JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
More than a month after Hurricane Helene, the VA Medical Center in Asheville is still sending teams to check on thousands of military veterans in Western North Carolina. Jay Price of member station WUNC went out with one of those teams.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: Seventy-six-year-old Vietnam vet Cliff Stewart - everybody calls him Sarge - lives in the community of Swananoa. His mobile home is just across the river from the devastated commercial district. Stewart has back and knee issues and uses a powered wheelchair. Like everybody here, the flood caught him by surprise.
CLIFF STEWART: And then the next thing I know, it's already above the windshield of the car.
PRICE: It came in under his doors and welled up from the heating vents. VA nurse Matthew Bain had visited before.
MATTHEW BAIN: The water was about - what? - two, three feet in there.
STEWART: It was two to three feet. Yeah. It was just above the wheels on my wheelchair there.
PRICE: Officials were still looking to reconnect his power. A small generator rattling out on the porch was mainly powering space heaters. A nonprofit company rebuilding his home has cut out much of the drywall and yanked out the insulation so the structure can dry out. A charity gave him a motor home to live in temporarily. It was parked out front.
BAIN: He can go there during the day, be out of the elements while they're in here, gutting this place out.
PRICE: Teams like this have been crisscrossing the mountains since Helene hit. After the storm, the VA put together a list of more than 2,600 veterans in the region at high risk because of serious health issues. Communications initially were almost impossible. And sometimes the VA couldn't reach them or their families. Patti Campbell, the chief nurse leading the VA outreach, said that left one alternative.
PATTI CAMPBELL: If we couldn't reach them by phone and we didn't hear from them on the email, they were the high-risk population. We had clinical staff in the vehicles going out.
PRICE: It didn't always work. Sometimes the veteran was just unreachable. Other times...
CAMPBELL: Some of the areas where we went to on the addresses - there wasn't - the home wasn't there.
PRICE: The VA staff has had to care for veterans while dealing with their own storm-related struggles. Bain was without power for 15 days, but he said others had it worse.
BAIN: We've got a couple of nurses we work with in primary care that have lost their homes completely that are just a total loss. Some of our staff lost family members. Some people lost homes. Some people lost nothing. Just like Western North Carolina, it's a gambit of everything.
PRICE: Among the vets Bain's team had to reach was a hospice patient in Weaverville, cut off when a bridge to his house washed away.
BAIN: Me and another nurse had to walk in water, food and supplies and backpacks about two miles in just to get him supplies. He had no medicines. They had no electricity. So, I mean, he was pretty much just at our whim - what we had we could give him.
PRICE: Many of those getting visits are in wheelchairs, like 50-year-old Donald Harris. Harris has multiple sclerosis and lives with his brother high up a mountain. A huge mudslide ripped right past their house, miraculously missing it but destroying their steep, quarter-mile dirt driveway. He was evacuated by a military helicopter. The terrain was too steep for it to land, so he was lifted out of his yard in a metal basket. He only recently returned home to a shattered community, where 13 of his neighbors died in the storm. Harris was in the shower when the team arrived, so they had to wait before he rolled out onto the porch.
BAIN: Hey, Mr. Harris.
DONALD HARRIS: How's it going?
BAIN: Good, brother. We didn't want to mix up your bath.
HARRIS: Oh, no.
PRICE: The VA team checked his medicine, the condition of his legs, talked with him about how the VA could make his bathroom more accessible, then said goodbye for now.
GARTH MASSIE: I'm sure I'll see you again.
BAIN: Oh, yeah.
MASSIE: Taking care of it. What's this - four or five times now? I'll be back again. I'm sure.
PRICE: As many times as it takes, he said. For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Swananoa, North Carolina.
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