ROCHESTER, N.Y. — While Florida is dealing with the wrath of Hurricane Milton, many people in the Carolinas are still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Helene two weeks ago.

Three Chinook cargo helicopters and 16 soldiers from the Army National Guard returned to Rochester Wednesday after helping to transport supplies to areas devastated by Helene in the Carolinas.

“It’s pretty devastating. I think that one thing you see is the pictures, a lot of pictures of the devastation and a lot of people saying that people are helping. But the reality is that, you know, we’ve been out there since last Sunday. So ten days now. Other air crews have been out there for even longer, doing the job on the ground, in the air and seeing the devastation is there, doing what we can do to improve the situation,” said First Lieutenant John Kraft of the Army National Guard.

These massive U.S. Army helicopters are able to carry up to 50,000 pounds to victims of the hurricane. Crew Chief Sarah Waterman explained their role in helping those affected by Helene.

“We went and we would pick up pallets of food and water at a time, roughly about 12,000 to 13,000 pounds of food and water at a time, and would deliver it to kind of remote areas where people couldn’t really going to get in and out of. So we were delivering food and water to, like, high school football fields and to, like, farmer fields in the middle of nowhere. Yesterday we picked up hay bales and feed and delivered that to some farmers up in the mountains,” Waterman said.

With Hurricane Milton currently impacting Florida, there are no immediate plans for the Rochester-based soldiers to assist in that area. However, they are prepared to help if the call comes.

“We don’t have any plans at this time to head down to Florida, but if that call comes and we’ll prepare the same way we did, where we’ll kind of be on standby and when the call comes in, we’ll have people volunteer, we’ll get the aircraft load up and go do what we do best, which is help the people of the U.S.,” Waterman said.

“Many people that went on this trip have gone on hurricane missions before to Florida. So it’s part of our routine stuff. They expect us to be professionals in what we do and and go out and get the job done,” Kraft added.

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