‘Whatever it takes’: Asheville, Va. health workers help veterans after Hurricane Helen

The road leading to the 80-year-old military veteran’s mountaintop home outside Asheville, North Carolina, was still impassable more than two weeks after Hurricane Helen slammed into the area, washing out roads, damaging bridges and causing landslides.

But Corey Anderson, a mid-level medical technician at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Asheville, knew he had to reach out to his patient.

So the 15-year veteran of Asheville, Va.’s emergency room parked his van, gathered his medical equipment and a few supplies, and walked to get to the veteran — a half-mile hike straight up a washed-out road covered in fallen trees.

“It didn’t seem like a choice. It was kind of impossible to turn around and go back to the VA and say, “I just couldn’t do it,” Anderson said in a phone interview this week. “It just couldn’t happen.”

At the top of the mountain, Anderson found his patient in good spirits and doing well after the storm.

Neighbors helped the veteran with groceries and started the generator. Neighbors even built a makeshift road after the storm, and last week Anderson was able to give a veteran a ride in his van full of medical supplies, he said.

For Anderson, it was just one of several house calls he made to check on elderly veterans in the weeks since Helen struck the area.

He’s used to making such visits while overseeing an Asheville, Va.-based program called Community Outpatient Services, Urgent Care and Telemedicine Services, or SCOUTS. The program sends VA health care workers to visit elderly patients in the days and weeks after an emergency room visit.

Anderson’s trek to reach his patient is an example of WNC staff’s efforts to help veterans in the wake of Helen’s illness, said Stephanie Young, who has served as WNC Health Care Director since 2018. .

Asheville Virginia workers visited hundreds of veterans in the days and weeks after the storm, Young said. During one welfare check, they found a wheelchair-bound veteran in a flooded home in need of medical attention and rushed him to the emergency room. In another case, workers in Virginia trying to reach a more than 90-year-old disabled veteran who was running out of medication realized the road to his home was impassable, so they called a local fire department to help them get to his home across the road. – with an all-terrain vehicle and delivered his medicine.

“I witnessed their unwavering commitment to veterans and their support of our (VA’s) mission even as they struggled with their own personal losses. … So not even a hurricane — not even Hurricane Helen could stand in the way of our staff taking care of our veterans,” she said.

“All you need”

When it became clear that Helen would likely affect the Asheville area, Young included the health care system, which includes Charles George Medical Center in Asheville and three smaller VA clinics in Hickory, Franklin and Forest City, in his preparedness plans. emergencies. But no one could have predicted the massive damage Helen would do to Asheville after it crossed about 500 miles offshore as a Category 4 storm early Sept. 27 in the Big Bend region of northwest Florida, she said.

As the storm swept across Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina, it left its worst mark in Asheville and surrounding areas, dumping 31 inches of rain on the region in three days, including 15 inches in September. 27. It caused record flooding on rivers, including the Swannanoa and French Broad rivers, and left Asheville’s popular River Arts District completely underwater.

The storm knocked out power to almost the entire region, left tens of thousands of people without access to drinking water and turned off mobile communications in most of the area’s residents. Anderson said he was stuck in his home for days after the storm because of downed trees. His cell phone was not working and he had no idea of ​​the level of devastation in the surrounding area.

When Anderson went to work after the storm, he was shocked by the amount of destruction he saw.

“It looked like a tornado had just come through the whole town. It’s wild. Nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he said. “Coming down Interstate 70 to work, it’s like three feet of mud on the side of the road down, destroyed houses, trees everywhere. I’ve seen whole blocks gone. Communities just erased. It’s terrible.”

Anderson spent the days after the storm delivering medicine, medical supplies, drinking water, body wipes and food to veterans across the city, including an apartment building where several of his patients, including a 99-year-old World War II veteran, lived upstairs and they had no electricity and drinking water.

As an Army veteran, Anderson said he drew on his military experience to get him through the devastating circumstances. He served as an engineer equipment mechanic with the 40th Engineer Battalion, 1st Armored Division, including a year-long deployment to Iraq from 2005 to 2006. The experience, he said, prepared him to answer Helen.

“One hundred percent, no question, it was beneficial because of that,” Anderson said. “It’s that mindset of having and not needing, versus needing and not having, and really adapting and overcoming and being willing to do whatever it takes.”

Recovery from the storm

Young credited her staff with quickly rebuilding VA systems after the storm, allowing them to quickly get health workers to veterans in need. The hospital was mostly back to normal after the storm, but it continued to run on a generator because its normal power had not yet been fully restored.

The Western North Carolina VA System serves about 49,000 veterans in 23 counties in western North Carolina and has about 2,000 employees.

But even with dedicated workers and solid planning, Young said she couldn’t have predicted the response that would be needed after Helen.

Losing communications was the most difficult aspect of the storm, she said. With cell service down and landlines down in much of the region, Young had no choice but to send his staff into the wilderness to find the veterans.

When the hospital’s phones were back up and running, she said, they began receiving hundreds of calls from family members and caregivers of local veterans asking for help checking their statuses.

Young sent so-called “tiger teams” — small teams of specialized care specialists — to check on high-risk veterans and see what they might need. Oxygen tanks, bottled water and medicine topped the list. In one case, VA staff found a patient whose glasses had broken during a storm. The patient recently visited the VA for an eye appointment and had glasses that were ready to be picked up. One of the VA employees went to the eye clinic, went through several boxes and found the man’s new glasses, Young said.

“We’re still doing those runs today,” she said Wednesday, nearly a month after Helen struck. “Not as much as we started, but we’re still there. We’re still doing it.”

Of course, Young said, it will take years for the Asheville area to fully recover from Helen’s wrath. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Thursday that repairing damage from the storm in his state will cost at least $52 billion. Helen is blamed for 96 deaths in North Carolina, and the storm damaged or destroyed more than 200,000 homes, state officials said.

More than 600 roads remained closed in the Asheville area Friday. Among them was the road from Interstate 40 that leads to the Charles George Virginia Medical Center.

“We’re getting back to normal,” Young said. “We will definitely get there. Our providers are working hard to get things right and increase surgeon visits. Our community center never closed and our hospital never closed. It’s truly a testament to the great work our staff do and how much they care about our veterans.”