“It took us four days to get back, due to flight cancellations. We spent a couple nights in Atlanta and finally rented a truck to fill with relief supplies, including a couple chain saws  we’d need to cut our way through downed trees when we returned home to Asheville.”  

When ARCAN member Al Panico and his spouse Robert DeJonckheere found their retirement home in a mountainous cove 10 minutes from downtown Asheville, North Carolina, it seemed the perfect safe and special place to purchase – so stated the national real estate rankings. Then the remnants of Hurricane Helene hit his city.

Helene was no doubt the strongest hurricane to hit Florida's Big Bend area north of Tampa since 1851. It made landfall near Perry, Florida, late on Sept. 26, as a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 140 mph. Who would have thought it would wreak the destruction it did, flooding and wiping out homes, property and infrastructure in Asheville and scores of towns and villages tucked away in the Blueridge Mountains?

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By Stephanie Kriner, ARCAN member and features writer; freelance editor and writer

It’s easy to understand why American Red Cross alumnus Michael Spencer has returned as a volunteer for the disaster relief organization after a 7-year separation. As he speaks about his memories in the field, his voice almost always seems to be on the edge of laughter. Michael, who is 42, began working for the Red Cross in 1996 as a swim instructor when he was just 14 and did not leave until he was 35 in 2017 after taking on multiple volunteer and staff roles. Today, he still radiates a genuine and contagious enthusiasm for the Red Cross and its work. 

Yet, sometimes, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the painful pauses, the part where tears instead of joy are kept at bay -- like when he talks about a man who he watched day after day walking on the same debris pile in Western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, where Spencer had arrived on October 4, less than a week after catastrophic flooding swept away entire mountain towns.

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“In Afghanistan I stood and counted the number of vehicles that left the base on mission at night – and counted them again when they returned in the morning… hoping they all made it back. Deploying with the military was, without a doubt, the most meaningful work I ever did.”

What can you tell us about your deployments with SAF?

My SAF deployments were the highlight of my 27-year career with the Red Cross… and that’s saying a lot considering I had many amazing experiences with the organization! I deployed to Afghanistan in 2013, Iraq in 2017, and post-retirement, to Poland in 2022. What an adventure! I lived and worked with our service men and women; same accommodations – a wooden shack, a container unit, a tent. And the latrine and showers were separate from living quarters… hopefully not too far away. None of that mattered… sometimes inconvenient, but never an issue... it was an adventure!

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