By Delayna Earley
The Island News
After several days of collecting donations, former Beaufort mayor Stephen Murray, Sea Eagle’s Craig Reeves, and other volunteers made the drive up to western North Carolina to deliver much needed necessities like water, diapers and toiletries to those who lost everything.
It has been two weeks since Hurricane Helene caused historic flooding and mudslides that destroyed entire towns in the mountains of western North Carolina, and Murray said that he felt like he needed to do something to help South Carolina’s northern neighbors after a call from Bob Woodman.
“My first thought was that we would take some chainsaws and equipment and head north to help with the clean-up,” Murray said. “But after sleeping on it, I woke up and thought, well you know, we’ve got trucks, we’ve got trailers, and at that time we were hearing a lot of calls that FEMA wasn’t in yet, the Red Cross wasn’t in yet, none of the big NGOs … meanwhile people didn’t have water, they didn’t have food, they didn’t have baby diapers or formula they didn’t have basic cleaning materials … so I thought, if we are going to go all the way up there, we might as well bring supplies with us.”
Murray said that after he put a call for donations out on Facebook, Beaufort stepped up.
Local business owners Nick Borreggine and Bennett Schiller agreed to collect supplies at their businesses to allow people easy access to donate.
In three days, they collected more than 100 pallets of donations to take to North Carolina and distribute to those small, rural towns that were devastated by Helene.
“We have probably two pallets of bleach and disinfectant,” Murray said. “I thought we would only get a few pallets of donations to take up to [North Carolina], but the community stepped up and boy was I wrong. They really showed their love for our northern neighbors.”
He said in addition to donations being dropped off at three different locations, he also had a lot of people show up and want to volunteer to help transport product, sort the donations and stack them on pallets with similar donations.
Murray said he went up twice during the week following the hurricane, once at the beginning of the week with Reeves and then again at the end of the week as part of a caravan of 10 trucks and vehicles to deliver supplies and volunteers to help with the cleanup efforts in some of these more rural North Carolina towns.
More than a dozen small towns and areas surrounding Asheville received donations from Murray on behalf of Beaufort, especially ones that the big trucks have a harder time getting to because they were a bit nimbler.
Murray and the other volunteers returned early this week, but he advised that the need has now shifted.
“Now we should be donating to a trusted relief organization up there so that they can put the money exactly where it is needed,” Murray said. “Now that the initial need for goods has been met, now we are switching into Phase 2 of the recovery effort which is really strong backs to go in and muck out things, clean the mold and get all of the stuff out of these waterlogged homes and businesses.”
He said that he and his fellow volunteers are in holding pattern.
They have suspended supplies because they have been told by their contacts in North Carolina that they just aren’t needed right now and in some places are more harmful than helpful because it requires someone to go through and organize the goods before distribution.
That said, in the coming weeks they may need more supplies as they deplete what they have, or they are going to need labor assistance in helping with cleanup.
He also mentioned that they are not unique in this and there are several other groups who are collecting goods and delivering them to those in need in North Carolina.
“There are hundreds of other people who saw a need, loaded up their cars with stuff and brought it and delivered it to people who needed it,” Murray said. “But now that immediate need has been met, it is time for the government and large NGOs like Red Cross, Salvation Army and Samaritan’s Purse, it’s really time for them to step in and deliver solutions at a scale that us small folks just can’t.”
Murray said that donations and advocacy is the best way to show support and not let the elected officials forget about western North Carolina because it is going to be a long recovery process.
Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
