By BRANDON CANTWELL

Staff writer

With communities along the paths of Hurricanes Milton and Helene working to recover from their devastation, groups in the Mahoning Valley are providing support.

The storms crashed into Florida and drenched counties with torrential rain, downed power lines and bridges, and flooded homes.

Jim McIntyre, communications director for the American Red Cross’s Northern Ohio region, said he expects their members to be there for months, as they don’t leave an area until it’s completely rebuilt.

“We still have 1,600 American Red Cross responders on the ground in five states,” McIntyre said. “Last night there were nearly 1,800 people taking refuge in shelters either the Red Cross or our partners were running.”

While donating definitely helps, as they’re not a government agency and they rely on the public’s generosity, McIntyre encourages people to volunteer, as they’ll train people to be disaster responders, and those skills can be applied to other local crises, such as fires, or national ones such as the hurricanes.

McIntyre also encouraged people to donate blood.

“When severe weather occurs, blood donations that would have been collected go uncollected,” McIntyre said. “So we ask people who are in areas that aren’t affected by severe weather to donate blood to help keep the nation’s blood supply solid.”

HURRICANE MILTON

Hearing of a friend in need inspired Poland residents Dale and Jan Heusser, as well as their condo association, to gather supplies to aid in Hurricane Milton relief.

“There was a good friend of mine who lost pretty much everything in the flood and he was in Elizabethton, Tennessee, right outside Johnson City. He and I worked down at Johnson City for a company and that’s how I knew these people down here,” Dale said. “So I called him and talked to him and thought, ‘I had to do something; we had to do something. Jan and I had to do something.'”

Dale said they reached out to people in their neighborhood, going door to door in hopes of getting water, paper towels and other necessities. Dale and his wife would end up collecting everything they needed in a week and a half, and renting a 16-foot truck to carry the 110 cases of water among the laundry list of supplies.

They also received support from the Calcutta Fire Department, whose fire Chief Scott Smith, reached out and contributed another three pallets of supplies, Dale said.

“When we left, we probably had close to 6,000 pounds of goods in the truck,” Dale said. It was really fantastic. The support we got from our condo community here. We also got some gifts from Giant Eagle in Boardman and in Poland, and the Gabe’s over in Boardman. And the dollar store general manager; the dollar store didn’t do anything for us, but the general manager bought things and gave them to us.”

Dale said he and Jan left the morning after things were loaded in Calcutta, staying in Kingsport overnight before stopping in Elizabethton the following morning, unloading some of the goods at a church.

However, the pastor didn’t accept all of their donations, as it was “more than he could handle”, Dale said, and he was asked to bring the remaining goods to Canah Chapel Free Will Baptist Church in Erwin, Tennessee.

Dale said pictures only did the hurricane “somewhat” justice.

“There are so many things; that people’s lives were just totally, totally destroyed. Everything they had was gone. It wiped buildings, houses, garages, places of work just right off the face of the map. There was nothing left.”

Dale said his friend’s house, which he remodeled months prior, ended up having eight inches of water and several inches of mud in it. His friend dropped his flood insurance a month prior, he added.

HURRICANE HELENE

For Denise Wilhelm of Newton Falls and her daughter, having a friend in North Carolina collecting goods for animals in shelters who didn’t have supplies encouraged her to take action.

“I have a friend that’s in North Carolina but she lives more on the east coast. She wasn’t by where the hurricane went through, and she was telling me that she was collecting dog food and stuff like that for animals in shelters that they didn’t have food to feed them and blankets and stuff like that,” Wilhelm said.

Wilhelm said her daughter spoke to her friend to find out what the situation was, asking if they had support from any organizations and to her understanding, there wasn’t anyone there.

“These people were more or less left on their own; so my daughter called me and she said, ‘mom, we gotta do something. We gotta get some stuff down there to these people because nobody’s helping them,'” Wilhelm said.

Collecting goods for Helene efforts led Wilhelm on a search to find an organization in North Carolina or Ohio that would accept their donations, and they used Lakeview Assembly of God in Lake Milton as a rallying point.

She said she called and texted number after number looking for someone to help, until her final call warned her that it wouldn’t be wise for she and her daughter to travel to North Carolina alone, as they were having issues with “different things.”

A neighbor notified her that American Legion 737, also based in Lake Milton, was collecting goods too, and would ultimately solve Wilhelm and her daughter’s dilemma.

“Our youth pastor collected the stuff and he took it over there for me. He just loaded it up because there was so much. He loaded up the trailers at the church and took it over,” Wilhelm said. “And I took three pickup trucks full of stuff over there by myself.”

Wilhelm said she appreciated everyone who donated stuff to the church, as she found out that some of the people affected by the hurricane live in mountainous areas and can’t be reached unless someone hikes or takes a horse or helicopter.