Do We Need FEMA?

 Earlier this week I was listening to the Charlie Kirk show and Christy Noem was being interviewed by Charly and the topic came up of eliminating FEMA from the federal government. She told Charly that president trump had directed her to effectively shut down FEMA.

FEMA is a Highly politicized government agency as we saw in the Hurricanes that hit northern Carolina where local FEMA agents had the discretionary authority of not serving people with trump signs in their yard. That's almost criminal activity.

And of course, there's always a concern about FEMA camps in the event national repression of conservatives in this country.
I don't know if that's actually a thing, but I don't like it.
There was a time in this country when we got along just fine without FEMA, and I wanted to describe a time like that to you that I was personally involved in.

I joined the Air Force in 1972 and after being trained in Biloxi Ms, I was stationed in Sumter SC, which is about 40 minutes east of Columbia SC. It’s a large base and at the time there were squadrons of F4s stationed there. They were the most advanced fighters in the world.

I was in a radio outfit that was assigned to give forward air control to these F4s so it was not unusual for us to have two and a half ton trucks and jeeps in our squadron assigned to us. Now I want to tell you about The Great Southeastern Snowstorm of February 1973.

 

This was a historic event for South Carolina, bringing 1 to 2 feet of snow to many areas and setting new snowfall records that remain unbroken in some locations. Notable snowfall amounts include 24 inches in Rimini, 17–18 inches in Florence, and 7.1 inches in Charleston!

The storm caused widespread travel chaos, school closures, and significant damage, roof collapses, leading to the deployment of the National Guard to clear roads. The storm was preceded by abnormally warm weather, with temperatures near 70°F just days before the cold front arrived, making the event a surprising and impactful one to say the least.

 Snow in South Carolina?

 When it started snowing during the day, I remember that there was a Corvette, that presumably a pilot had driven, that literally flew off the entrance ramp to the base from the highway. Plastic all over the highway.

My roommate and I drove into town to get a burger and fries after work and the town was shut down except for the Burger King.

We returned to the base and a number of us gathered in my  room to drink beer and listen to my stereo.

The door was closed and we heard a knock on the door.

That was weird since most guys would just walk in. So, we expected, and saw, the First Seargent, telling us to get our parkas on (we had them in case we ever got sent to the arctic) and head to the motor pool, pick up a deuce and a half and we would convoy into Sumpter and martial at the courthouse.

I got to my  truck and, after warming up the injector heaters, started the engine.

It was amazing how many southern boys in our outfit did not know about the necessity of warming up the manifold in cold weather. My roommate was a mechanic in the motor pool and ended up dragging a battery charger through drifts from truck to truck to start them after the batteries had been worn down.

When we got to the courthouse, having seen a number of cars in ditches, we were given orders as to where to go.

I and a guy from a sister squadron were tasked to head to a rural village called Pineville, about 20 miles away.

We were also tasked to drop off some jail trustees at the county road yards to pick up some graders to clear roads.

As soon as we left, the trustees let us know that we were going to drop them off at Rosie’s and they’d find their way to the yard after that. We were not going to argue with these guys.

 

So, after dropping them off at Rosie’s, we headed to Pineville. Halfway there, as I was lead truck, we went into an intersection in the middle of the night, and in the middle of the intersection, I saw a car antenna sticking out of a snow drift and I swerved to avoid it, ending up in a ditch.

I was stuck. The guy in the other truck pulled up and we tried to get his winch to attach to my truck to pull it out.

It would not work. I later asked my roommate about that, and he said that he and his partner had disconnected them so no one would burn them up. Thanks a lot.

After a couple of hours I managed to rock the truck out of the ditch. I am from Michigan after all.

The other guy said he’d take lead. I outranked him by two weeks, time in grade, but I acquiesced and we took off.

As we got within a few miles of Pineville he started to slow down. He was dragging snow with his axles.

He would stop, back up and then ram through the drift he had built.

After he did this a few times, as he stopped, I hit my air horn and kept going, ramming him from behind to break him free.

The next time I did that, I just stayed on his bumper and we drove through the snow with 20 wheel drive till we got into town as dawn was breaking about 7 am.

We drove to the police station and found the local chief.

He took us to the school down the road that was being set up as a civil defense center.

Leading that effort was a retired Chief Master Sergeant.

He was about to give us directions when the mayor took me aside.

The mayor was a Republican who had just gotten elected the previous November by organizing the black vote against the democrat candidate. The Police Chief was a Democrat, as was the retired Master Sergeant. They wanted me to start making deliveries to their friends’ local farms and businesses. Cattle need feed and fuel.

The mayor had a different plan and wanted me to support his electorate. Humans.

I decided to follow the mayor, he was 1) the top politically elected official and 2) I actually agreed with him.

I told the retired Chief Master Sergeant that I was going to listen to the mayor.

He then asked me who my commanding officer was and told me to wait while he called him.

I told him the name of my Colonel, and he placed the call. He talked to the Colonel for a while and then turned to me and held out the phone and said your commanding officer would like to talk to you son. I took the phone with some trepidation and put it to my ear whereupon the Colonel said “Son, martial law has been declared and you are the ranking military person in that Township. Make your decisions wisely and please let me talk to the retired chief master Sergeant.”

I did as I was told, and the Sergeant relented, and we began to make food and fuel deliveries to people under the direction of the mayor. I felt pretty good about what we were doing.
At one point we were driving down the main highway and we saw a caravan of cars that were stranded on the side of the road. We pulled up and found out that they were tourists from Quebec, headed to Florida. I told them to abandon their cars and get in the back of our  trucks and we would take them to a warm place. They argued at first but then got in.
Later when I came back to the school again, I found out that they had taken up cooking and were preparing meals for anybody who needed them including us first responders. It was wonderful French cooking.

After a bit, around noon, I was back at the school standing outside when I saw a tall thin black man high stepping through the snow approaching the grocery store (built in the 1920’s I imagine) across the street from me. The mayor saw him too and slapped his head and said “Oh my God I totally forgot about these guys!”
He recognized the man as being from an outlying community and we started to deliver food and fuel to tar paper shanties. With no insulation.
One of the tasks we could not complete was to drive to a nursing home, pick up the doctor and his nurse there, and take them into town to get pharmaceuticals for the nursing home.

Sometime later in the afternoon I got a call from the base that said that relief drivers could not drive in (where we had driven) to take our trucks over. So they were going to fly the relief drivers in by helicopter. I directed one of the local farmers who had a tractor and a front end bucket to clear a section of road for the helicopter to land on and he did so. A short while later a large helicopter landed in the field across the street from the clearing we had made.  Of all things it was Marine One, president Nixon’s helicopter. It had been forced down at our base by the storm while it was on its way to key Biscayne Florida where the president wintered.

 I asked the pilot why he landed in the field instead of the clearing and he pointed to the telephone lines right alongside the road where we had cleared the snow away.
I greeted the new drivers who were older NCOs from our squadron, showed them the trucks, told them what we were doing and got on the chopper.
The next thing we did was fly to that nursing home that we could not get to by truck to pick up the doctor and his nurse.
The helicopter landed there but nobody came out. I was exhausted and had slept much of the flight but the sensation of taking off by being shoved down into my seat as we took off (or up) woke me and I looked out the window and saw the doctor dragging his nurse through the snow. I got the steward's attention, and he talked to the pilot and we turned around and landed and picked them up.

Next, we flew to a parking lot in a shopping mall in Sumter SC where a pharmacist was opening up for the doctor and the nurse. It was pretty surreal.

We went in and got a candy bar and a couple of snacks got back on the helicopter and it flew us to our base. From there we walked about a mile back to our barracks and crashed.

Later when I woke up, I was told to grab another truck and head back to Pineville to continue operations. I drove with a friend of mine, Sgt Darryll Gheen, and when we got back to Pineville, we continued to drive those missions of mercy. We even picked up a dog along the way that was stuck in the truck ruts ahead of us that it couldn't get out of.

It was funny watching Darryl chase the dog down the ruts while I followed in the big truck.

We took the dog back to the barracks with us until we could get him back to its owner.

 

That was our adventure in that snowstorm as we gave relief to the town that needed it without any FEMA being involved. I would add that at one point, Darryll and I were at the school in the evening when the National Guard finally arrived in their armored personnel vehicles.

We asked them what had kept them, and they told us that they had driven from Fort Jackson in Colombia about 40 miles away and they knew that their vehicles only had a certain amount of “mean time before breakdown” and that's what happened after 35 miles. So they had to fix their APV's before they could get out to relieve us.

So, Darryl and I drove back to the Courthouse to debrief.

 There were a lot of guys standing around drinking coffee and talking about their adventures. Among them a number of farmers and truckers who had volunteered. The heroes of their community. One of the farmers was telling us that he had come across a Cadillac stuck in a ditch on I95 and that he offered to pull him out of the ditch. The owner of the Cadillac was incensed and told the farmer that there was no way he was going to let this farmer attach that  tractor to his $9000 Cadillac. The farmer laughed and said that he told the guy “Yeah you're right, I'd hate to damage my $15,000 tractor trying to pull your Cadillac out of the ditch” and left him there. There were a lot of other good stories about good works that had been done and people's lives who had been changed by what we did for them there.

Later that year in August, Darryll and I were at the Kresge’s in Sumter SC looking through the record bins. I had learned to enjoy some country music and certainly bluegrass from listening to records with Darryll. I preferred rock'n'roll myself, stuff like Electric Light Orchestra, Chicago Blues band and an eclectic mix of records, and while we were standing there we heard someone call out our names. It turned out that it was the mayor of Pineville. He told us that he was glad he found us because he didn't know how to get a hold of us and he wanted to thank us for what we did during the storm for his town.

We said it was no big deal and that it  was just part of our job but he said the town was very appreciative of everything we did and the effort we put out and that there was going to be a Labor Day picnic and they wanted to present us with a token of appreciation for everything we did.

Later, Darryll and I talked about it and we thought that it just didn't seem right to take honor for something like that that we were just expected to do. In retrospect I wish we had done it because I feel that we insulted the townspeople by not agreeing to their request.

________________

A few years ago, Scherie and I stopped in Pineville on our way back from Florida.
I wanted her to see the town.
I expected to see a bustling community, having grown over the years.
Actually, it had declined. The school looked upgraded, the grocery store was gone.
I went to a diner and asked about the mayor.\ or anyone who had been involved in the events of the time.
Nobody knew anything about it.