NH Heroes: Manchester firefighters were rescuers in storm-ravaged N.C.
When the Swiftwater Rescue Team from the Manchester Fire Department arrived in Boone, North Carolina, during Hurricane Helene last September, they knew their skills would be tested.
Nothing in the Merrimack River or in floods they had dealt with in New Hampshire or Vermont prepared them for the enormity of what they encountered.
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Rapidly changing hurricane conditions. High winds and pounding rain. Racing water in swollen or overflowed creeks and rivers. Landslides and mudslides that dislodged and crushed houses. Flooding that submerged parking lots in 20 minutes and inundated the first floors of commercial buildings. Fire trucks stranded in water.
They had driven 18 hours to get there on the morning of Friday, Sept. 25, with their two rescue boats.
The parking lot behind the Boone firehouse had become a river.
Trees, dumpsters, parts of demolished cars sped by in an overflowing creek, piling under a bridge and popping the span four to five feet in the air.
Two Manchester rescue team members swam through 6 feet of water in the halls of an evacuated National Guard Armory to locate a woman trapped inside, not knowing whether she was still alive. They lifted up each floating backpack to see if she was holding on or submerged.
'I've never experienced anything to this magnitude,' said Battalion Chief Jon Fosher. 'What was normally a babbling brook, a lazy creek, turned into a roaring river. You could hear boulders moving by.'
'Once they showed up, the storm switched so fast. I'm proud of the members' ability to adapt on the fly and manage a very high-risk situation without having any understanding of the area or region they were in,' said Manchester Fire Chief Ryan Cashin.
'It comes down to the training they do throughout the year, and their dedication to their craft on a daily basis. They consistently try to make themselves better and I couldn't be prouder.'
The team members paid for swift water training and did it in their off hours. 'I'd put our guys up against any other fire department in the country,' Cashin said.
New Hampshire Heroes
On Wednesday, Fosher, Safety Officer Kevin Grebinar and Swiftwater Rescue Team members Capt. Adam Iverson, Lt. Tom Defina and Rescue 1 firefighters James Langley, Adam Langlois, Tyler Gaudette, Craig Robichaud, Bob McKechnie and Jason Coulter will be honored as New Hampshire Heroes by the Union Leader.
The Manchester crew expected to spend a week in North Carolina and stayed 12 days. Some of the men were disappointed to leave.
'These were people whose whole town and communities were wiped out and they went our of their way to feed us, do our laundry and give us a sendoff with a bluegrass band,' said Iverson.
'It was a humbling time,' said Coulter. 'We train all the time on our skills, oftentimes with ourselves. When you put real people into the event, it's as realistic as it can be. When it's a real event, it's humbling to do it and have a good outcome.'
Their work involved 'the most technical things we've done in my career,' said Defina, who has been with the Manchester department for 26 years and also serves on a federal search and rescue team in Massachusetts.
At one point, firefighter Langley leaned against a tree and looked up to see the high-water mark well above his head.
'You could look up and see the water line 30 feet up in the trees,' said Defina. 'I saw a reclining chair sitting on a tree limb.'
'The first 24 to 36 hours,' when the storm hit Boone, a town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, 'probably most shocking was (how) it picked and chose which neighborhoods it hit,' Gaudette said. 'Some parts of town were totally gone, with nothing left but the foundations.'
'Just the amount of water coming down and the level of destruction,' said Langley. 'Cars turned into a small portion of what they used to be. The water erased everything that used to be.'
A toppled tree lying across the uphill side of a house saved the mother, daughter and dog inside.
Sliding mud had 'caved in the 80-year-old mother's second-floor bedroom. She had to crawl across a mud-filled, caved-in room to get out,' said Robichaud. 'If that tree didn't land horizontally across the back, the mud would have overtaken the house and it would have been a different outcome.'
The rescue team rigged a high line to transport the women and their dog down the wreckage-strewn mountainside, amid trees piled like matchsticks and the remains of homes.
When the team entered Boone, the parking lot behind the Boone Fire Department had filled with five feet of water.
Defina had to hold onto the roofline in order to rescue the woman stranded in the National Guard Armory from a window and bring her inside his team's rescue boat. 'We could stand up in our boat and get onto the roof of the building.'
'Swift water is the most dangerous thing we have to do,' said Defina. 'When you're dealing with water, you're dealing with a force you can't imagine.'
'At some points the boat would have been outpowered by the water,' said Robichaud.
The nearly opaque water hid hazardous materials such as auto parts and oil tanks.
Military helicopters evacuated people who otherwise could not be reached.
Second call to help
This was the second time the City of Manchester answered a call for help in North Carolina through the federal Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) system. The first time was in 2018, during Hurricane Florence in the state's eastern half.
But that paled in comparison to what they saw last September in western North Carolina. 'The damage (in 2018) was nothing like I saw here,' said Defina. 'I've never seen the damage I saw here, all because of the mountains' and the water pouring down them.
They worked in other towns around the region, including Marion and Green Valley. On Oct. 5 they returned to Manchester.
'Manchester is fortunate because we have a really well-trained rescue company,' Fosher said. Rescue teams respond when a governor declares a state of emergency and contacts the federal government and other states for help.
'We're lucky we had highly trained individuals who knew what to do. Everyone worked together to do what needed to be done,' said McKechnie.
'We started our mornings by 4:30 every day,' commuting to where they were needed, 90 to 120 minutes each way, Iverson said. 'Places you'd think you could get to were flooded out themselves.'
'The ultimate thing for our department is to be able to respond to more of those EMAC requests,' said Defina, who also belongs to Massachusetts Task One Urban Search and Rescue, one of 28 teams nationwide developed to respond to earthquakes.
'Now it's mostly swift water with the amount of hurricanes.'
rbaker@unionleader.com
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