going to be an awesome chance to see these guys and have the attendees go through the journey Right.
Speaker 1:So Friday morning which I think would have been the 27th we had no comms and we couldn't make any communications and we couldn't get in touch with any of the family members, and so we were driving from Austin to Dallas and it got to be about, you know, 8.30, 9 o'clock central time, and we still had no communication. And I finally got a text from Megan's brother-in-law my former brother-in-law and he sent me a text and it came through as a text, not an iMessage, which means there's no internet connectivity, and he said the roads are still flooded. I don't think we're going to be able to get back there, but we haven't heard from Megan and Toby. Wow. And so we got to Dallas. We stopped at a nonprofit. We told them we're not them, we can't stay, we got to go. Yeah, that's right. And so we turned and burned and we broke every law.
Speaker 1:From Dallas, texas, to Asheville, north Carolina, over the next 18-hour period, we passed on shoulders, I kept it floored, we stayed at 96 miles an hour unless the traffic got in the way and we had to slow down. We stopped for gas, we stopped for a chainsaw, we stopped for chainsaw fuel and we finally got into the area at about three o'clock in the morning, saturday morning, which I think would have been the 28th, and we tried to cut our way in and every road that we went into it was blocked, trees were down, roads were completely washed out, freaking mudslides everywhere. And before we got there there like 1 am I looked at taylor and I said you know, I think they're probably dead, like nobody can get in 5, 30 or so. That night prior I got a phone call from a good friend of mine, jamie white.
Speaker 1:Jamie's a phenomenal human being, jamie um, his family was in danger and after the storm subdued settled, he couldn't get his family out of the mountains, but they were okay in the house that they were in at the time. So he's a firefighter. He packed up and he just took off and he went to start helping and he climbed to the top of a mountain and he got a bunch of text messages from me hey, what, what's house? Broad river area, this is where Toby and Megan live, what's the word? And he called me and he said it's really bad, everyone's cut off, the mountains are cut off. I can't get to them. It's really bad, you have to get here. And uh, we tried to get in, couldn't get in.
Speaker 1:That all day Friday we sent out text messages, facebook messages, text messages. We're going to need help. We can't get in. The only way we're going to be able to get to my family is if we have a helicopter. So do I know somebody who knows somebody, who knows somebody that'd be willing to fly me and I can get my daughter and her mom out from the mountains if it's possible? And at this point you didn't even know if they were alive.
Speaker 1:At this point we didn't't know, we had no comms with them. You know we were sitting all day friday by. You know, by friday at 10 pm it had been 24 hours of no comms and by the time we got there it was really close to to being right at 36 hours. When we landed on the ground, it was really close to 36 hours of no communications. Um, and by the grace of god providential is the only way I can say it Everything that has happened from the moment we left Texas to right now being here with you has been providential. Somebody reached out, a friend of a friend. He had a helicopter. He met us at the Harley Davidson dealership Saturday morning at like 9, 915. He landed, we loaded up, he and I flew out, we landed and they were perfect.
Speaker 2:That's a blessing, though it's a blessing, and that that's gotta be fucking stressful as shit, as you know. You gotta keep going because you gotta make it to where it's your baby, the the.
Speaker 1:It stopped being about rescuing them and it just started being about, you know, I. I have to make certain that I can recover them, like I, I just assumed that they were dead. Like we, we got to make sure that we can recover them. Like I can't let. I can't, let you know, I, I gotta one, no matter what. I gotta find my baby girl and I gotta find her mom, no matter what, like that. That's, that's now the mission, and they just accepted it. Well, you have to function. Yeah, so I think it was easier to not have hope that they were alive and accept the worst case scenario. And then, when we landed, to see them both alive and to see my little girl just running up yelling at me why are you flying on an airplane, you know, like that's the, that was the, that was probably the. That was probably the greatest piece of all this was that, that was the, that was, that was, that was probably miracle number three, maybe miracle number four.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, I mean, god, I can't. I'm just, I'm just trying to put myself in your position. I can't even. I don't even know. I know that I, I would like to think that I would be unstoppable, like you to to go and get my son and carry? I'd like to think that. But until that situation arrives, I mean, uh, it's, it's pretty incredible. It's pretty incredible because you know what, if, if you didn't do that and they were there for an extra day or something, you don't know what could happen. You don't know, you don't know. I mean, maybe they tried to get out themselves and they you know what I mean. Well, she even said after the fact, when, when we flew, she was talking to Taylor and she said to Taylor she said, well, I was planning on packing up and trying to walk out. Well, you could have tried, but it would have taken days with a little kid, like with a three-year-old and a dog, and carrying all your shit on your back If you were taking it and it wouldn't, it wasn't eight miles, eight and a half miles, but you had.
Speaker 1:When I say roads were washed out, I mean roads were gone. Yeah Right, they were gone. They were no longer existent. There was, there was mudslides that had slid down the mountain, that covered up three switchbacks and knocked the road out, and then, where it landed and stopped, it was, you know, it was 30, 40 feet deep and 50 yards wide on the road there's.
Speaker 1:You know, on the, uh, on the phone, you were telling me, um, how big the, the devastated area actually was. Oh, can you describe that a little bit? Yeah, this wasn't. Uh, you know, you hear about towns. You hear about Swannanoa, you hear about Asheville. You hear about swannanoa, you hear about asheville. You hear about towns, right, chimney, rock, spruce, pine, bat cave, burnsville. Uh, elk, um, um, what is elk creek? Like, you hear about these towns relief. People don't realize that we're talking about a 200 mile radius. Jeez, like.
Speaker 1:It's not like localized destruction. It's not like you drive down the street of one town and one town was devastated. You're, a hundred thousand homes were damaged or destroyed, a hundred thousand homes, six thousand miles of roads, 41 trillion gallons of water fell in 24 hours. The, the reservoir went 18 feet over flood level. Holy shit, that's how high is flood, flood level. I don't even know what flood level is. I just know that if you can imagine one reservoir, something like 318,000 gallons of water in one foot of depth, so one foot of depth is like 318,000 gallons of water, and it was at 22 feet above flood level, and that's on one acre. So one acre at one foot is 318 000 gallons, and that thing is like that. That particular reservoir is, I don't know, like 300 something or 400 something. Acres, yeah, of reservoir, millions and millions and millions of gallons of water flooded the lowlands. More like they called it. It's now called a geological event because more, millions of pounds of earth moved, rivers redirected themselves, rivers changed paths.
Speaker 1:It's so hard to describe and I don't want to be dramatic about it because I hate all the drama on social media where we're in dire need or we're in desperate need, or there was you know what we were there was a desperate need for supplies and effort and and there was a dire need for, for help and support. There was and there was a dire need for rescue operations 100 and FEMA fucking failed every, every path. But I don't want to sound dramatic. I do want to say the fact of the matter is is that it's really hard for the human brain to fathom the extent, yeah, of destruction, the amount of earth, the amount of water, just in general, that happened, that moved, that fell in that 24-hour period. It's, it's you. You can't be dramatic because it is in of itself Drama. Yeah, you know there's a guy you're going to meet tonight. His name's Richard, um, his friend from here in Leesburg went down there a couple of weeks ago to to help. He brought supplies or whatever, and he is now coming here for supply. Like he, he, he described the devastation to Richard I'm hearing this third hand from Richard but that it is so tremendous there.
Speaker 1:No national media source even came close to describe me what actually happened there. No, because the devastation is just absolutely out of this. It's more than a war zone. Oh, yeah, in a shorter period of time. Yeah me what actually happened there. No, because the devastation is just absolutely out of this. It's. It's more than a war zone. Oh, yeah, and um, in a shorter period of time. Yeah, the.
Speaker 1:The only thing that I could attribute this to is if you took a, um, if you, you seem like the, the curved scrapers, like an ice scraper, but it's curved, and you kind of hook it through the bottom of a bucket or something and scrape out whatever's in the bottom of the bucket, yeah, yeah, if you could imagine doing that through every river valley where that scraper came through and just scraped everything down the river valley because the amount of water and the amount of force, the amount of pressure that came through there. That's, that's what it's akin to. It's like. It's like it's like they carpet bombed every river valley.
Speaker 1:Well, look man, I, I can tell just by the you know you describing this and you know your, your, your passion for what happened. And I mean you were, you were a special forces guy, you've seen combat, you've been in war, you've been in some bad places, um, but I guarantee you, you probably don't have the same passion talking about those places as what you just did. And to me, being in the, you know, from a kind of the same circle, um, I could definitely recognize that that it wasn't recognized there. I can recognize that from, from just talking with you, and you know, uh, I don't even know you that well, I just know you're a good dude from Brie and you know, just the last couple of times we've talked on the phone and stuff, but, um, you know I, I know you're, you're genuine, and you know I can tell that this is, uh, this is something.
Speaker 1:The magnitude of this is just ginormous, it is, and people just don't really, uh, americans, uh, will always get behind something if they know about it. I think is that the thing is is like the media tends to make everyone forget about you. Um, yeah, and you'll see that tonight, like there, there are people that wanted to come, or you know, cause it's on a Tuesday night, right, um, but they, they have absolutely came up and talked with Josh and I and said, hey, you know what? This is awesome, you guys are doing this. You know, they wanted to come meet you, um, and there's going to be people that are there tonight. There's people that I haven't talked to for a long time, that aren't even a part of the club, that are going to be there tonight because they believe strongly that. You know what we shouldn't be forgetting, like this is not the time we cannot let the news cycle and everything else forget about these people. Right now is when their struggle is going to start.
Speaker 1:You know, I mean mean rebuilding is one of the biggest things. It's it that's where you need the most help. After, after recovery effort. It's the hardest part, it is absolutely and it's the longest part. Yeah, yeah, um, and I'm glad there's people like you down there doing it. Man, it's, uh, it's pretty badass. Well, I, I, I'm, I won't take any responsibility for it, I'm just a fellow that rolled around in a big old pile of shit and it stuck to me and people just came out of the woodworks because they either smelled it or they wanted to roll around in it too. You ain't going to put it on me. We've had over 26, 2700 volunteers come through just our location, just our location, like probably three and a half, four, four and a half, 5 million pounds of supplies that have come through our location that we've received. Dude, the things that I was seeing on social media from like um, like the, the socom, different chat things and different groups, was amazing to me. Yeah, just everyone just coming like specifically within special operations. Yeah, yeah, yeah, specifically like everyone's, just like hey, man, I man, I'm on my way. Yeah, I got these skills, oh, where do I go? Boom, boom, boom.
Speaker 1:By Wednesday, thursday, the first week, we had 80, 75 to 90 special operators, special operators Right From every tier, from every unit in the United States special operations community, from every intelligence agency. Everybody took time off, they took leave, they took vacation, whatever they had to do. Guys were in retirement, they came out of retirement, I mean, you name it. We had guys. We had we had dudes from tier one, elements from brag. We had dudes from tier one, elements from Northern Virginia. We had white side soft as green berets and Navy seals. We had Marsock. That was on site. We had MARSOC that was on site.
Speaker 1:We had guys on leave from active duty that took their own personal leave time to come out and support and be of assistance. I mean, you name it, we had them there. And then we had with us co-looking. We had National Guard. We had a National Guard liaison. By day three, the National Guard liaison, he self deployed from the National Guard and was like I heard our commander said you probably could use some help. I came out to see if you could use some help. We were like we could. We could use your air assets. What do you have? And by the time we got into it by like day 10, we had a Mike Coriel who's a chief electrical engineer for SpaceX. He was there with us. We had a hundred and on average about 115 to 125 volunteers on the ground at any one time.
Speaker 1:We had, um, the FAA wrote a freaking note on dude. This is crazy shit. So the FAA wrote a note on declaring our HLZ designated controlled airspace. That was ours to control Dude, that awesome dude. Look, josh, you know I mean the magnitude.
Speaker 1:Okay, let me, let me put it this way. Let me I'm gonna put it in perspective in a war zone, to have any type of air right to control airspace. Yeah, in a war zone, you would think I mean it is pretty easy, but it's also pretty hard. And same thought, right it. It takes a lot of moving parts to make something like that happen. To have that happen here in the States is fucking phenomenal. Man, like someone at the FAA, had their head. They were. I guarantee they were probably military or something. They were. Fucking guarantee it they were. We talked to him on the phone. Yeah, yeah, because there's no way that. I mean that guy had his head screwed on straight. A woman had their head screwed on straight. Man, it just happened. Yeah, man, no, that is a tremendous thing for that to happen. I mean, we had a day when we had 102 unique airframes touched down on our airfield.
Speaker 1:Wow In one day that was not even in a 24-hour period, that was from like lights. We had, I don't know. Sunrise was like 8, I don't know 07, 07, 15. And then we had, you know, clouds had cooked off at that point by like 8, 15. And we were running birds by 8, 30. And between the birds that we were running on site, plus the birds that landed on our location, 102 unique airframes.
Speaker 1:So did you guys have like your own airboss, like a rotating thing of air bosses? Yeah, we said yeah, we had our own air boss. We coordinated with the county air boss. Um, the crazy part was, early on, we, we made contact with um, the county air boss. You talk about a really, really awesome, awesome human being, phenomenal human being. This guy is just. I mean, he's a, he's a man of god, he's a family man man. He's humble in his approach. He recognized what assets he had and what he didn't have.
Speaker 1:Then he got a note from somebody and it was Adam helicopter guy. Harley Davidson, call him. That was the note he got and he called me and it was a close of business Monday night. It says Monday night, three days after the storm had passed and we were shutting down the operations for the night, because he couldn't fly at night. And he called me. He said hey, dude, like my name's Christian. And I was like what's up, dude, my name's Adam.
Speaker 1:He's like, somebody gave me your number, I'm the air boss for the EOC. And I went that's awesome, man. What can I do to be a service? How can we help you? And he said look, I don't have the assets that I need to be able to do what you guys are doing. If I get something on the line and I don't think I can cover it, can I send it to you? And I was like no problem, and he went, he went.
Speaker 1:The first problem I have right now is I don't have any oxygen tanks for my ambulances. We've used all of them and we don't have a place to get them refilled because there's no power. No power there's. So we're operating off of generators, off of star links. There's no cell communications, there's no internet except for star links and there is no power from the grid. Everything, everything is generator powered. Everything, everything internet wise or cell phones connectivity wise, is all done off of starlink, everything. And so he, he, we made the phone call.
Speaker 1:Actually, what was even more interesting was that he made the phone call and um, and then, uh, the next day he sent me a radio so that we could have comms. By the mid of the fourth day, we were able to get a couple of viper repeaters up and running, wow. And so they were able to get power to the Viper repeaters, which is what emergency management runs off of. And um, I want to say it was probably day four and he sent me a radio, so we had direct line of communications. And so that first night he was like hey, I, we don't have any O2 tanks, we don't have any oxygen tanks.
Speaker 1:And it could have been that Monday or could have been Tuesday, like, been a whirlwind, my dates are not going to be 100 on, yeah, and I went okay, well, let's see what we can do. Then we put it out to the team and the team started making phone calls and literally within 24 hours, we had 182 oxygen tanks show up and we deployed those oxygen tanks to the county and we refit every one of their ambulances, we refit their medical centers, we refit their, like you name it. We had an awesome oh, and it was. But it was like dude, you, god, man, that is america. Oh, you know what I'm saying? It is god, it's god, it's, yeah, that's all that too. It's, it's, it's all god.
Speaker 1:And I gotta tell you the vast majority of american people have it in them to do stuff like that. They do. Oh, 100 it is. But how do you? How do you?
Speaker 1:The question that I have is how do you go from a black hole of communication and things miraculously show up? Not, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I can tell you this definitively we, we had a bird on the tarmac. We had to go do um. We had a medical emergency that we were given support to, and it was a diabetic emergency and the lady had no insulin and she she was, her blood sugar was dropping out and she had to get evacuated off the mountain. Well, how did we get this information? Starlinks and generators, starlinks and generators. And so we got the information.
Speaker 1:We're spinning a bird up and we had run out of insulin night, the night before. So we didn't have any insulin, we didn't have any glucagon, we didn't have any test strips and, as the bird is getting ready to take off with our medic, um, who I think was a PJ, um, I'm like, I'm like, dude, we really need insulin. And another guy was like we really need insulin, somebody else has said we really need insulin. And a van pulled up to the front gate of the Harley Um and the gate. The access control guy was like hey man, like what can we do for you? And he's like how can I be of service? Do you guys need anything? He goes yeah, we need insulin. He goes, hold on a second, he reaches behind himself in the van and he pulls out a cooler full of insulin on test strips. Right then, right there on on the spot, holy shit, dude. And the access control guy gets the cooler and runs it to the helicopter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and it was like that every time we needed it and had just shown up 15 minutes before we needed it or had shown up 15 minutes after we needed it, right then and it would show up right then. It was like a freaking time warp on the ground. It was, it was. I didn't. That's surreal, man. I I never experienced anything like in my life. Yeah, but I and so, um, we need to get to josh real quick because, josh, I know you've got some good questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I definitely got a couple, two of what I think is good questions. Hopefully I don't fuck this up.
Speaker 1:I ain't going to fuck it up.
Speaker 2:You can't mess this one up, dude Shit. I mean she was just telling me honey, get back to the fucking mic. No, so, being that, like you were, you dedicated a lot of your life to this country to protect the country, going to other countries to do things, and you spent all this time as a Green Beret and stuff like that, right and all these things work, and then some shit like this happens and FEMA just kind of fucks everybody.
Speaker 1:Like how does that make you look at that section of the government? It makes me look at that section of the government. The same way I've always looked at them Okay, worthless. They are worthless, they are worthless. Look man, fema. In the first 10 days of the new fiscal year, fema came out and did a news presser that said we've used 50% of our budget. They have an $18 billion with a B billion-dollar budget per annum, and at the first 10 days of the new fiscal year, they said they used up 50% of it For what? Well then, they said this happens every year. Well then, we start digging into where they're using it for. And they're using it to provide funding to illegal immigrants that are illegally crossing the borders of the United.
Speaker 1:States, not even citizens, not even citizens, not even American citizens. And we know this, it's fact-based, it's not conspiracy theory, it's been proven, we know that. This is the fact. They even said it. They said it outright, outright. So when you look at things like that and then you hear them say, well, we're going to have to reduce spending, and then you look at the camps that they built in order to house their relief workers, which are powered, they have heated bathrooms and shower stalls and trailers. They have heated and powered sleeping facilities. They have a dining facility completely set up like a forward operating base that we would have overseas in a combat zone, and they're housing, rather than housing the 700 people or a thousand people they could house, they have 225 people they're housing and they're all contracted FEMA workers on the ground. Not one North Carolinian citizen, not one American resident living in any one of those fucking trailers, because they're all relief workers.
Speaker 1:So what do they do? They say here here are some hotel vouchers. We're going to give you hotel vouchers so you can go sleep in hotels. We're going to give you a 30-day voucher. Most, you can go sleep in hotels. We're going to give you a 30-day voucher. Most people begin vouchers until the beginning of November, which means that their vouchers were up 30 days later, december 2nd, december 3rd, december 5th and December 6th is the window, right now, when a majority of those vouchers are going to be up, and that also doesn't automatically mean if they don't have a home to go to, that FEMA is going to update that voucher automatically. They have to go through a re-approval process, a re-application process. Fema even says the 30-day voucher is designed for you to find a more permanent living solution.
Speaker 1:Here's the fucking problem. You have people that own property. They have mortgages on these pieces of property, they own this land, their homes have been destroyed and earmarked funding that is supposed to go back to American citizens and populace is getting redirected into supporting the illegal immigration of persons from foreign entities that have no interest in the betterment of the human condition in the United States of America. It's a blank check. And it's a blank check, you guys, motherfuckers. So to answer your question very like as direct as humanly possible, it is a travesty to the American experiment that the bureaucratic process has become one of self-justification and a constant we'll just say mutual masturbation of existence, because one agency rubs off the other agency in order for them to justify their existence, and there is a constant tit for tat game being played by all of these bureaucratic agencies and FEMA's existence.
Speaker 1:Do we need FEMA? Sure, we can use a FEMA. We can use a federal emergency management agency, one that understands the premise of how to manage funds, one that has a holding bucket of money so that, in a disaster, we can redirect that money in a more effective manner. And also, do we need a fema that does what it does right now? The answer would be conclusively fuck no. Yeah, fuck no, because it's turned into an insurance agency. There's a political agenda, obviously, obviously, I mean and text messages that don't go to people's homes that have Trump signs.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, even with the, with the. So look, I, I, I love the fact that we are a country full of legal fired up, legal immigrants. Yeah, but dude. That's the answer. That's the answer that people need to hear from someone that's been on the ground.
Speaker 1:Here's, here's. I said this to a Senator the other day, guy, and I got to tell you this, and to you too, josh. I said this to a senator the other day. I said I just have a question what sort of culture of leadership, what sort of culture of operational culture do we have inside an agency where someone thinks it's acceptable to send a text message and a series of instructions that says avoid homes with Trump signs? Moreover, senior FEMA leadership had a conversation with me face-to-face, good, and they were not bad people, they were good people. They wanted to quote help people, help people. And after our conversation, they said hey, we want to help you, help people. We're having a hard time doing it. Our interactions, we can't have our fingerprints on it.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Damn Exactly. Wow, what, why, why would? Why would personnel, senior personnel, representing an agency designed to provide disaster relief and recovery efforts? Why would they say they can't have their fingerprints on it? Was it because we as an organization were so outspoken against FEMA from the get-go? Or was it because we have conservative standards or conservative traits, because we pray in the morning and we pray at night before we go operational, and then, at the end of the day, to say thanks at the end of the operation, like? Is that the reason? Is the reason because there's a different agenda that's being pushed by the current administration and by powers that be inside of the bureaucracy that don't want to see certain things?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I just asked the question because I don't know what the fucking answer is. I do know what the actions on the ground look like, and the actions on the ground do not represent an organization who is designed to provide disaster relief and recovery. Nope, and I think that's a pretty damn good answer. You'll be fired up, josh. Hey, josh, pull another one of those ones out, man. One more, pull another one.
Speaker 2:Nah, tell them there's a jam out there. I know I'm about to roll in a second, so my other question is when let's say, right, you were talking about it was eight miles of shit just completely washed away. So when that gets to a point to where you can actually walk those lands and shit like that and y'all can cut through stuff, how many people would it take to, let's say, cover on a day, like once things are dissipated, to cover like two to three miles of land? How many people would it take, and then how many people in each group like amongst that two to three miles For what? Like debris clearing and stuff? Yeah, I mean even trying to find people in the midst of the fucking debris.
Speaker 1:Well, man, when you're talking about search and rescue on the front end, a lot of the effort that we had was based on, like intel, rumor mill mill stuff that was getting pushed out on social media, things that we could find in text messages, local communities saying, hey, we saw so-and-so get washed down the river from here. The biggest, the initial rescue part wasn't saving lives of people, it was getting access to people. Yeah, the biggest part of all of this was that what would normally be search and rescue was human remains discovery and detection. So there was a you weren't gonna find somebody that had been washed away down river that made it.
Speaker 1:There's just too much debris and everything. The amount of the volume of water and the pressure of water was moving through those, those valleys they say it was two to five times more than that of Niagara Falls the hydraulic pressure that was coming through those areas um that's fucking sad though it's, it's hard to think about.
Speaker 1:It's hard to think about the people that did get washed away and lived are man. They should go to the. They should go to vegas because they're lucky, they're blessed, they have a bigger purpose in life and hope they don't squander it because they're still around. But we still. There are still missing people. Now there's a lot of rumors about how many missing people are out there. People have made up their own missing persons lists which are not valid. They have no way to back check them. They have no idea who's actually been found and not been found If you look at the official numbers, I think the official numbers are something closer to like eight to 12 total people still missing.
Speaker 1:Comparatively to when it started. I think when we started the list was at 17 or 1800 people missing and my daughter and ex-wife were on that list Wow, and we found them and they came off the list. But there's still people that are missing. The eyewitnesses stated and said we watched them wash down river and some people were washed away and were found. You know, 12, 15 miles away. Some of them may never be recovered because of the mud and it could be under 100 feet of mud 100, 100%. They never find those poor people's bodies remains.
Speaker 1:It's probably the hardest part of everything. That's the reason why what we're doing right now is so important, because there was such a dramatic focus of human remains detection, such a dramatic focus on helping reunite families. Yeah, and we were so focused on the dead and it was heavy for everybody and it still is. I mean, you obviously like talking about. It is a hard thing to communicate about, and it's the reason why, where we are in recovery process, why it's so important for us to start building homes. Yep, because if we don't start building homes, the second disaster is coming and that's the economic disaster. And if we don't work to overcome that disaster, if we don't demonstrate that there is truly and legitimately hope and progress being made, made like made towards recovering the region, then the people that are gone will stay gone, the businesses that are closed will stay closed and the economic downfall of Western North Carolina would be complete.
Speaker 1:Because this wasn't a small event, this wasn't one or two businesses. A majority of the business in North Carolina is found in those. It's 45% of North Carolina's GDP. In those 39 counties that were hit. Holy shit, there's 111 or 112 counties. I think in North Carolina, 39 counties that were hit make up 45 percent of North Carolina's GDP. I mean, this is not something small. This is not regionalized or localized. This will affect the entire state.
Speaker 2:The number one source of high-quality courts comes out of western North Carolina, but it's changed for decades even generations, yeah, forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is an event that's not going to just change the lives of those who've experienced it firsthand, that survived, change the lives of the volunteers that came in. Like, you just talked about your buddy, he was like he just keeps coming back. It's, that's, that's the trend. That's what's happened. I woke up this morning, yesterday morning, before we drove into town, we had we're, we're in nine weeks. We had 40, 41 people, volunteers, 41. Holy, we're nine weeks in, yeah, and there's 41 volunteers in our talk. This morning I got a phone call. Hey, dude, there's like 45 people here tomorrow I expect there's going to be 40 plus people in the talk they got a key. I mean, dude, it's awesome, like, like it's good to see that, uh, uh, people are providing hope for those, those people that live there man.
Speaker 1:You got to roll in this flat. It's three 22. Yeah, I think so. He's getting blown up.
Speaker 2:We're telling him he's like my wife's giving me fucking shit.
Speaker 1:All right. So, hey, hey, josh, we're going to, we will, uh, we will, we'll take a break, that way you can roll. And before Josh rolls, I mean can you? Can you, however, you can articulate to the people down there that you know we're thinking about them, you know we're going to, we're going to keep, we're going to keep pressing them. Man, this is, we can't fucking forget about this shit. No, I think, I think I think the only way keep pressing it, man, this is we can't fucking forget about this shit.
Speaker 2:no, I think, I think I think the only way this shit really happens and things really change is is with uh, is with consistency, like if you're not consistent, like even even us wanting to help and try our best to be able to support your cause and everything that's going on like it's not a one and done thing, like it only really fucking changes if it's consistent, like if, if there's not consistency, there's not shit. That's right, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, man, hey man, that was a good first half. It was good, I got to fire it up dude, yeah, dude yeah.
