While this sort of thing sounds excessive and unfair at first glance, and the article is written with a clear slant, there's usually a good reason for it. Disaster response and rescue air missions are enormously complex with a lot of moving parts, and allowing anyone with an aircraft to get involved can actually make the entire response less effective.
It's extremely common for disaster response and search & rescue teams to ask random volunteers to stand down and stop trying to "self-deploy" and help on their own.
First, it's inherently a more dangerous airspace than usual, given the huge numbers of aircraft flying around, lots of low level flying, and degraded communications and other networks.
Second, just keeping coordination between all the different units, groups, volunteers, and aircraft in a mass disaster like this is a huge undertaking. There are dozens of aircraft, hundreds of distinct organisations down to local fire departments and volunteer groups, and thousands of people all of whom have to stay reasonably organised to ensure everyone who needs to be rescued is. Which is why as far as possible it's best to use only the volunteers who have not only trained in the relevant communication and coordination protocols but actually practiced them at least once. If that group is overwhelmed then they look outside and bring on others through established and expedited procedures so that they don't jam up the works.
This is one guy and his helicopter, which in the greater scheme of things isn't so bad. But imagine it's 20, 30, or a 100 all doing what he's doing.
His mistake was only coordinating with some local firefighters, and believing that was enough. But they're not in charge of air operations. He should've approached the relevant air operations cell for South Carolina, or gone via one of the established volunteer organisations for pilots with their own aircraft that have pre-existing relationships with the Air Force and other organisations involved in rescues and disaster response, and are prepared to take in new volunteers and use them effectively.
“He originally asked me who I was. I gave him the same information, who I was with, my background experience, law enforcement, and firefighting. And his response was, if you have that kind of experience, you should know that you should be coordinating with us. And I said, I’ve been coordinating with everybody as I’ve been here just the day before, speaking with local law enforcement, other rescue personnel,” Seidhom recalled.
Seidhom said he tried to de-escalate and asked the official for instructions on how to communicate with the Lake Lure Fire Department while he was flying a rescue mission near the town. Seidhom said the fire official ordered him to leave and not come back.
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This sounds a lot more like ego to me. A rational person would have pointed him to the right people to coordinate with, not keep escalating to the point of threatening him with arrest if he goes to pick up his co-pilot (his son) who was still on the mountainside.
And this is ESPECIALLY bad with the Carolina Emergency Response Team so DESPERATE for civvie copters (because the military ones are too heavy).
Which is why he should've reached out to the Carolina Emergency Response Team or a related organisation first, rather than the possibly-overwhelmed local first responders who have no role in coordinating the air response.
Which is what a professional such as a fire chief should have calmly told him to do (it takes all of 30 seconds), rather than ordering him to abandon his son and leave, and then threatening to arrest him (even the cops there were scratching their heads at this).
So if the official who threatened arrest was the "correct" firefighter to coordinate with, why didn't the official incorporate him into the larger operation rather than threaten him?
I think the most likely answer is a small town bureaucrat had to prove that he's in charge, and now they're trying to do some damage control.
> I think the most likely answer is a small town bureaucrat had to prove that he's in charge, and now they're trying to do some damage control.
I listened to a lot of reporting about a major fire in my country, and one of the things I learned was that ways of working that run like a well-oiled machine for minor and medium-sized disasters can completely fall apart in a large disaster.
For example, a rescue team is dispatched to Family A, but on their way they encounter Family B who are in imminent danger, and rescue them instead. Or maybe the rescue team are from a few towns over, all the signs are fucked, and they rescue Family C from a different street and think they've got Family A.
Well, if it's a medium-sized disaster you can coordinate this stuff on a whiteboard. But in a large disaster, where lots of irregular stuff is going on? Very easy for an update to get missed - then the whiteboard says Family A has a rescue team on the way, and the next free rescue team gets dispatched to Family B or C's empty home.
On the other hand, the whiteboard system is what you and your team know best, it's served you well in fires in low-rise buildings etc in the past, and the middle of a major incident doesn't seem like the time to adopt a different system. I can easily understand clinging to a familiar system even when it's not working very well.
So I can understand why, even when the person coordinating the response arguably should have integrated a volunteer with a helicopter, they might not have been ready to.
Or that he was overwhelmed by local issues and wasn't aware of which one of the many organisations was the one coordinating volunteers with their own helicopters. He may just have known that random people adding themselves into the mix wasn't allowed.
So how should the pilot have known who to contact, if even the assistant fire chief wasn't aware of who was in charge of coordinating volunteers?
I agree he was probably having a stressful day, but if his default response to stress is to threaten to put a man in a cage, then he should not have authority.
> So how should the pilot have known who to contact
Part of your training as a pilot is learning how to find out about stuff going on in the area where you plan to fly and who to contact about flying in that area.
If you don't know (or have forgotten) how to do that, you should not be flying a plane. Full stop.
EDIT:
For some reason I can't reply to to the commenter below who pasted "met with multiple law enforcement officers and first responders".
Those are not people responsible for airspace access and airspace management, and the pilot should have known that. Its 101-basics stuff.
Meeting with law enforcement and first responders about airspace is about as useful as fart in a spacesuit.
In response to "followed all FAA regulations", well he would not be threatened with arrest if he had .... I suspect there is far more to the story than the one-sided article lets on !
> If you don't know (or have forgotten) how to do that, you should not be flying a plane. Full stop.
I’m sure the victims on the ground have a different opinion, but thank you for chiming in on their behalf.
On defense of the Pilot, it’s awfully hard to coordinate with some random nobody power-tripping beaurocrat in a disaster area with no power, water, or standard communication in play.
As a reminder this occurred the day after the storm.
"Once in the Lake Lure area on Saturday, Seidhom said he first landed at the nearest airport and met with multiple law enforcement officers and first responders to coordinate communication channels with them and to find out what was needed and where he should go to help."
He did contact local officials and coordinate with them. Why didn't these local officials point him in the right direction?
Edit in response to your edit: he also contacted the airport and followed all FAA regulations.
2nd edit response: so the fact that the assistant fire chief threatened to have him arrested implies his guilt? No one has ever been threatened with arrest without having broken a law?
He was an S.C. Pilot flying into NC, and for what it’s worth the area he was flying supplies into was, to put it in desktop GUI terms
CTRL-A and CTRL-SHIFT-DELETE
All the people clamoring to defend the lame fire chief against the defend just don’t get it.
This a world-class disaster area and if someone is willing to risk their own safety to get supplies to people in imminent threat of perishing themselves… that’s a good thing. Life isn’t a 0-risk game, and definitely not in an insane disaster area.
I'm willing to believe he was flying according to FAA regulations, which includes flying a properly maintained and fueled aircraft and taking all applicable hazards into account. (This is the basic assumption of good faith. That and I presume he has a license which says he's able to operate his helicopter competently and safely.)
Is he trained in search and rescue? Flying into and landing in confined spaces? Assessing the suitability of disaster landing zones in terms of surface quality and debris?
None of that is part of the regular FAA-regulated private pilot training syllabus.
> So if the official who threatened arrest was the "correct" firefighter to coordinate with, why didn't the official incorporate him into the larger operation rather than threaten him?
There are any number of valid reasons from liability to the inability to vet the pilot's skills and licenses to the danger of introducing a pilot unfamiliar with the current SOP/LOPs.
That's the best steelman of the fire official's position that I've seen, but it still sounds like it was a decent general rule, being overapplied when it was inappropriate for the situation (per the pilot's testimony, there were no other helicopters operating in the area, when he was threatened with arrest if he went back to pick up his son).
I agree the fire chief's response could've been better, but I'm also willing to cut people at the local response level a bit of slack in being overwhelmed, exhausted, and perhaps not fully aware of all the moving parts above them.
That's why it's so important as a volunteer to approach the organisations, units, groups, etc who are set up to accept and onboard volunteer help.
I don't have it handy. Caught a tiktok last night of a separate helicopter pilot. It is not one guy either. There are several private choppers trying to help. The one I heard, he had rescued a newborn and an older woman on oxygen. Both would otherwise be dead now. He says there are people with makeshift SOS markers and simply not enough public helicopter help. Apparently the rescue effort is focused on clearing 10 to 40 miles of downed trees. It needs to be on getting people airlifted out, flying through canyons, finding stuck survivors. There should be a fleet of army helicopters there three days ago. People are dying.
If they don't want people "getting in the way" then they have to be actually doing something. They are simply costing lives due to ego politics. They should be helping coordinate not shut down help.
There is an organisation, the Carolina Emergency Response Team, that's coordinating private helicopters for the response. That's who he should've approached from the start, and according to the article he's flying for them now.
There are plenty of military helicopters, but in several areas the available landing zones aren't large enough, which is why the CERT is coordinating small private helicopters.
You’re saying this well after the fact. This incident occurred in the immediate after math of the storm when these fancy government agencies were still asleep at the wheel.
I myself had to ignore all the usual “stay off the road, don’t drive under or over downed trees and power lines” to get relatives out of Asheville.
In times of crises, these rules, however well intentioned, are just suggestions. If you understand why the rules are there, how to safely inform them, and need to break them, break them.
Sometimes there just isn’t a bull on the other side of Chesterton’s fence no matter how much people might think there is.
Having been part in localized efforts after a similar event, it's nearly always that the national emergency response is late, slowly, bureaucratic and makes things worse.
Some Bigwigs talking over people with local knowledge, ignoring advice, wanting to press their processes and rules...
Most people, after a couple of days were all aligned 'Leave the money and the equipment, we will do the rest.'
> common for disaster response and search & rescue teams to ask random volunteers to stand down and stop trying to "self-deploy" and help on their own
Agree that the article is inherently (and self consciously) biased, having only one side’s account. But I’m training to be a pilot and I know quite a few people in SAR. The fire chief should have used, if not the pilot, the helicopter.
Not really possible if you don't have readily available pilots to fly it.
The fire chief should have directed him to the organisation coordinating volunteers with their own helicopters, the Carolina Emergency Response Team, but it's possible he didn't know about it.
> if you don't have readily available pilots to fly it
Sure. But it’s easier to find a pilot than a helicopter in a disaster. My point is threatening the pilot with arrest and sending him and his chopper away makes no sense.
As I said elsewhere, I'm willing to cut those responders at the local level a bit of slack given that they're probably exhausted, overwhelmed, and not fully aware of all the parts of the response. That's why it's important to offer your services via the organisations/groups/etc set up for it, rather than finding the nearest local first responders.
When last did you run disaster response in any area for something of this scale?
Emergency and disaster response organisations always ask people not to just rock up and do their own thing, but to go via the correct channels when volunteering for help. It's not an ego thing.
That's why it's important to not have chiefs defaulting to fear of losing control vs fear of losing lives.
You can see this in other chaotic situations, such as war. Command and control structures work great until they get overwhelmed by too many events on the ground, at which point they completely gridlock.
Without clear evidence of incompetence, why would I prioritise that option? The official's actions make sense in terms of existing and normal regulations and practices in disasters.
Also, if you don't want to deal with local fire chiefs who don't know everything about the air operations, maybe don't approach them first and instead approach the actual units and organisations that are coordinating the air response.
> This is one guy and his helicopter, which in the greater scheme of things isn't so bad. But imagine it's 20, 30, or a 100 all doing what he's doing.
Also don't forget the basic motto of First Responders .... "don't become a statistic by adding yourself to the count".
The fact of the matter here also is that law enforcement, first responders, search and rescue etc. etc. do this sort of stuff all day long every day. They have training, they have well established lines of communication, etc. etc.
One guy and his helicopter trying to be a hero is, sadly, only likely to cause more problems than fix them. The professionals on the ground would likely rather have random civilians "out of their hair" instead of hanging around "trying to be helpful".
If the civilian professionals have trouble keeping up, they have lines of communication up to the military for backup support.
I know it sounds harsh. But really, in a first-world country like the US, just leave it to the professionals and the well established protocols.
So he was a licensed pilot flying in normal/unregulated airspace (initially no flight restrictions in NOTAM) . So his actions to that point were legal (and within the limits of regular established protocols, to use your terminology) .
If officials want civilians out of their hair they can declare a temporary flight restriction, which in fact someone did declare 30 minutes after the discussion with the fire official. (And it is strongly implied it was the fire official)
That said, some of the people on the ground actually promised to shield him; so there appears to have been a rather strong organizational split wrt attitudes towards pilot assistance. [1]
Note that a TFR MAY include coordination contact information. Which this one apparently did: "CTC ASHEVILLE APP WITHIN 20NM ON 125.8" (from the map summary in the September 29 screenshot in the article).
The balance of your thesis does seem to come under pressure with the Mon 30 Sept screenshot; which shows the TFR lifted and multiple aircraft (said to be helicopters) working in the area.
This is based just on information in this article. You might be basing your opinion on more general information?
[1] "...but we can tell you if you come back with the victim, we’ll have you a designated landing spot and we’ll make sure they don’t come over here"
It was deployed, it sounds like he just wasn't aware of it. For instance, the Carolina Emergency Response Team was coordinating private helicopter assistance from Hickory airport.
AFAICT from TFA, it looks like this cell could only have been active from Sept. 30th, as it was when the no-flight zone was removed. IIUC, the guy started its stuff the 28th, and the incident happened the 29th.
The cell was active before, CERT is assisting it, not replacing it. The article doesn't provide the necessary background information on when it started operations, only when the subject of the article became aware of it.
Not really. The no-fly zone still allows for military flights and any flights authorised by them or whoever else is performing the air traffic coordination.
does either have any authority over airspace? There seems to be encroachment of local and state powers on the airspace, like for example states passing the laws de-facto prohibiting any meaningful flying of drones. Drones in emergencies like this could have been very useful. Of course, one could immediately say that adding drones, especially if a large number of them, would complicate things - yet it is the obvious catch-22 - why no advanced control system of flying of large number of drones have so far been developed? - because de-facto no drone flying is allowed.
that is because no drone-incorporating airspace control system exists right now. The question is why such a system is not even in planning stages.
>Random individuals flying their drones are a hazard to rescue helicopters and other aircraft.
Is it so really? In Ukraine war a lot of de-facto random individuals from both sides are flying a lot of drones without pretty much any coordination and control system and in combat conditions, much tougher than civilian emergency, and mostly in FPV mode without direct LOS, frequently at night, yet no drone-helicopter/aircraft collisions have so far been reported (and everybody watching the aircraft and helicopter losses very closely)
> that is because no drone-incorporating airspace control system exists right now. The question is why such a system is not even in planning stages.
There are several approaches to this problem, but it usually requires that the drones are all running compatible control and communication software. e.g. [0] https://www.flytbase.com/blog/drone-disaster-relief
> Is it so really? In Ukraine war a lot of de-facto random individuals from both sides are flying a lot of drones without pretty much any coordination and control system and in combat conditions, much tougher than civilian emergency, and mostly in FPV mode without direct LOS, frequently at night, yet no drone-helicopter/aircraft collisions have so far been reported (and everybody watching the aircraft and helicopter losses very closely)
Those people aren't random, they're part of organised military forces and are part of command and control networks. Troops do reduce certain types of drone activities when they're informed that their own aircraft will be overlying their positions. And that's even though both sides are flying comparatively few helicopter sorties at the front lines because of the constant threat from air defence.
As an aside, there have been collisions, at least one of which was intentional.
>Those people aren't random, they're part of organised military forces and are part of command and control networks.
these C&C networks don't control drones in the air. And most the people in the both fighting forces are mostly random ones really. If they got drones, frequently bought themselves or donated by volunteers - they fly them, if not - then not.
> Troops do reduce certain types of drone activities when they're informed that their own aircraft will be overlying their positions.
I don't know where you heard this. From what i heard - they frequently even can't discern whether this is their drone or an enemy's one.
> these C&C networks don't control drones in the air. And most the people in the both fighting forces are mostly random ones really. If they got drones, frequently bought themselves or donated by volunteers - they fly them, if not - then not.
I didn't say they did. Being part of command and control networks means that troops are informed of air operations by their own side over radio or other communications channels.
> I don't know where you heard this. From what i heard - they frequently even can't discern whether this is their drone or an enemy's one.
From acquaintances and friends in the Ukrainian armed forces on or near the front lines.
I've spent a significant amount of time working in disaster response. In the US (and probably elsewhere), you have "Disaster Cowboys." These are people who are untrained but fancy they know better how to do things than people who have spent their lives training for these types of scenarios. Picture 1000 people showing up with their pickups and John boats following Hurricane Katrina. Or, imagine the Coast Guard conducting a search grid and all of these people zooming around the grid in every which way.
On one hand, yes, they save some people. On the other hand, they are not on the official search grid rosters, don't tend to take directions well from the authorities, and can cause all sorts of havoc. They can make it harder to find people in need. In fact, when they don't coordinate with the authorities, they end up wasting the experts' time (who may end up covering the same ground) or, when they do coordinate, people in need end up getting missed because the random people who show up to help are not properly trained to conduct searches.
Finally, as this news article shows, these folks have a tendency to go to the media and present themselves as heroes. You very rarely see that from the official search and rescue/recovery teams.
Disaster response is extremely psychologically and emotionally stressful. You may ride a wave of adrenaline while you're out in the field, but most staff end up rotating out (by mandate) after several days to protect them. Even among professionals, there are a lot of people who end up relying on alcohol to ease their minds.
Most importantly, the dignity of the people being rescued/recovered is important. It is all about those people, not about the hero rescuers. They are literally in trauma and can be dangerous and/or in need of urgent help, medical or otherwise. It is desperately unfair to them when somebody untrained, with a "cowboy" attitude, shows up and flips the script. Or, even worse, the cowboy crashes his helicopter and there's one more person who needs to be rescued.
Not all people who randomly show up in their helicopters or John boats are like this, but enough of them are to sow chaos. And look at us all wasting time talking about this guy who feels slighted because his unprofessional help was refuted. It's the same story every time.
Let the professionals do their job and, at the very least, let them coordinate the volunteers who show up to help. It sounds like a great idea for everybody to show up in their helicopter, but trust me, it's not.
"It is desperately unfair to them when somebody untrained, with a "cowboy" attitude, shows up and flips the script. "
Those rescued by the cowboys did not expressed that. Sure, everyone prefers the professionals to show up, but if they don't, because they are overwhelmed by the situation, I surely would be glad, if an "cowboy" comes instead to pick me up.
Troublemakers in search for attention are to be kept away for sure, but those who are reasonable and willing to help and have a helicopter, like the person from the story, are probably open for an official way to help. Not what happened here.
The article is written with an obvious slant, from the perspective of a guy who decided to go to the media to bash first responders after being asked to coordinate via proper channels.
I would take anything he said with a huge grain of salt.
"I would take anything he said with a huge grain of salt."
I do and I did not like that reporting, but if the facts are somewhat right, the arrest threat from wanting to at least still pick up his left behind son is way over the line, of anything reasonable.
Is it? He was simply told not to fly in that area anymore. Either his son was fine in which case no big deal, or his son wasn't fine in which case he was creating more people who needed to be rescued.
The son was left there on a mission agreed with local official staff to rescue a person of greater need, which otherwise would have been needed to rescue anyway.
If the local chief decides to send a free helicopter away is one thing, but then sending the father away while failing to provide another extraction is just a sign of not being able to handle the situation.
Ideally, there would have been an easy process for volunteers to get involved.
They might have told him to come, but with the son back at home.
We call them Walter Mittys, not Disaster Cowboys, but yes, these people appear at every scene. Everything else you said rings true, but sometimes motives are more sinister than a desire for personal glory. Vulnerable people attract predators and there's plenty of vulnerable people in disaster zones.
This is a bunch of gatekeeping with “yeah, they save lives, but might cause harm”. Has anyone actually done analysis to determine if a bunch of amateurs is actually a net negative?
Search and rescue people get upset by these people not following authority, but that’s a standard response anytime amateurs show up to something. It’s the same dilemma of allowing regular people to serve food to large groups. Sure, discourage it if there is enough actual food to serve the survivors, but you sure as hell shouldn’t be doing it when the alternative is starvation.
The same applies when you have dudes like this pilot who was flying where nobody else was. The people out there had 0% chance of rescue without him. Grounding “the cowboy” is just an authority flex.
Do you not think that, if every disaster response and search & rescue organisation is saying the same thing about people just rocking up to get involved without the right coordination, that they might have a reason for it rather than just 'gatekeeping'?
So the main problem is what? Control? 1000 people show up and your leadership skills or ego can handle it? Sure be embarrassing if they outdid the government, that’s for sure.
How about this: get out of their way. Or even better: clear their paths. Or conduct your own operations and don’t worry about it.
What would your reaction be if someone showed up to your place of work and just started trying to do things how they thought they should be done, ignoring the proper channels and now knowing any of the procedures?
Well said. Your point about 'disaster cowboys' is especially important, as disasters also unfortunately tend to attract people with a hero complex and without sufficient skills to be doing what they're doing.
That's why you have proper volunteer organisations so that volunteers can be vetted before running around the disaster area.
Imagine working your ass off trying to rescue people and someone goes to the media after being asked to coordinate through proper channels and sends a pitchfork mob after you.
What would your reaction be if someone showed up to your place of work and just started trying to do things how they thought they should be done, ignoring the proper channels and now knowing any of the procedures?
It’s also a disaster zone beyond anything some keyboard warriors need be pontificating on.
Ive personally had to deliver diesel into Asheville to rescue family with a two month old over the weekend. You might see some nice PR photos coming out from the last day or two of Chinooks and cargo drops but at the time this incident occurred, there was nothing going on out there. If you didn’t know someone who could help you, or make it to a central place point you were SOL.
Here and today, now, even with assets in place it just isn’t enough.
It is the place of work of the disaster recovery people, who have established communication channels and procedures. If there is literally nobody coming to help you, then it may be reasonable to go ahead and do it yourself, but it feels incredibly unwise to do it if there are already people trying to do things
Yes and at the time there was no one coming to help. This incident didn’t occur yesterday, it occurred immediately after the storm in a town that is, to this day, unreachable.
Respectfully, please get your facts straight here. The ignorance of HN is well on display in this thread.
If you're stuck for days without food, water or electricity, who do you want running to the rescue - the guy with a helicopter, or the bureaucrat with a rule book?
A lot of folks in the comments are acting like this was one of what they refer to as "cowboys".
Yet the guy went through each and every hoop to cooperate and coordinate properly with the ATC (which should dispell all the "100 planes in the air" worries) and the local IC (that set up a landing zone for the guy and gave him the frequencies to coordinate).
I understand that there may be some vigilantes that would ignore the rules and procedures but this guy with his previous expertise in fire and rescure went through all the stages to help.
The local fire chief was either on a power trip, or had a knee-jerk reaction to out of org help (which IMO disqualifies him from being an effective IC capable of using the available resources to prioritize human life). It is very clear that the guy was absolutely ready to cooperate according to the rules that the chief would set, but ordering him to not go back for his son is ABSOLUTELY a power trip.
The only ATC the article says he spoke to was the Tower at Charlotte-Douglas International, to get permission to fly over the airport. They only manage the area immediately around the airport, and it's not the ATC that's coordinating the disaster response and managing the aircraft over the disaster area.
That is my point. Any order regarding flight restrictions will be immediately disseminated by the local ATC, and I do understand that the ATC does not coordinate the rescue effort over the area, my point is he DID get the permission and actively attempted and successfully coordinated and complied withe the DR team who set up a landing zone for him.
My point being this is a clear failure of the IC (the fire chief in this case)
He spoke to local first responders, not to the people actually coordinating the air response.
There are different ATCs and areas of responsibility. The only one the article says he spoke to was the Tower at an airport in Charlotte, over 100km away. They're only going to have been concerned with what he was doing in the immediate airport vicinity as crossing traffic, not where he was going to and what he'd be doing there.
There obviously wasn't a no-fly zone over Charlotte at the time, so the ATC would not have had to disseminate the info during their communications. Instead, that would be reflected in NOTAMS issued by the FAA.
Reminds me of the themes in "How one ED mobilized his department during a mass casualty incident" (I only found this HN thread [0], but I think there were others). Their decisions went in opposite directions: that ER adapted to a disaster by decentralizing and diffusing responsibility, whereas this air traffic thing (if this story's accurate) insists on decisions flowing through central points of control–which are degrading under high workload.
(I'm *not* asserting if what the NC people are doing is necessarily wrong in context–I don't know enough about air-traffic control to know that).
The government’s main concern is preserving itself and its budget (for its contractors).
I don’t know why we keep having to relearn this lesson over and over again. Your life does not matter to them; their primary concern is their preserving their power.
The disaster porn false reports have been nasty; but not as bad as Katrina, in nature or in reach.
We've got people repeating (false, AFAIK) reports that "supplies are being confiscated!" but as yet I haven't seen major media saying "cannibalism!"
The most pernicious propaganda on this one is going to be "its not worth rebuilding." Its going to take major effort to pry some of the rednecks out of their ancestral mountain homes but there's apparently a lot of people ready to begin already.
In some cases wouldn’t it make more sense to use a drone to drop off water and supplies? I imagine private operators could pitch in as long as their efforts are coordinated with official responders. Of course depending on the load capacity of the drone it may require several round trips.
Edit: Indeed they are being used and saving lives! Get on it HackerNews :)
Its not that news worthy outside of the states. Europe has their own floods right now, and have had the last couple of years.
Its also nothing compared to the weather catastrophes other places in the world routinely overlooked by western press.
We had 2 weeks parts of countries being destroyed by water in Europe. I was in NYC that time and saw maybe 1 minute of info in TV. Sometimes I think that’s maybe it is better this way.
Well... I do not know much the US culture but... To my EU taste, if an officer in an emergency tell me something illogical without justification he/she might be sued for attempted omission of assistance, threats, misconduct during a crisis. So he/she better back of or got trouble instead. I se NO POINT in being assertive and even no point in publishing an article, a simple formal complaint with all the relevant charges without saying another word to him.
Whoever that "fire official" is, he is clearly a bureaucrat going on a power trip ecstatic that he finally gets to lord over the peasants and plebs begging for help at his whims.
If the gods decide one day it's his turn to be fucked sideways, I shall have no sympathy.
That's one explanation, and it's absolutely possible that you're correct. Another possible explanation is that this is a person who is under immense stress and just doesn't have the mental flexibility right now to deal with integrating a private pilot into what I expect is quite a complex operation.
Do I hope I'd react better than this guy in the same situation? I sure do. Am I sure that I would, given the context of what is currently happening? Not really.
One, fire chiefs are not cops. Two, the cops in the story were coördinating with the pilot. Three, the fucking pilot is a “a Class 1 certified law enforcement officer.”
ACAB applies in the sense that ACAB can be seen as a general critique of all hierarchical authority, not just law enforcement officers on duty.
It's obvious that the previous pointer did not use such a strict interpretation of ACAB and applying such an interpretation here only serves to poison the discussion.
I agree with everything you wrote, except: using that pretentious "hey look, I read the New Yorker" diaeresis is a surefire way to alienate the sort of person who thinks "ACAB" belongs in an adult conversation. Though it doesn't sound like you were trying to make friends.
>using that pretentious "hey look, I read the New Yorker" diaeresis is a surefire way to alienate the sort of person who thinks "ACAB" belongs in an adult conversation.
Why? I thought the "ACAB" crowd are well educated (or at least like to think they are), and generally like European-adjacent things like adding diaeresis in English? If anything, on the "ACAB <-> thin blue line" spectrum, I'd expect the latter to be inflamed by the "I read the New Yorker diaeresis" more.
> FEMA is out of money, because they spend $1 billion supporting illegal immigrants
FEMA is not in a cash shortage. It projects it will run out of cash. But that doesn’t impact present operations. (Technically, the whole government runs out of cash in December.) And remember: President Trump used FEMA funds on illegal immigrants, too [1].
While the brave men should be applauded, can I vent my frustration about these victims, who decided it was a good idea to stay alone in a mountain AirBnB in the possible path of an incoming hurricane (I won’t even say this if they actually lived there)? It’s not like the hurricane came out of nowhere, there was plenty of advance warning. Good people sometimes die trying to rescue these idiots. Oh and there’s also a 4yo? WTF.
This is a mountain area with regular residents that is over five hours of driving from the ocean. They expected a couple inches of rain. They didn't expect 20 inches and a dam to break.
Nobody predicted this kind of damage. These were not idiots who ignored warnings. These are people who were hit with an unprecedented natural disaster and if you had called them idiots outloud around here you may end up with a broken nose.
A couple inches? NOAA was forcasting record flooding days before the storm. Local news in the Triangle were showing pictures from the 1916 Asheville flood and saying this storm was going to be worse. There were mandatory evacuation orders all over.
The severity of the situation leading up to the storm wasn't lost on me. We need to understand how people didn't get the message, or didn't believe it if they did get it, or got it and believed it but didn't have an option to leave. Those people didn't have to get stranded.
A friend has a kid in a school in Boone. The school didn't officially close until the storm was almost over them. My friends kid wasn't going to leave because they didn't want to miss a test. My friend pulled their kid out of their apartment in the middle of the night as the flood waters started rising. My friend knew what was happening, but the school officials didn't? That kind of ignorance is excredible dangerous.
Five hours of driving from the ocean is nothing. I have lived on opposite sides of the world and prepared for both hurricanes and typhoons plenty of times while being further from shore. I have prepared for two recently. These aren’t natural disasters without warning (unlike say earthquakes), and while you can hardly mitigate the damage, there’s no excuse being stranded unless you simply live alone. Maybe people in your area collectively have no preparedness at all, if they all think moving away from a mountain AirBnB into civilization in preparation for a hurricane is outlandish.
Gotcha. These people, mostly residents, should have disregarded the predictions of 2 inches of water, assumed it could be, literally 10x as bad, and should have relocated, potentially at expense rates that would hurt their paycheck to paycheck situation. What idiots.
Airbnb renters shouldn't be going into mountains during storms in general. Why do you keep bringing them up though? What percentage of the people stranded, dying, and dead are you ascribing to short term renters? I would be astounded to discover if it was more than 5%.
> mountain AirBnB ... (I won’t even say this if they actually lived there)
How about reading comments you reply to? Anyway, I’m done with this bad faith exchange.
Edit: Thanks for the shadow edit changing your comment entirely after my reply, making a bad faith exchange worse. Why do I keep bringing AirBnB renters up? Maybe because I read the article before commenting and it’s what the particular incident is about?
I won’t further change my reply even if there are more shadow edits.
While this sort of thing sounds excessive and unfair at first glance, and the article is written with a clear slant, there's usually a good reason for it. Disaster response and rescue air missions are enormously complex with a lot of moving parts, and allowing anyone with an aircraft to get involved can actually make the entire response less effective.
It's extremely common for disaster response and search & rescue teams to ask random volunteers to stand down and stop trying to "self-deploy" and help on their own.
First, it's inherently a more dangerous airspace than usual, given the huge numbers of aircraft flying around, lots of low level flying, and degraded communications and other networks.
Second, just keeping coordination between all the different units, groups, volunteers, and aircraft in a mass disaster like this is a huge undertaking. There are dozens of aircraft, hundreds of distinct organisations down to local fire departments and volunteer groups, and thousands of people all of whom have to stay reasonably organised to ensure everyone who needs to be rescued is. Which is why as far as possible it's best to use only the volunteers who have not only trained in the relevant communication and coordination protocols but actually practiced them at least once. If that group is overwhelmed then they look outside and bring on others through established and expedited procedures so that they don't jam up the works.
This is one guy and his helicopter, which in the greater scheme of things isn't so bad. But imagine it's 20, 30, or a 100 all doing what he's doing.
His mistake was only coordinating with some local firefighters, and believing that was enough. But they're not in charge of air operations. He should've approached the relevant air operations cell for South Carolina, or gone via one of the established volunteer organisations for pilots with their own aircraft that have pre-existing relationships with the Air Force and other organisations involved in rescues and disaster response, and are prepared to take in new volunteers and use them effectively.
“He originally asked me who I was. I gave him the same information, who I was with, my background experience, law enforcement, and firefighting. And his response was, if you have that kind of experience, you should know that you should be coordinating with us. And I said, I’ve been coordinating with everybody as I’ve been here just the day before, speaking with local law enforcement, other rescue personnel,” Seidhom recalled.
Seidhom said he tried to de-escalate and asked the official for instructions on how to communicate with the Lake Lure Fire Department while he was flying a rescue mission near the town. Seidhom said the fire official ordered him to leave and not come back.
-----------------
This sounds a lot more like ego to me. A rational person would have pointed him to the right people to coordinate with, not keep escalating to the point of threatening him with arrest if he goes to pick up his co-pilot (his son) who was still on the mountainside.
And this is ESPECIALLY bad with the Carolina Emergency Response Team so DESPERATE for civvie copters (because the military ones are too heavy).
Which is why he should've reached out to the Carolina Emergency Response Team or a related organisation first, rather than the possibly-overwhelmed local first responders who have no role in coordinating the air response.
Which is what a professional such as a fire chief should have calmly told him to do (it takes all of 30 seconds), rather than ordering him to abandon his son and leave, and then threatening to arrest him (even the cops there were scratching their heads at this).
[dead]
So if the official who threatened arrest was the "correct" firefighter to coordinate with, why didn't the official incorporate him into the larger operation rather than threaten him?
I think the most likely answer is a small town bureaucrat had to prove that he's in charge, and now they're trying to do some damage control.
> I think the most likely answer is a small town bureaucrat had to prove that he's in charge, and now they're trying to do some damage control.
I listened to a lot of reporting about a major fire in my country, and one of the things I learned was that ways of working that run like a well-oiled machine for minor and medium-sized disasters can completely fall apart in a large disaster.
For example, a rescue team is dispatched to Family A, but on their way they encounter Family B who are in imminent danger, and rescue them instead. Or maybe the rescue team are from a few towns over, all the signs are fucked, and they rescue Family C from a different street and think they've got Family A.
Well, if it's a medium-sized disaster you can coordinate this stuff on a whiteboard. But in a large disaster, where lots of irregular stuff is going on? Very easy for an update to get missed - then the whiteboard says Family A has a rescue team on the way, and the next free rescue team gets dispatched to Family B or C's empty home.
On the other hand, the whiteboard system is what you and your team know best, it's served you well in fires in low-rise buildings etc in the past, and the middle of a major incident doesn't seem like the time to adopt a different system. I can easily understand clinging to a familiar system even when it's not working very well.
So I can understand why, even when the person coordinating the response arguably should have integrated a volunteer with a helicopter, they might not have been ready to.
Or that he was overwhelmed by local issues and wasn't aware of which one of the many organisations was the one coordinating volunteers with their own helicopters. He may just have known that random people adding themselves into the mix wasn't allowed.
So how should the pilot have known who to contact, if even the assistant fire chief wasn't aware of who was in charge of coordinating volunteers?
I agree he was probably having a stressful day, but if his default response to stress is to threaten to put a man in a cage, then he should not have authority.
> So how should the pilot have known who to contact
Part of your training as a pilot is learning how to find out about stuff going on in the area where you plan to fly and who to contact about flying in that area.
If you don't know (or have forgotten) how to do that, you should not be flying a plane. Full stop.
EDIT: For some reason I can't reply to to the commenter below who pasted "met with multiple law enforcement officers and first responders".
Those are not people responsible for airspace access and airspace management, and the pilot should have known that. Its 101-basics stuff.
Meeting with law enforcement and first responders about airspace is about as useful as fart in a spacesuit.
In response to "followed all FAA regulations", well he would not be threatened with arrest if he had .... I suspect there is far more to the story than the one-sided article lets on !
> If you don't know (or have forgotten) how to do that, you should not be flying a plane. Full stop.
I’m sure the victims on the ground have a different opinion, but thank you for chiming in on their behalf.
On defense of the Pilot, it’s awfully hard to coordinate with some random nobody power-tripping beaurocrat in a disaster area with no power, water, or standard communication in play.
As a reminder this occurred the day after the storm.
> As a reminder this occurred the day after the storm.
I don't care if its the day of the storm, the day after or 50 years after.
The rules and laws of aviation do not cease to operate just because there has been a major storm.
In fact quite the opposite, they deserve to be far more rigorously adhered to and enforced because of the greater risk.
[flagged]
Please keep your comments within the HN Guidelines. There's no need for you to attack the person replying to you. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Once in the Lake Lure area on Saturday, Seidhom said he first landed at the nearest airport and met with multiple law enforcement officers and first responders to coordinate communication channels with them and to find out what was needed and where he should go to help."
He did contact local officials and coordinate with them. Why didn't these local officials point him in the right direction?
Edit in response to your edit: he also contacted the airport and followed all FAA regulations.
2nd edit response: so the fact that the assistant fire chief threatened to have him arrested implies his guilt? No one has ever been threatened with arrest without having broken a law?
He should've approached the South Carolina Emergency Management Division, perhaps: https://www.scemd.org/recover/volunteer-and-donate/
Or contacted one of the organisations listed here: https://www.fema.gov/disaster/4829
He was an S.C. Pilot flying into NC, and for what it’s worth the area he was flying supplies into was, to put it in desktop GUI terms
CTRL-A and CTRL-SHIFT-DELETE
All the people clamoring to defend the lame fire chief against the defend just don’t get it.
This a world-class disaster area and if someone is willing to risk their own safety to get supplies to people in imminent threat of perishing themselves… that’s a good thing. Life isn’t a 0-risk game, and definitely not in an insane disaster area.
Then he should've approached the equivalent organisations in North Carolina, such as https://www.nc.gov/working/volunteer-opportunities/volunteer..., as linked from https://governor.nc.gov/news/press-releases/2024/10/01/rescu....
Asking volunteers to not just rush in and do things themselves without coordinating via the proper organisations set up for that purpose is standard for every disaster. For instance: https://matadornetwork.com/change/why-you-shouldnt-run-out-t...
> if someone is willing to risk their own safety
Except its not "their own safety".
If the guy crashes, or runs out of fuel, or has a mechanical fault, or, or .....
What happens then ?
Oh yeah, that's right, the professionals have to come scoop up the remains.
Its all fun and games playing the hero, until the fun stops.
I'm willing to believe he was flying according to FAA regulations, which includes flying a properly maintained and fueled aircraft and taking all applicable hazards into account. (This is the basic assumption of good faith. That and I presume he has a license which says he's able to operate his helicopter competently and safely.)
Is he trained in search and rescue? Flying into and landing in confined spaces? Assessing the suitability of disaster landing zones in terms of surface quality and debris?
None of that is part of the regular FAA-regulated private pilot training syllabus.
> So if the official who threatened arrest was the "correct" firefighter to coordinate with, why didn't the official incorporate him into the larger operation rather than threaten him?
There are any number of valid reasons from liability to the inability to vet the pilot's skills and licenses to the danger of introducing a pilot unfamiliar with the current SOP/LOPs.
That's the best steelman of the fire official's position that I've seen, but it still sounds like it was a decent general rule, being overapplied when it was inappropriate for the situation (per the pilot's testimony, there were no other helicopters operating in the area, when he was threatened with arrest if he went back to pick up his son).
I agree the fire chief's response could've been better, but I'm also willing to cut people at the local response level a bit of slack in being overwhelmed, exhausted, and perhaps not fully aware of all the moving parts above them.
That's why it's so important as a volunteer to approach the organisations, units, groups, etc who are set up to accept and onboard volunteer help.
I don't have it handy. Caught a tiktok last night of a separate helicopter pilot. It is not one guy either. There are several private choppers trying to help. The one I heard, he had rescued a newborn and an older woman on oxygen. Both would otherwise be dead now. He says there are people with makeshift SOS markers and simply not enough public helicopter help. Apparently the rescue effort is focused on clearing 10 to 40 miles of downed trees. It needs to be on getting people airlifted out, flying through canyons, finding stuck survivors. There should be a fleet of army helicopters there three days ago. People are dying.
If they don't want people "getting in the way" then they have to be actually doing something. They are simply costing lives due to ego politics. They should be helping coordinate not shut down help.
There is an organisation, the Carolina Emergency Response Team, that's coordinating private helicopters for the response. That's who he should've approached from the start, and according to the article he's flying for them now.
There are plenty of military helicopters, but in several areas the available landing zones aren't large enough, which is why the CERT is coordinating small private helicopters.
You’re saying this well after the fact. This incident occurred in the immediate after math of the storm when these fancy government agencies were still asleep at the wheel.
I myself had to ignore all the usual “stay off the road, don’t drive under or over downed trees and power lines” to get relatives out of Asheville.
In times of crises, these rules, however well intentioned, are just suggestions. If you understand why the rules are there, how to safely inform them, and need to break them, break them.
Sometimes there just isn’t a bull on the other side of Chesterton’s fence no matter how much people might think there is.
Having been part in localized efforts after a similar event, it's nearly always that the national emergency response is late, slowly, bureaucratic and makes things worse.
Some Bigwigs talking over people with local knowledge, ignoring advice, wanting to press their processes and rules...
Most people, after a couple of days were all aligned 'Leave the money and the equipment, we will do the rest.'
> common for disaster response and search & rescue teams to ask random volunteers to stand down and stop trying to "self-deploy" and help on their own
Agree that the article is inherently (and self consciously) biased, having only one side’s account. But I’m training to be a pilot and I know quite a few people in SAR. The fire chief should have used, if not the pilot, the helicopter.
Not really possible if you don't have readily available pilots to fly it.
The fire chief should have directed him to the organisation coordinating volunteers with their own helicopters, the Carolina Emergency Response Team, but it's possible he didn't know about it.
> if you don't have readily available pilots to fly it
Sure. But it’s easier to find a pilot than a helicopter in a disaster. My point is threatening the pilot with arrest and sending him and his chopper away makes no sense.
As I said elsewhere, I'm willing to cut those responders at the local level a bit of slack given that they're probably exhausted, overwhelmed, and not fully aware of all the parts of the response. That's why it's important to offer your services via the organisations/groups/etc set up for it, rather than finding the nearest local first responders.
People in authority get no slack when they start abusing power to flex without having a good reason. This dude just didn’t like being challenged.
When last did you run disaster response in any area for something of this scale?
Emergency and disaster response organisations always ask people not to just rock up and do their own thing, but to go via the correct channels when volunteering for help. It's not an ego thing.
That's why it's important to not have chiefs defaulting to fear of losing control vs fear of losing lives.
You can see this in other chaotic situations, such as war. Command and control structures work great until they get overwhelmed by too many events on the ground, at which point they completely gridlock.
> m willing to cut those responders at the local level a bit of slack
Why don't you consider they may be incompetent as an option?
Without clear evidence of incompetence, why would I prioritise that option? The official's actions make sense in terms of existing and normal regulations and practices in disasters.
Also, if you don't want to deal with local fire chiefs who don't know everything about the air operations, maybe don't approach them first and instead approach the actual units and organisations that are coordinating the air response.
> Without clear evidence of incompetence
Incompetence is the default state of every human organization. You rather need proof of competence not to assume it.
> This is one guy and his helicopter, which in the greater scheme of things isn't so bad. But imagine it's 20, 30, or a 100 all doing what he's doing.
Also don't forget the basic motto of First Responders .... "don't become a statistic by adding yourself to the count".
The fact of the matter here also is that law enforcement, first responders, search and rescue etc. etc. do this sort of stuff all day long every day. They have training, they have well established lines of communication, etc. etc.
One guy and his helicopter trying to be a hero is, sadly, only likely to cause more problems than fix them. The professionals on the ground would likely rather have random civilians "out of their hair" instead of hanging around "trying to be helpful".
If the civilian professionals have trouble keeping up, they have lines of communication up to the military for backup support.
I know it sounds harsh. But really, in a first-world country like the US, just leave it to the professionals and the well established protocols.
So he was a licensed pilot flying in normal/unregulated airspace (initially no flight restrictions in NOTAM) . So his actions to that point were legal (and within the limits of regular established protocols, to use your terminology) .
If officials want civilians out of their hair they can declare a temporary flight restriction, which in fact someone did declare 30 minutes after the discussion with the fire official. (And it is strongly implied it was the fire official)
That said, some of the people on the ground actually promised to shield him; so there appears to have been a rather strong organizational split wrt attitudes towards pilot assistance. [1]
Note that a TFR MAY include coordination contact information. Which this one apparently did: "CTC ASHEVILLE APP WITHIN 20NM ON 125.8" (from the map summary in the September 29 screenshot in the article).
The balance of your thesis does seem to come under pressure with the Mon 30 Sept screenshot; which shows the TFR lifted and multiple aircraft (said to be helicopters) working in the area.
This is based just on information in this article. You might be basing your opinion on more general information?
[1] "...but we can tell you if you come back with the victim, we’ll have you a designated landing spot and we’ll make sure they don’t come over here"
> He should've approached the relevant air operations cell
The one that was not yet deployed?
It was deployed, it sounds like he just wasn't aware of it. For instance, the Carolina Emergency Response Team was coordinating private helicopter assistance from Hickory airport.
AFAICT from TFA, it looks like this cell could only have been active from Sept. 30th, as it was when the no-flight zone was removed. IIUC, the guy started its stuff the 28th, and the incident happened the 29th.
The cell was active before, CERT is assisting it, not replacing it. The article doesn't provide the necessary background information on when it started operations, only when the subject of the article became aware of it.
> The cell was active before
Then why was a no-fly zone set up? That sounds pretty counter-productive?
Not really. The no-fly zone still allows for military flights and any flights authorised by them or whoever else is performing the air traffic coordination.
> But imagine it's 20, 30, or a 100 all doing what he's doing.
> His mistake was only coordinating with some local firefighters, and believing that was enough.
This was my same thought. Also, if it's only half-coordinated and an accident happens, who pays for the damages or the lost human lives?
I know the intentions were exemplary and that they are heroes, but one first has to zoom out a bit.
Love how the article always says "out-of-state chief"
Oh, nonsense. This local police officer had no idea what they were doing.
Otherwise, they would have restricted the airspace on an ongoing basis: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/foa_html...
They did it temporarily, and once. At loggerheads with other rescue efforts.
Fire chief, not police officer.
does either have any authority over airspace? There seems to be encroachment of local and state powers on the airspace, like for example states passing the laws de-facto prohibiting any meaningful flying of drones. Drones in emergencies like this could have been very useful. Of course, one could immediately say that adding drones, especially if a large number of them, would complicate things - yet it is the obvious catch-22 - why no advanced control system of flying of large number of drones have so far been developed? - because de-facto no drone flying is allowed.
Random individuals flying their drones are a hazard to rescue helicopters and other aircraft.
that is because no drone-incorporating airspace control system exists right now. The question is why such a system is not even in planning stages.
>Random individuals flying their drones are a hazard to rescue helicopters and other aircraft.
Is it so really? In Ukraine war a lot of de-facto random individuals from both sides are flying a lot of drones without pretty much any coordination and control system and in combat conditions, much tougher than civilian emergency, and mostly in FPV mode without direct LOS, frequently at night, yet no drone-helicopter/aircraft collisions have so far been reported (and everybody watching the aircraft and helicopter losses very closely)
> that is because no drone-incorporating airspace control system exists right now. The question is why such a system is not even in planning stages.
There are several approaches to this problem, but it usually requires that the drones are all running compatible control and communication software. e.g. [0] https://www.flytbase.com/blog/drone-disaster-relief
> Is it so really? In Ukraine war a lot of de-facto random individuals from both sides are flying a lot of drones without pretty much any coordination and control system and in combat conditions, much tougher than civilian emergency, and mostly in FPV mode without direct LOS, frequently at night, yet no drone-helicopter/aircraft collisions have so far been reported (and everybody watching the aircraft and helicopter losses very closely)
Those people aren't random, they're part of organised military forces and are part of command and control networks. Troops do reduce certain types of drone activities when they're informed that their own aircraft will be overlying their positions. And that's even though both sides are flying comparatively few helicopter sorties at the front lines because of the constant threat from air defence.
As an aside, there have been collisions, at least one of which was intentional.
[0] https://www.flytbase.com/blog/drone-disaster-relief
>Those people aren't random, they're part of organised military forces and are part of command and control networks.
these C&C networks don't control drones in the air. And most the people in the both fighting forces are mostly random ones really. If they got drones, frequently bought themselves or donated by volunteers - they fly them, if not - then not.
> Troops do reduce certain types of drone activities when they're informed that their own aircraft will be overlying their positions.
I don't know where you heard this. From what i heard - they frequently even can't discern whether this is their drone or an enemy's one.
> these C&C networks don't control drones in the air. And most the people in the both fighting forces are mostly random ones really. If they got drones, frequently bought themselves or donated by volunteers - they fly them, if not - then not.
I didn't say they did. Being part of command and control networks means that troops are informed of air operations by their own side over radio or other communications channels.
> I don't know where you heard this. From what i heard - they frequently even can't discern whether this is their drone or an enemy's one.
From acquaintances and friends in the Ukrainian armed forces on or near the front lines.
I've spent a significant amount of time working in disaster response. In the US (and probably elsewhere), you have "Disaster Cowboys." These are people who are untrained but fancy they know better how to do things than people who have spent their lives training for these types of scenarios. Picture 1000 people showing up with their pickups and John boats following Hurricane Katrina. Or, imagine the Coast Guard conducting a search grid and all of these people zooming around the grid in every which way.
On one hand, yes, they save some people. On the other hand, they are not on the official search grid rosters, don't tend to take directions well from the authorities, and can cause all sorts of havoc. They can make it harder to find people in need. In fact, when they don't coordinate with the authorities, they end up wasting the experts' time (who may end up covering the same ground) or, when they do coordinate, people in need end up getting missed because the random people who show up to help are not properly trained to conduct searches.
Finally, as this news article shows, these folks have a tendency to go to the media and present themselves as heroes. You very rarely see that from the official search and rescue/recovery teams.
Disaster response is extremely psychologically and emotionally stressful. You may ride a wave of adrenaline while you're out in the field, but most staff end up rotating out (by mandate) after several days to protect them. Even among professionals, there are a lot of people who end up relying on alcohol to ease their minds.
Most importantly, the dignity of the people being rescued/recovered is important. It is all about those people, not about the hero rescuers. They are literally in trauma and can be dangerous and/or in need of urgent help, medical or otherwise. It is desperately unfair to them when somebody untrained, with a "cowboy" attitude, shows up and flips the script. Or, even worse, the cowboy crashes his helicopter and there's one more person who needs to be rescued.
Not all people who randomly show up in their helicopters or John boats are like this, but enough of them are to sow chaos. And look at us all wasting time talking about this guy who feels slighted because his unprofessional help was refuted. It's the same story every time.
Let the professionals do their job and, at the very least, let them coordinate the volunteers who show up to help. It sounds like a great idea for everybody to show up in their helicopter, but trust me, it's not.
"It is desperately unfair to them when somebody untrained, with a "cowboy" attitude, shows up and flips the script. "
Those rescued by the cowboys did not expressed that. Sure, everyone prefers the professionals to show up, but if they don't, because they are overwhelmed by the situation, I surely would be glad, if an "cowboy" comes instead to pick me up.
Troublemakers in search for attention are to be kept away for sure, but those who are reasonable and willing to help and have a helicopter, like the person from the story, are probably open for an official way to help. Not what happened here.
> Those rescued by the cowboys did not expressed that
Probably, but that's literal survivorship bias: those who died due to a badly-performed search have nothing to say.
But those investigating that would have?
In other words, sources please.
The article is written with an obvious slant, from the perspective of a guy who decided to go to the media to bash first responders after being asked to coordinate via proper channels.
I would take anything he said with a huge grain of salt.
"I would take anything he said with a huge grain of salt."
I do and I did not like that reporting, but if the facts are somewhat right, the arrest threat from wanting to at least still pick up his left behind son is way over the line, of anything reasonable.
Is it? He was simply told not to fly in that area anymore. Either his son was fine in which case no big deal, or his son wasn't fine in which case he was creating more people who needed to be rescued.
The son was left there on a mission agreed with local official staff to rescue a person of greater need, which otherwise would have been needed to rescue anyway.
If the local chief decides to send a free helicopter away is one thing, but then sending the father away while failing to provide another extraction is just a sign of not being able to handle the situation.
Ideally, there would have been an easy process for volunteers to get involved. They might have told him to come, but with the son back at home.
We call them Walter Mittys, not Disaster Cowboys, but yes, these people appear at every scene. Everything else you said rings true, but sometimes motives are more sinister than a desire for personal glory. Vulnerable people attract predators and there's plenty of vulnerable people in disaster zones.
This is a bunch of gatekeeping with “yeah, they save lives, but might cause harm”. Has anyone actually done analysis to determine if a bunch of amateurs is actually a net negative?
Search and rescue people get upset by these people not following authority, but that’s a standard response anytime amateurs show up to something. It’s the same dilemma of allowing regular people to serve food to large groups. Sure, discourage it if there is enough actual food to serve the survivors, but you sure as hell shouldn’t be doing it when the alternative is starvation.
The same applies when you have dudes like this pilot who was flying where nobody else was. The people out there had 0% chance of rescue without him. Grounding “the cowboy” is just an authority flex.
Do you not think that, if every disaster response and search & rescue organisation is saying the same thing about people just rocking up to get involved without the right coordination, that they might have a reason for it rather than just 'gatekeeping'?
So the main problem is what? Control? 1000 people show up and your leadership skills or ego can handle it? Sure be embarrassing if they outdid the government, that’s for sure.
How about this: get out of their way. Or even better: clear their paths. Or conduct your own operations and don’t worry about it.
What would your reaction be if someone showed up to your place of work and just started trying to do things how they thought they should be done, ignoring the proper channels and now knowing any of the procedures?
Bad analogy. If someone considers a disaster zone to be their personal fiefdom, they have a screw loose.
Is enforcing established procedures making it their "personal fiefdom"? Because this is how most jobs work in my experience
There was not a shred of established procedure. Till a day later.
Well said. Your point about 'disaster cowboys' is especially important, as disasters also unfortunately tend to attract people with a hero complex and without sufficient skills to be doing what they're doing.
That's why you have proper volunteer organisations so that volunteers can be vetted before running around the disaster area.
Imagine working your ass off trying to rescue people and someone goes to the media after being asked to coordinate through proper channels and sends a pitchfork mob after you.
Well, looks like the pioneer spirit is well dead and buried in the US.
"You are not allowed to do anything without the approval of the Nameless, Faceless Bureaucracy [that isn't coming to help anyway]."
What would your reaction be if someone showed up to your place of work and just started trying to do things how they thought they should be done, ignoring the proper channels and now knowing any of the procedures?
It’s not a place of work. It’s America.
It’s also a disaster zone beyond anything some keyboard warriors need be pontificating on.
Ive personally had to deliver diesel into Asheville to rescue family with a two month old over the weekend. You might see some nice PR photos coming out from the last day or two of Chinooks and cargo drops but at the time this incident occurred, there was nothing going on out there. If you didn’t know someone who could help you, or make it to a central place point you were SOL.
Here and today, now, even with assets in place it just isn’t enough.
It is the place of work of the disaster recovery people, who have established communication channels and procedures. If there is literally nobody coming to help you, then it may be reasonable to go ahead and do it yourself, but it feels incredibly unwise to do it if there are already people trying to do things
Yes and at the time there was no one coming to help. This incident didn’t occur yesterday, it occurred immediately after the storm in a town that is, to this day, unreachable.
Respectfully, please get your facts straight here. The ignorance of HN is well on display in this thread.
If you're stuck for days without food, water or electricity, who do you want running to the rescue - the guy with a helicopter, or the bureaucrat with a rule book?
A lot of folks in the comments are acting like this was one of what they refer to as "cowboys".
Yet the guy went through each and every hoop to cooperate and coordinate properly with the ATC (which should dispell all the "100 planes in the air" worries) and the local IC (that set up a landing zone for the guy and gave him the frequencies to coordinate).
I understand that there may be some vigilantes that would ignore the rules and procedures but this guy with his previous expertise in fire and rescure went through all the stages to help.
The local fire chief was either on a power trip, or had a knee-jerk reaction to out of org help (which IMO disqualifies him from being an effective IC capable of using the available resources to prioritize human life). It is very clear that the guy was absolutely ready to cooperate according to the rules that the chief would set, but ordering him to not go back for his son is ABSOLUTELY a power trip.
The only ATC the article says he spoke to was the Tower at Charlotte-Douglas International, to get permission to fly over the airport. They only manage the area immediately around the airport, and it's not the ATC that's coordinating the disaster response and managing the aircraft over the disaster area.
That is my point. Any order regarding flight restrictions will be immediately disseminated by the local ATC, and I do understand that the ATC does not coordinate the rescue effort over the area, my point is he DID get the permission and actively attempted and successfully coordinated and complied withe the DR team who set up a landing zone for him.
My point being this is a clear failure of the IC (the fire chief in this case)
He spoke to local first responders, not to the people actually coordinating the air response.
There are different ATCs and areas of responsibility. The only one the article says he spoke to was the Tower at an airport in Charlotte, over 100km away. They're only going to have been concerned with what he was doing in the immediate airport vicinity as crossing traffic, not where he was going to and what he'd be doing there.
There obviously wasn't a no-fly zone over Charlotte at the time, so the ATC would not have had to disseminate the info during their communications. Instead, that would be reflected in NOTAMS issued by the FAA.
Reminds me of the themes in "How one ED mobilized his department during a mass casualty incident" (I only found this HN thread [0], but I think there were others). Their decisions went in opposite directions: that ER adapted to a disaster by decentralizing and diffusing responsibility, whereas this air traffic thing (if this story's accurate) insists on decisions flowing through central points of control–which are degrading under high workload.
(I'm *not* asserting if what the NC people are doing is necessarily wrong in context–I don't know enough about air-traffic control to know that).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247841
The government’s main concern is preserving itself and its budget (for its contractors).
I don’t know why we keep having to relearn this lesson over and over again. Your life does not matter to them; their primary concern is their preserving their power.
The disaster porn false reports have been nasty; but not as bad as Katrina, in nature or in reach.
We've got people repeating (false, AFAIK) reports that "supplies are being confiscated!" but as yet I haven't seen major media saying "cannibalism!"
The most pernicious propaganda on this one is going to be "its not worth rebuilding." Its going to take major effort to pry some of the rednecks out of their ancestral mountain homes but there's apparently a lot of people ready to begin already.
Sounds like it was actually the assistant fire chief who threatened arrest (from what I've seen on twitter)
In some cases wouldn’t it make more sense to use a drone to drop off water and supplies? I imagine private operators could pitch in as long as their efforts are coordinated with official responders. Of course depending on the load capacity of the drone it may require several round trips.
Edit: Indeed they are being used and saving lives! Get on it HackerNews :)
NEARLY HALF-DOZEN! No, it’s 5. Or maybe 4. Great article with even greater drama building style!
It strange how little news coverage this situation gets in the rest of the world...
Its not that news worthy outside of the states. Europe has their own floods right now, and have had the last couple of years. Its also nothing compared to the weather catastrophes other places in the world routinely overlooked by western press.
So no, not strange at all.
We had 2 weeks parts of countries being destroyed by water in Europe. I was in NYC that time and saw maybe 1 minute of info in TV. Sometimes I think that’s maybe it is better this way.
I don't think in a crisis you should throw out all laws and rules. Sometimes engineering managers (CTOs) make that mistake too.
And sometimes, in a crisis, it’s ok to skip formal processes to get back online.
No one is saying abandon all law here, that’s a straw man
What happened to the lady’s husband?
Worse than he deserved, I guarantee you that.
This makes the blood boil
Well... I do not know much the US culture but... To my EU taste, if an officer in an emergency tell me something illogical without justification he/she might be sued for attempted omission of assistance, threats, misconduct during a crisis. So he/she better back of or got trouble instead. I se NO POINT in being assertive and even no point in publishing an article, a simple formal complaint with all the relevant charges without saying another word to him.
FEMA override?
Whoever that "fire official" is, he is clearly a bureaucrat going on a power trip ecstatic that he finally gets to lord over the peasants and plebs begging for help at his whims.
If the gods decide one day it's his turn to be fucked sideways, I shall have no sympathy.
That's one explanation, and it's absolutely possible that you're correct. Another possible explanation is that this is a person who is under immense stress and just doesn't have the mental flexibility right now to deal with integrating a private pilot into what I expect is quite a complex operation.
Do I hope I'd react better than this guy in the same situation? I sure do. Am I sure that I would, given the context of what is currently happening? Not really.
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> ACAB
This is ambitiously wrong to the point of parody.
One, fire chiefs are not cops. Two, the cops in the story were coördinating with the pilot. Three, the fucking pilot is a “a Class 1 certified law enforcement officer.”
ACAB applies in the sense that ACAB can be seen as a general critique of all hierarchical authority, not just law enforcement officers on duty.
It's obvious that the previous pointer did not use such a strict interpretation of ACAB and applying such an interpretation here only serves to poison the discussion.
I agree with everything you wrote, except: using that pretentious "hey look, I read the New Yorker" diaeresis is a surefire way to alienate the sort of person who thinks "ACAB" belongs in an adult conversation. Though it doesn't sound like you were trying to make friends.
>using that pretentious "hey look, I read the New Yorker" diaeresis is a surefire way to alienate the sort of person who thinks "ACAB" belongs in an adult conversation.
Why? I thought the "ACAB" crowd are well educated (or at least like to think they are), and generally like European-adjacent things like adding diaeresis in English? If anything, on the "ACAB <-> thin blue line" spectrum, I'd expect the latter to be inflamed by the "I read the New Yorker diaeresis" more.
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> FEMA is out of money, because they spend $1 billion supporting illegal immigrants
FEMA is not in a cash shortage. It projects it will run out of cash. But that doesn’t impact present operations. (Technically, the whole government runs out of cash in December.) And remember: President Trump used FEMA funds on illegal immigrants, too [1].
[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/aug/30/pete-butti...
That’s a lot of hand waving to say the exact same result
While the brave men should be applauded, can I vent my frustration about these victims, who decided it was a good idea to stay alone in a mountain AirBnB in the possible path of an incoming hurricane (I won’t even say this if they actually lived there)? It’s not like the hurricane came out of nowhere, there was plenty of advance warning. Good people sometimes die trying to rescue these idiots. Oh and there’s also a 4yo? WTF.
This is a mountain area with regular residents that is over five hours of driving from the ocean. They expected a couple inches of rain. They didn't expect 20 inches and a dam to break.
Nobody predicted this kind of damage. These were not idiots who ignored warnings. These are people who were hit with an unprecedented natural disaster and if you had called them idiots outloud around here you may end up with a broken nose.
A couple inches? NOAA was forcasting record flooding days before the storm. Local news in the Triangle were showing pictures from the 1916 Asheville flood and saying this storm was going to be worse. There were mandatory evacuation orders all over.
The severity of the situation leading up to the storm wasn't lost on me. We need to understand how people didn't get the message, or didn't believe it if they did get it, or got it and believed it but didn't have an option to leave. Those people didn't have to get stranded.
A friend has a kid in a school in Boone. The school didn't officially close until the storm was almost over them. My friends kid wasn't going to leave because they didn't want to miss a test. My friend pulled their kid out of their apartment in the middle of the night as the flood waters started rising. My friend knew what was happening, but the school officials didn't? That kind of ignorance is excredible dangerous.
Five hours of driving from the ocean is nothing. I have lived on opposite sides of the world and prepared for both hurricanes and typhoons plenty of times while being further from shore. I have prepared for two recently. These aren’t natural disasters without warning (unlike say earthquakes), and while you can hardly mitigate the damage, there’s no excuse being stranded unless you simply live alone. Maybe people in your area collectively have no preparedness at all, if they all think moving away from a mountain AirBnB into civilization in preparation for a hurricane is outlandish.
Gotcha. These people, mostly residents, should have disregarded the predictions of 2 inches of water, assumed it could be, literally 10x as bad, and should have relocated, potentially at expense rates that would hurt their paycheck to paycheck situation. What idiots.
Airbnb renters shouldn't be going into mountains during storms in general. Why do you keep bringing them up though? What percentage of the people stranded, dying, and dead are you ascribing to short term renters? I would be astounded to discover if it was more than 5%.
> mountain AirBnB ... (I won’t even say this if they actually lived there)
How about reading comments you reply to? Anyway, I’m done with this bad faith exchange.
Edit: Thanks for the shadow edit changing your comment entirely after my reply, making a bad faith exchange worse. Why do I keep bringing AirBnB renters up? Maybe because I read the article before commenting and it’s what the particular incident is about?
I won’t further change my reply even if there are more shadow edits.
Clearly I read your comment as dismissing the general population there as airbnb travelers with the proviso that some may actually live there
This is an unprecedented hurricane and humans make mistakes. These folks will never make that mistake in the future :)
Even a significantly weaker hurricane can end badly for you if you’re alone in the mountains when it rips through.