A Franklin minister is staying in North Carolina until the end of the month to help hurricane victims cope with what they are experiencing and be someone who listens as a volunteer with the American Red Cross.
Dave Owens, a Greenwood resident, is a spiritual care volunteer, a fairly recent service offered by the international relief aid organization. He is one of several volunteers from Indiana, but the only one from Johnson County.
Primarily, his job has been to travel to shelters in North Carolina and talk with residents and families who have been impacted by Hurricane Florence, which made landfall on the east coast more than a week ago. Flooding became a major issue after the hurricane moved through, and has been the focus of most volunteer efforts regardless of the organization.
Owens, who made his way to the coast Sunday, is traveling with a group of spiritual advisers from other states to shelters throughout North and South Carolina. Their base is in Greenville, S.C., he said Friday. Besides praying with those who ask for it, he is tasked with checking in on everyone who is staying at the shelters, regardless of their religious affiliation, to see how they are doing and what assistance they may need. Some shelters had 40 people in them. Others had more than 100, he said.
“Most of the time, it just kind of comes down to meeting them where they’re at. I am very experienced in helping people spiritually. But right now, my job is really to just give them a chance to verbalize what they’re feeling, to talk,” Owens said Friday afternoon as he rode in a truck to a fire station in New Bern, N.C. from an airport to help deliver supplies.
This is Owens’ second mission with the Red Cross, although he has served for more than two decades on other mission trips, he said.
“These people are in real crises. I came across this 91-year-old man who was all alone; he didn’t really have anyone else. He tried to stay in his house, but the water was slowly rising, so he called for help,” Owens said.
“Then there was this young guy who was driving along one second and the next second he was swimming for his life. A lot of people were separated from their animals so they’re searching for their animals. The Red Cross is trying to reunite them. Schools have been shut down for, what, a week now. People are worried.”
Two local firefighters who had been helping with recovery as part of Indiana Task Force One were headed home on Friday after being on the east coast for 12 days.
The 86 first responders with Task Force One, who were deployed from Indiana before the hurricane made landfall, were on their way back Friday. They had been in Wilmington, N.C. helping local crews and FEMA rescue folks.
It was Sean Campbell’s first deployment with the task force. Campbell, a volunteer with the Bargersville Community Fire Department, said he can’t wait to get home to his family.
“I was glad to get out there and have a chance to help people, but I can’t wait to get home. I am so excited to sleep in my own bed. I can’t wait to see my wife who is 7 months pregnant. We’ve had pretty limited contact back and forth. There were times that I had no cell service. So it will be nice to get home and get back into my daily routine and get back to work,” he said.
He learned a lot from the members of the task force who had responded to disasters before, he said. Campbell is trained to use high-tech gadgets to search for people who may be trapped in debris. But because most homes did not collapse during the storm, he spent most of the trip manning the GPS, helping crews navigate from place to place, and using the tools to identify and mark structural damage on homes to make it easier for insurance agencies and FEMA to complete their reports.
It was Campbell’s first time experiencing a hurricane, he said.
“I didn’t think we’d actually be going into where the storm was hitting. I thought we’d go in once it passed, but they deployed us right in the path of the hurricane. I didn’t think we would be hunkered down in building as it moved through,” he said.
The task force spent the last couple days in the Carolinas assisting local first responders with typical, everyday calls, task force spokesman and Johnson County resident Michael Pruitt said.
Both were reflecting on what they had experienced and what was ahead for the communities they helped.
“They have a lot of rebuilding to do. It really kind of hit home for me the last day we were there because one of the firefighters we had been working side by side with the whole time, his house flooded. So we took the time on our last day there to go out to his house and help them tear out the floors and everything. When we left, there was still this huge pile of stuff in the front yard,” Campbell said.
“I took a second to reflect on that … what if that was my house? I couldn’t believe the devastation (the storm) caused, and that was just one house. To put that on a statewide level, it’s going to be years probably before things are back to normal.”
