Published Sept. 30, 2024, 2:41 p.m.
Going live with coverage in the disaster zone in North Carolina within the hour Cindy Fortner X/Twitter: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1YpJkloBNnoxj Rumble: https://rumble.com/v5gx01t-bnn-brandenburg-news-network-9302024-live-coverage-of-helene-disaster-in-no.html https://rumble.com/v5gx0cl-bnn-brandenburg-news-network-9302024-live-coverage-of-helene-disaster-in-no.html Guests: Donna Brandenburg, Cindy Fortner
Hi, and welcome to the special edition of Brandenburg News Network. This afternoon, I am Donna Brandenburg, and it is the thirtieth day of September, twenty twenty four. To all of my viewers that watch on a regular basis, I decided to jump on this afternoon after talking to my friend Sydney Cindy Fortner. And I just wanted to decided that it was time for us to snap the cameras on. So I want to give you a little background on this. Okay. I don't like secondhand news because you can't confirm anything and you don't know who is, who's spinning the, the alleged truth for their own gain. Well, let me tell you, I, I know, I know Cindy and she's a friend of mine. She actually stayed up here, helped take care of my dad before he died. And I've known her for a long time. and really consider her incredibly an incredible person. She's well informed. She cares about people deeply. And she has always unique perspectives on what's going on as somebody who can actually research for herself and not be told what to say and what to do. So I want to bring her on right now and welcome Cindy onto our show. Hey, Cindy, how you doing? Let's see if we get her on here. Connection's a little slow. Hey, Cindy, how you doing? Yeah, I'm good. Is everything okay? Yeah, you're doing great. The connection seems to be slow off and on, and I'm assuming that's due to being down. It is, yeah. They're having trouble. Yeah, the disaster zone down there a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, we're having trouble getting. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, we're there. The service here is like spotty. We do have service here at the casino, but they said it's kind of coming in and out, but right now it seems to be holding. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to tell you what I've seen online. It's just absolutely horrific. And being able to talk to you who is on the ground there and seeing what's actually, actually happening is from somebody who's local, I think gives a very unique perspective to what's actually, and I mean, actually um going on on the ground um can you please tell everybody exactly the terrain down there because what I've seen other people bring to the table is it's shots of a disaster area but it's really not talking about the human cost and what's happening to the people and what the instant needs are down there because we're going to see more people die and a lot more people die until unless somebody gets off their behind, gets a plan, it gets in there to help people that are on the ground. So just as I talked to you a couple of hours ago, I was going through town and saw a train of rescue coming in buses, boats, police officers. So I went over to interview them to see what was going on. They, the federal marshals, the agents that are here are here to protect the people that are here to do the rescue and searches. I don't know why they need federal marshals for that, but they are all over the place. They came in from Florida. The one fellow I talked to was from Chicago. So they're all from all over the country and they're staging these rescue events all over the area, not just here in Cherokee. This just happens to be one, one issue that they're sending them out from one place they can stage. because we do have some kind of service right here. First two days, we had no service anywhere at all. We still are not able to make a nine one one call. So if anything goes wrong, any rescue needed or anybody has an emergency, you have to drive to your closest fire station to be able to pick them up. They instituted some type of a roaming device that if they happen to have a Terrible emergency. You can reach them, but it's a roaming service only. So it's hitting this. We all knew the storm was coming in. I used to live on the coast of South Carolina. So I'm familiar with hurricanes. Hugo just hit thirty five years ago on my dad's birthday in McClellanville, South Carolina. So we took a direct hit. Knowing all that, I'm always ready for storms to come through up here. Nobody knew this was going to come in like this. So. you're sitting here waiting for a rainstorm to come in. And we had rain three days previous to all this rain coming in. So not associated to the hurricane, just three days of constant rain. Prior to that, we've had a drought. So the rain didn't go anywhere, just rolled off. So then when it started Friday afternoon, well, it started Thursday night. By Friday morning, some places were already up to twelve, fifteen inches of rain. In the end, some places got thirty inches of rain. So you're talking about all that rain coming down from the top of the mountains, starting up in Tennessee, and then it comes all the way down through North Carolina and then on down into South Carolina and Georgia with nowhere to go. So from what I understand and from the pictures that we can get, Asheville, North Carolina is not recognizable. There's nothing left of it. It's still underwater. The water has nowhere to go, so it's not draining. Montreat College, wiped out. Black Mountain, North Carolina, which is the home of the famous Billy Graham. From what I understand, Black Mountain is also destroyed. Marshall University, right up here at Marshall, North Carolina, all wiped out. You go a little bit further over, we were just in Lake Lure. I used to live there in the nineties, having lunch by the lake and Not five or six days later, there's nothing left of the town down from Chimney. So it starts up at Bat Cave. It's sort of like the top of the peak. And you wind your way down through a little two-lane snake road into Chimney Rock. And then it winds on further down into Bat Cave. Lake Roar, excuse me. Everything let loose. Mudslides and all that let loose at Bat Cave. Pushed it through Chimney Rock. And all of that that you just saw in that video is the debris that's laying on top of the surface of the lake at Lake Roar. So everybody... What's so bad is a good bit of our population here is very impoverished. A lot of people you find living in permanent campsites with like permanent roofs over their little, you know, shade over their campers or whatever. And that's where they've come to retire. A lot of these people will never be found. It's washed out. And, you know, they were living in permanent sites. So it's not like they could evacuate because they have nowhere to go. A lot of these people live in like here on the reservation, they don't have cars. We have a transit available, but if you can't call transit, you don't have transportation. So basically some people are walking the streets. My son is a manager of the local pawn shop. The first two days, they were the only ones with internet service at all. So people were coming in panicked because they all left Florida coming here to get away from the hurricane. Once it hit here Friday, all communication was cut. All banks are gone. No money was here. Nobody had any way to get out of here. And Cash only. So it's been kind of apocalyptic. The highways are washed out beyond repair all the way up to the side of the mountain. So they just opened up a road, I understand, between Tennessee and here. So you can come through. Otherwise, it's pretty much cut off from the rest of the state. Wow. You were telling me about one. Let's show this video for everybody so that if they haven't seen it, that they can see exactly the devastation and tell people what they're looking at, if you would, here. I'm going to see if I can full screen this a minute. And so that people can know what they're looking at. So if most people don't know, a portion of Dirty Dancing was filmed in Lake Lure in nineteen eighty seven is when they wrapped it up. They had their screen party and it was Patrick Swayze's birthday when they closed it out. So we had a big influx of people there from Hollywood and all that. It's a twenty three mile radius manmade lake, the beachfront waterfront. And we just went last Saturday for the first time in years. We had gone up to an apple orchard and went by Lake Lure just to check it out for old time's sake and had a picnic. What you're seeing is houses and everything that was in them. Boats, no doubt, probably there's bodies in that water. And that is the surface of Lake Lure. You can't see the water for the debris. So you're talking about an entire town. The dam, they have a dam there. Although the dam did not breach, didn't break, it was imminent to break. Water was going around it and over it. So even if you were within close proximity of that dam, you also got washed out. The only way I know to clean this out is because it's a man-made lake. I just got word from, and this is straight from the guys from the federal marshals, over the airwaves, they're telling people that there's about a thousand people missing or unaccounted for. These guys just told me there's eleven thousand people unaccounted for and missing right now. Not just here, but in all the areas. You're talking probably around a two hundred mile radius. Eleven thousand people. Missing or unaccounted for. Yes. And the reality is that, well, I'm glad the marshals are on the ground there and that they're, you know, who's in charge? Is there anybody in charge that's got a plan that's, you know, really, can you tell who it is? Not really. When I first pulled up, when they were first starting to come into town, I stopped and just started questioning the officers. They were the first ones on site besides a couple of buses. and what they told me were they were federal marshals marshals here to protect the guys that are doing the rescuing and they don't have any certain they were getting ready to form their meeting to decide where they were going to go and where they'll be sent and so just now right before I came in and we got started I rode through the parking lot again and now they're they've got a full team down there now I saw rescuers walking with dogs so that means they've got bodies sipping dogs out they're going to look for you know, what they can find or, and possibly too, there may be people that are, you know, that they can locate that are still alive. I don't know how, but so they were just all meeting in the middle of the parking lot when I drove through. And I guess right now for the first time, since this hit Thursday night, Friday morning, they are going out to the community. He told me that they had come up from Florida. They were all sent to Florida. So they were just getting into town, uh, about twelve thirty this afternoon. And so right around two, they were just going together as a group to, I guess, be sent out to where, and the sun's coming out now for the first time since Thursday. So I asked them if they knew what they were getting ready to look to see. And they said they didn't know anything about it. They were coming here blind. Nobody has filled them in. They don't know what they're up against. They don't know what they're getting ready to go look at. So they don't, they don't know. And I don't know with that in mind, how do they have a plan? until they get here and just actually go. Because I don't know how you could wrap a plan around this mess. Well, let's talk about the cities as far as how many people were living in those cities that vanished and they're basically gone, you know, up the mountain. Well, you're not talking about big populations. And like the schools, the colleges, Montreat and Marshall, those are very small little schools you're probably talking about a thousand to fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand students on campus at a time. The town itself, they have like a Bojangles and a Taco Bell and that's it for food, fast food. So you can kind of guess it's not very well populated. The school is the majority of their infrastructure and their income for the economy. Asheville is a very large city. I don't know how it comes back from what it is right now. I saw pictures Especially the ones like down by the river district. They call it the art district, which basically it was the entire homeless camp was up and down that river. Now they've cleaned most of it out before all this happened just to do it. They've gone in and had rebuilt it and people were starting to come in and everybody was living down in that area, but they're in poor housing. It's like really old, old places that they're trying to refurbish and like shanties is basically all they were. So they didn't stand a chance once the water started coming up. It just... Took out railroad tracks, everything. I mean, there's nothing left. And it wasn't the wind. It was all the water and the rain, the rushing water, the floods. Herds of cattle. I mean, just everything you can imagine is gone. I don't even know where to go with some of this, you know, because it's like, you know, the human cost is just unbelievable with this. And the response from, say, like the federal response has been less than stellar from what I understand. They've had times, like I said, even if they didn't think about it Thursday night, By Friday morning, they knew that we were projected to get up to thirty inches of rain in an area that can't hold it. It's a bowl. We're in a mountain. Ashley's a bowl. Ashley. Asheville is a bowl. It's like Louisiana. Once the water goes in, whatever rained in there this past week is still sitting there. It hasn't gone out. It has nowhere to go. So it's going to be like scraping a barrel with a rake trying to find what's left over. And the people that lived in the higher elevations The thing about it is the governor has come out and he's had one interview and they're sending out five hundred and fifty National Guard. The federal government sent out fifteen hundred National Guard for five states. It's going to take fifteen hundred just to cut the trees down between here, Asheville, Henderson, Hendersonville, North Carolina, pretty much wiped out Waynesville, North Carolina, which is between here in Cherokee over the mountain down into Asheville on your way to Asheville, completely underwater. The stores off the reservation, from what I was told, the Walmart over in Silver, which is the closest town, twenty miles away, their shelves are bare. All the water is contaminated, so they're telling everybody to boil their water. But since we don't have TV and we don't have any kind of communications or cell phones right now, nobody's getting any kind of watches. We're not getting any alerts. We don't have any kind of information about what's going on. Strictly by word of mouth, people telling people what's going on. They have to drive down to a local community center. They've opened those up in just the last day, last twenty-four hours with a Wi-Fi service. So we've basically been, so during COVID, they shut the reservation down. They put, there's only two entrances in and off the Cherokee reservation. They blocked them down with law enforcement. Nobody could come in. Nobody could go out unless you had an ID. And they started doing that because there's curfews now in all these towns, seven thirty in the morning until seven thirty at night. And because the roads are so unstable, it's not only just where they washed out. You've got to know that the roads are undermined from below and the roads, the mudslides and the rock slides are a danger from above. So you can't say it's like you're taking a risk. You don't know when it's going to do anything to hit. And if you do get in an emergency situation like that, then it may be days before they find you. And that's only if somebody stumbles upon you right now. They're doing some rescues by air. They're begging people for that to try to find these people in the communities that have been cut off. And there's places we don't know about yet. They got hit three years ago with a big flood. So there's no telling about that either. Talk about the highways. Can you talk about the highways? Yeah, they... So going from Asheville down the mountain, as you're going to go towards Charlotte, so you're going from east west to east, it's about two hours from Asheville over to Charlotte. So as you're leaving Asheville, you go down a steep mountain and it's where you go down towards Black Mountain. And it's about a six lane highway. You have a complete drop off on the right hand side if you're going down and then the mountain is right there on the edge of the other six lanes. So going down and this is I-Forty leaving Asheville. I-Forty out of Asheville completely washed out and there's two lanes left hanging onto the side of the mountain, which would have been your return lanes coming back towards Asheville from Charlotte are the only things left and they're just hanging onto the side of the mountain. So you can't travel. So the, so the services can't get in or out to you other than by air is what it sounds like. Right now, out of Asheville, pretty much everything is by air. They have not opened up. They have a place called the Tale of the Dragon, and this is a very well-known area. It's a ride-or-die kind of trail. It's a road that comes down two lanes only. It starts at the top of the mountain, very windy. People come and go down on motorcycles and little cars and leave their parts and body parts all over the mountain. It's called the Tale of the Dragon. Up until today, that was the only way in or out of here, and it takes two hours to drive down it, and that was to get from Asheville just over to this side of Western North Carolina, which is only sixty miles away as the crow flies. But they opened up I- twenty six going towards Tennessee. So that's how the rescue people were able to get here is they came down from Ohio and then the other fellows came up from Florida. The marshals came from Florida. This group that's here now, they're from Ohio. So I took the video of all their they've got their boats, they've got their buses or command centers, generators. It's an entire casino parking lot full of equipment. But it took them. Today is Monday. Yeah, it is. But they told me, I interviewed several of the different officers, and they said it's going to take months to dig these people out, just to dig them out, not cleaning up. They don't even have an estimate of what it's going to do to clean it up. Basically, you'd have to go in and just bulldoze everything. Because everything, all the buildings, the surrounding towns around Asheville, leaving Cherokee and everything, are like little mill villages. So you have your little two small villages bedroom houses or frame houses that have been here since the forties. And it's been a thing to come in and buy them and remodel them. And the younger couples are kind of homestead, you know, starting out their new lives like that, but they're not built very soundly because they're so old. But when that much water comes in in that short amount of time and that much, we had not even on our winds. So we had hurricane force winds on top of the water coming through and it sat installed right over the top of us and didn't go anywhere. So with that, we're still sitting here in the mud. The reservation had very minimal damage, what we usually expect from a flash flood. It covered up the island, which is a park that they built for picnics and things like that. It kind of washed over it. But knowing what to expect, they have those tables bolted down to the concrete, so they generally don't float off. Only thing you have to watch out there is for the destruction of debris that comes from the top of the mountain. And you may have trees that are, you know, ten foot in diameter come washing down, so... And that's what a lot of the damage has been. It's been the bigger trees too. They're just crushing people's houses. But it's not leaving anything behind. You can't see where anything's been. Is there a way that communications can happen to people that haven't been able to talk to or find their loved ones in the area? I mean, how are people handling this? So for the first couple of days, it was sheer panic. People were trying to drive up here to find their loved ones, not being able to get even close to here because all the roads were cut off. My son was letting people use his private phone because the business told him they couldn't use their landline to make phone calls because it was people from all over trying to get phone calls out. From what I understand, T-Mobile and AT&T have their towers back up. But here in Cherokee, the only service you have with any service at all is Verizon. So until Verizon comes in and I think they've got three towers down until they come in and set up. That's our in general. That's what everybody, probably seventy five percent of the people here have Verizon. If you have satellite direct TV, you can watch TV, but you're not getting the news. I'm telling you right now, they're not talking about it. I have not seen a whole lot out there that's really covering this. And it's like, you know, the first thing I want to know is what's the plan? Is there a plan here of any type to address this? And if there isn't, why wasn't there one, you know, something in place beforehand? I mean, I know you can't, you can't, you can't foresee something like this happening, but there's usually they have emergency plans that, that are prepared in case of, you know, we've seen so many things happen lately, especially like the newest one that I saw was if a hundred, if there's a mass casualty event to a hundred of our congressmen, they're doing practices for that just to determine what they would do. Well, I guess I would kind of think that we've had enough duratios in the United States. I mean, I've worked in, we've worked in one of those areas. to see what an inland hurricane can do. And it's devastating. And it is one of those things that you're talking years and years and years and years. to even scratch the surface. I know one area in Florida is out of power, touched me personally down there actually. And it's two months before getting the electricity back on potentially and two years to get the substations to work to service the area again. I mean, this is a catastrophic, catastrophic hurricane. I saw where they listed Asheville in a list of the cities along with Maui and East Palestine, Ohio, as far as the massive amount of infrastructure that has been taken out. Asheville's a big city. I don't know the population there, but it's a very big city. And it's kind of a crossroads between, if you leave to go anywhere from this side of the mountain, you're all the way next to the Tennessee border. We're thirty-five miles from Tennessee right here in Cherokee. So we're basically at the furthest Eastern or Western point of North Carolina that you could be in. So to get out of Western North Carolina, you would have to go straight through Asheville. And so it's a thoroughfare pretty much to go up around, you know, beside anyway, North, South, East or West. All of our services, Asheville is a hub. So Amazon, Amazon distribution, their distribution center is Asheville. My son used to drive for them. Our food banks, Manna Food Bank that we get over here for locals and for employees at the casino comes every two weeks, comes out of Asheville. I'm sure it's wiped out. It took out the entire Goodwill Habitat store, not Goodwill, but the Habitat for Humanity store was sitting on the river. And the only thing left down there is a pair of railroad tracks hanging without a base underneath it, just the metal railroads ties across the sky. So all of our food service trucks for, restaurants, resorts, and all that come from Asheville. So we've got no way, and you can't get anything out of Greenville. So right now, unless we can reroute all of our services out of Tennessee, we're cut off from all of that. I don't even think we got mail today because your mail distribution comes out of Asheville too. Have you seen or heard what's going on in Tennessee? Cause I, from, for me, do you have any context down there? Because I haven't heard that much because I'm, I've been focused on your area a little bit and what's happened there. They had the flash floods. They had the floods like we did and no doubt they've had some rock slides and that kind of thing, but nothing like what we've had here. It went directly, directly over here. We took the direct hit. As soon as it left the coast down there, um, It kind of stalled out and it came up here and got here by Thursday night. And all this started coming in during the night. So nobody, you know, you wake up and you're it's still raining. You're like, OK, well, it's still raining. And then we're used to. So what they have ready here on a normal basis is high water rescue or possibly an earthquake every now and then, but nothing that tears anything up. They do have a lot of high water rescue because Western North Carolina is one of the top spots to come for kayaking. And they actually do a lot of their like preparations for going to the Olympics and things like that is done here in Western North Carolina because of the rivers and all. Well, any and all of that is, you know, I don't know when they'll do all that again, but just to show you the effects of the nature, it's already rough and fast flowing water when we're just having a normal flash flood. They're saying this one is more than once in a century. They're listing it up there with Hugo and the other major storms like Katrina that has ever destroyed an area. And I don't know why. I guess it's because of the sheer panic. They don't want the population here to know just how cut off they are. Because up until today, and even through today, my daughter was telling me there's a radio station out of Asheville and they've got five lines open for anybody that can call in and say, help me, whatever they need. And it's literally people that were in their cars that got out of their cars and were holding onto the guardrails on the side of the mountain, trying not to be washed away or they're calling and they're saying, I finally got a signal out. I'm standing on a stump in the middle of the lake and I can't get out. My house is underwater. Come help me. So my daughter was in tears last night. The casino is working. They do this all the time for like different tribes because it's tribal here. They'll get together food drives or clothing drives to go out West with some of the other tribes that aren't, anywhere near as well off as this one is, and we're still very impoverished here. But they're gonna get together, work crews, but I don't know what they can do. I've been there to clean up after Hugo. I had a dustpan, a five gallon bucket, and a wheelbarrow. My dad had eight feet of mud and water and shrimp and fish come in his house off of a four foot porch. So you would scoop a bucket of mud with the dustpan, pour it to the five gallon bucket, empty that into a dustpan, roll it out onto the front porch and just dump it. Imagine that with one house, it took us, oh, ten days. And that was without any electricity or anything else like that to clean that just one place up. You'll never clean these places up because you can't dig them out. You'll have to literally take bulldozers and heavy equipment and just push it somewhere. And I don't know where you'll push it. My goodness. You can't take a trough and drain the water. I don't know what you do with it. How many people were living in approximately in Chimney Rock? Less than a thousand, but you're talking like their businesses were downstairs, they lived upstairs. So everything they owned, and even if they were at home, it all blew very quickly. They weren't expecting, they had been given a warning, but the first thing they got was a siren. And then the next thing you know, the river, the mountainside let loose and everything came washing down the street. And it's all downhill. It's like at an angle. You start, like I said, you start up a little bit higher at Bat Cave and then it declines on down into Lake Bloor is like the little valley area. So everything that was on the left-hand side of the road going down towards Lake Lure is probably sitting on the edge of the river right now. But anything that was on any business on the right, and it's only a two-lane road in or out. So you're not talking about heavily populated. But once you get down to Lake Lure, Lake Lure is resorted. So you've got Fairfield Mountains Resort over there. We lived there in the nineties for four years, building really nice exclusive homes for like, lindell cedar homes the big log cabins and things like that million dollar houses and that's what's on the other side of lake lure now I don't know that those were touched but all the people that lived permanently or had summer homes at lake lure if they had anything in or close to the water or on the water it's gone businesses too there's something there's a hotel gone the sign's still there for the hotel but the building itself is gone so it's unimaginable you can't Unless you, and I encourage everyone to go in and just take a look that they tell me that on TikTok and on YouTube, you're getting more information because you're getting people that are able to get out and take pictures. So if you go in and just Google or look for, search for any of these small towns, you'll get some coverage and you'll get an idea of just how it is. And like, I feel like I have it bad, but I'm so blessed because we didn't lose power. Even with all that wind, I didn't lose power. No TV, no cell service, any of that. Plenty of food because I'm a prepper. I'm always ready. I've got a whole bedroom full of food. I'm feeding everybody in the A little paranoia about being prepared is a good thing at this point in time. I think that all of us are going to have to face some really, you know, not even dealing with like a natural disaster like this or created. I mean, we could go a couple of different ways with that because, you know, it's hard not to go there knowing that we've got plenty of proof that they're able to do some weather manipulation out there. And so there's like, what is there, three or four other hurricanes that are on the way north. There's three more coming up right behind it. And they said that two of them are going to merge. Oh, there's all kinds of fun, right? And when you look at where they originated from, it looks like they're coming from the same spot. And so that to me is like, how is this even possible? I mean, we need to start asking. Same trajectory too. Same trajectory, everything. Kind of unusual that this would happen, that you'd have like four hurricanes right on top of each other. Same trajectory, the same thing. And I think we got a lot of questions to ask and some answers about our need to be coming forward. It is very shocking to me, and I don't know if you've seen anything, but I haven't seen a lot of response from anybody in the Biden administration on this. It looks like both Elon and President Trump are working on a few things. You know, it looks like they're trying to get some access to Starlink up and running, which I think that's wonderful. You know, anybody that can do anything right now and jumps in on this and sees this as a human tragedy, this really is. I mean, this is our family. This is our family. These are friends. These are countrymen down there. And I just I wish a lot of these little towns. These little towns are where people come to retire, like it's mostly older people. So you're wiping out like populations of a certain age of people. And also, you know, there's no way you can have any kind of election. There's no way to have an open poll house anywhere to vote in Asheville, North Carolina or anywhere around it. So that's done for. They won't even be getting the mud off the streets in thirty five days. So. Well, and they can't get through the absentee ballot thing. It's not there, too. I mean, any of the mail and stuff is going to distribute them. You can't even find the people right now. There's no roads to get to some of these people. When I talk about poor people, I'm talking about dirt poor people. They are dirt poor. They've got very little and. They couldn't have evacuated. One of my daughters is out at Duke right now going to school. And she said a lot of the things that were coming online, people were like, well, why didn't those ignorant people get out of there? Why didn't they evacuate? Well, who in the world would have put a ninety mile an hour, almost a cat one hurricane coming through the western mountains of North Carolina on their bingo card? It would have never come up. You couldn't have planned it. And again, even if you had wanted to get out, there's a lot of people, they just couldn't, they have nowhere to go. I see people walking the streets here every day and it's local people that live here. And unfortunately it's due to drugs and other things like that. And the tribe, I have fought with the tribe that they don't do anything to help that, but they won't let us go hungry. If worse comes to worse and the streets start firing, they'll shut the reservation entrances down and they'll keep, they'll keep us fed, but any, it'll be a, One of my grandsons went down the road halfway to Asheville just to get service the first day. And he said, it was like something you see in a movie. People were lined up on both sides of the highway, at least a hundred and fifty, two hundred cars. And they weren't out talking to each other or trying to go anywhere. They were just sitting there trying to make a phone call. No, no traffic moving. All the businesses are shut. The Ingalls grocery store, which is our major chain here, has shut down the doors. They just closed the doors. When they did open up, they're only letting two or three people in at a time. Cash only sales. If you have no money, you got no groceries. They did today that we have one grocery store on the reservation, a food line. And they today for the first time accepted a debit card, but there's no, well, it is, but like for people that their only source of income is food stamps, you can't use your food stamps. So they can't connect to the, to the accounts and stuff. So, they were bringing in anything they could to the pawn shop where my son works, just to get enough money to buy just a little bit of liquid bread, some peanut butter and jelly, just to get through this for a few days. And if you don't have something to pawn, you didn't have money. He had a couple here today and he just told me this, remember I was speaking to you earlier and he was going out to make a purchase of a firearm. and it was a couple that was here from florida and they just wanted to get home and they couldn't get out of here and he it was the wife of a former highway patrolman who was had passed away and she happened to have two of his firearms with her and he was able to purchase those not through the store it wasn't anything illegal it was a completely legal purchase but for protection only and they were just happy to be able to get out of here and get, try to get back home. Are you seeing a lot of people that are, are like fighting for, for, are, are people cooperating pretty good or are they scared and doing stupid stuff? They're scared right now. And the stupid stuff is over in Asheville where you're literally, if you're in Asheville and you have been wiped out, you got no chance to get anything unless you got somebody specific bringing you something or you were standing at a food truck. The different, um, services that go in like chefs, I forget the names of them, but they go into communities when they're hit by disasters and they serve hot meals to the people there or first responders. They're only being able to hand out one meal a day. So they've got those set up in and around Asheville, Swannanoa, which is another little community that was washed out. So they're starting to bring those things in. Here at the casino, they put up a sign at our cafeteria that said due to conditions on the outside world, Be patient with us. We're fixing what we can. So I'm guessing we're eating out of the freezers over here right now. First couple of days, the casino was packed. Nobody had any way to go. They were having to stay here because they came here to get away from it. Once they got here, they couldn't wait. Today is pretty quiet. Not many people here, but believe it or not, there are a bunch of jackasses downstairs still throwing money on the tables. Isn't it unbelievable to you? That's unbelievable to me that there are people that are sitting there gambling when there's so much to do. I mean, even just figuring out. You just got twenty miles down the road and you can't go any further. One guy walked in the pawn shop yesterday and he threw a bag of jewelry on the counter and demanded my son give him six thousand dollars for it. And he said, man, I'll give you five hundred dollars. That's all I am able. That's my limit. And he was, you know, started getting cranky with him. And he said, I've got people that are coming here giving me whatever they can pull out of their house to pawn just to get groceries or get gas for their families. He says, I'm saving the money for the locals. And at that, he can't even give them cash. They still have to bring something to pawn to get the money for it. And they're not giving much out. A family came in yesterday and they had a bag of CDs and movies. And he said, I can give you twenty five cents a piece for the movies and I can't buy the CDs for me. They're worthless. Oh, my goodness. So it's very sad. Well, if there's somebody on the outside that's watching this and they want to know what to do, do you have any ideas that are coming to mind right now? Or should we start making a plan? Like, do you need me to jump in my truck and come get you? Well, the only commercials I've seen, because my neighbor does have DirecTV and I go up there and poach his TV when I get a chance. The only commercials. thing on TV is a Red Cross commercial. And I do not want anybody to give money to the Red Cross. It never goes to the people. And right now that's the only disaster relief that's even showing up in advertising. So again, I don't think they know what they're doing. I don't think they know how to do it. They're just jumping in and hoping to God they can make something happen out of it. Did I hear correctly that Biden said that they're not giving any more money to the area? Is that true? I saw a message on Telegram on a channel on there, and I just saw one that came across on my newsfeed that said the same thing. The Biden administration is not giving out any more money, relief money to victims of Helene at this moment. I don't know. The guys that I talked to, they didn't know anything. They had jumped in rental cars in Florida. The one guy that federal Marshall I talked to, he was from Chicago. And I said, do you know anything about this area? He said, no, ma'am. I said, do you know what you're getting ready to go look at? He said, no, ma'am. I said, do you all have any idea what you're going to do? He said, no, we don't. We were told to meet here. They were just all arriving at one time. And like I said, about two o'clock, they looked like they were gathering in the parking lot to disperse. So he said they have. And I stopped one guy and I said, so where's your FEMA headquarters going to be? Because one of the guys told me they were going to have a specific site for FEMA right here, too. And he said, we don't really have one set up. We won't know what we're going to do till we're told to go where we're told to go. And no, nobody is talking. There's nobody that's addressing the people or anything. There's no news cameras here when they do a lot, when the channel news, which is the ABC affiliate out of Asheville. And that's the closest one for this whole Western North Carolina. That's what we all get for our news. They show the same newsfeed from one live shot and they've not left that spot for four days. So I don't know if they just can't get around or if they don't want people to see anything else. I again think it's to keep people from panicking because again, we are in the situation to where it's your worst nightmare. It doesn't, you know, see what could happen when you're cut off. You got no water, you got no food, you got no house to live in. You got water all around you. Everybody else is washed away and you're sitting there on a stump waiting to see when the next helicopter comes over to get you out of there. Because most of the driveways on a good day up here, I don't drive around here because they're straight up and down. they're gravel, they're dirt, they're not paved. And if they are paved, if they got rained on with the leaves on them right now, you can't drive on those anyway. So even on a good day when the sun's shining and we've not had a drop of rain, you can't get up and down these roads. They're straight up hanging off the side of the mountain. No guardrails, just dug out with a bulldozer, throw some gravel down and welcome to your new home. So And up there with no service. I mean, and the thing, some people came in and it was two ladies. They said, well, we've got service where we are at the top of the mountain, but we don't have any food and we have no cash. And the ATM at the pawn shop was completely empty. Now they have an ATM here at the casino with money because once it runs out, they just go back to their safe. They take the money out of the safe. They put it right back in the ATM and then the gamblers come right on over. They take their debit cards out. They stick it in that ATM, pull the money right back out and throw it on the tables. So they're just they're rolling money just in a circle around here right now. And it's a ten dollar ATM charge to take the money out. Oh, my goodness. Wow. Well, I think we need to start working on a plan there to figure something out or at least find out what's going on and and maybe get a get get something that people can jump into to help with this. I think the only thing you could do right now. is just start getting ready for when they do finally come to a starting point. They don't have a starting point yet. That's the whole thing. They don't know where to start. Once they get an idea of what they're up against and then they make a plan, then they're going to know what they need more than anything. Cause like we have Pepsi distributors here and different people like that. And they're opening up spots to where they're giving out water because water's gone. We have to boil water. And the different food trucks are coming in trying to, you know, feed what they can. But like the first responders here, We don't have any restaurants open at night. I told them, I said, you know, I know that our first responders here on the reservation, my nephew's a sergeant on the police force here. They can come and eat at the casino because we're open twenty four hours a day. I don't know if we got enough food to feed all the first responders that are out there. I don't know if their buses that they brought in has their food on there. And our local grocery store, although we do have food on the shelves, they're closing at nine o'clock at night. And what they've got may be all they have for a while. So in my mind. The only way to do anything would be like, I may go home and start making a bunch of cakes and things and just bring it down here to where they're staging everything. I'm sure people are going to start bringing in food to them. Community centers will start opening up and having places for people to come in and get food once they get food to have that way. So I would say things that, you know, everybody's going to need because it's going to start getting cold. When Hugo hit Charleston down there, they had an early fall and early winter. And so everybody in my dad's family was walking around scavenging for wood if they had a fireplace just to have heat in their house after Hugo. So it's gonna turn, right now we're still warm. We're not worried about that, but I think we're gonna need all the provisions that you could imagine needing from very basic needs people are going to have to have. I know when I stood in line at Hugo, I had one in diaper. I had a two-year-old and a four-year-old. So I had to stand in line to get diapers. I had to stand in line to get a hot meal from McDonald's once a day. I had to stand in line to get a bag of ice. They had National Guard with razor wire and guns all over Every town that was affected by Hugo, there's nothing out here. So the looting could start at will. I'm worried about sleeper cells that are sitting out here waiting to go. I mean, there's all kinds of things going through my head right now that I don't have answers for and nobody can fix or help either because it doesn't look like they're really too worried about it. Well, like we were talking earlier, and you hadn't heard about this, but there's stuff out there that shows like some trucks and such had their tires slashed trying to bring relief into the area. And they were warning people not to stop at the rust areas or the truck stops. because they were slashing tires and they were actually even a count. I couldn't believe it. It's like, wow, how low can you go? I mean, why would somebody slash tires of vehicles when there's a disaster going on? There's only one reason for that is that they're trying to make things worse. Well, that and maybe come back later when... Well, they could come back later and do it. You got to remember they got eighteen wheels on each one of those trucks. If they slash all of them, how long is it going to take them to replace those tires? So they could probably come back at a later time and just walk off with everything if it's left unguarded. When that kind of stuff happens, it feels like Venezuela. Maduro was doing the same thing. There was no law down there, so any help that anybody tried to send the people, it was being looted before they got there because the government was totally derelict of its duty to protect the people. And so it's, it's just really sad, but well, I sure hope that I take notice because Asheville is a very liberal stronghold. I don't doubt that it's probably a sanctuary city. I went to see Sarah Palin speak at the convention center when she was running for vice president. And we were heckled by all these hippies with all their signs and, you know, the women with all their hairy armpits and all that, you know, And that was all, that's the best they got going for them. But that's what kind of the community is in Asheville. They can't, they don't have to survive. They have no clue. They can beat a drum. They can walk around in gauzy clothes and they can, you know, whatever they do, but they don't know how to live like this. And that's the majority of the population in Asheville was that. And young millennials that are just social, you know, social butterfly type people. It's a, entertainment community, eclectic entertainment community. And so they have a bunch of people down there floundering. It's too bad. It's quite a mess. Well, and prayers go out for all the families who have people in harm's way. And let's say a prayer a minute, and then I'm going to have you come back on over time here so we can talk about this some more. If you can take pictures or videos or want to do some interviews, that would be awesome. So let's say a prayer right now, and then we'll come back on. This is just heartbreaking. It's just so heartbreaking. And really, really see if we can get the word out there. Even if we can get something out there that shows people that they haven't been able to contact, that'd be great. So, you know, let's go ahead and say a prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for being with us in these times when there's such great loss and tragedy. We know that we don't understand why this happens. We really don't. But we ask that you would bless every single person who is involved with this and give them a peace that passes understanding as you walk us through this horrible tragedy. Please give us the way to do the best we can to mitigate any more loss of life and that we can be there for these people. We thank you so very much for being with us in times of trouble. We trust you and we love you so very much. And please bless everyone involved in this. The rescuers, keep them safe and give them the way that they need to go to find the most people to be helpful. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. All right. Well, let's come back. Let's come back to this later, Cindy, when we get a chance to talk some more. We'll be back, guys, on and off on this. And then Cindy will be helping us to see what's going on down there and how we can best help. And so we'll be talking to you soon. Okay.