Late one night last October, at a church in a remote corner of Yancey County, North Carolina, government emergency medical workers participating in the response to Hurricane Helene gathered medications, records, laptops and radios, threw them into backpacks — and abandoned their field clinic.
More than two weeks after the massive storm ravaged the region, roads were badly damaged. Led by an ambulance, side lights illuminating the winding two-lane highway that follows Big Creek, the group made its way across the state line and into Tennessee.
Rumors about armed militia members threatening teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency had prompted FEMA to pause some operations. The same day in Rutherford County, roughly 70 miles from the field clinic in Yancey County, a 44-year-old man armed with an assault rifle was arrested for threatening to harm FEMA workers. In Tennessee, a sheriff said witnesses reported FEMA workers being harassed by armed people.
But the Oct. 12-13 evacuation of a state medical assistance team, including FEMA contract workers, on the order of a program director more than 250 miles away in the state capital, Raleigh, is being reported by Raw Story for the first time.
“It was late enough the community had gone to sleep,” said a FEMA contract worker who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We had a rotating cadre of [sheriff’s] deputies … They said, ‘We’re willing to set up an overnight guard.’
"The state medical team was like, ‘No, we’re not going to stay.’”
On Oct. 12, as darkness gathered, Dr. Tripp Winslow, medical director for the state Office of Emergency Medical Services (OEMS) and physician for the Yancey County site, paced in the parking lot at Big Creek Free Will Baptist Church.
A medic had delivered an alarming report — of observing snipers on rooftops and viewing a social media post indicating militias were hunting FEMA.
In another part of the parking lot, three unfamiliar men approached. One inquired about the medics’ sleeping accommodations. A FEMA contract worker told Raw Story one man wore a shirt bearing the insignia of Savage Freedoms, an armed volunteer disaster response group that had become a focal point of medical workers’ concerns.
“I mentioned to Dr. Winslow: ‘We had these three people come up, and they know where we sleep. They know we’re not in the clinic at night,’” the worker told Raw Story.
“The state was like, ‘We’re not comfortable with you guys staying here, especially now that they know where you’re sleeping.’”
Asked for comment, Winslow referred questions to the state Department of Health and Human Services.
The church was a disaster-response hub for an area cut off due to a bridge washing out on the road to the county seat, Burnsville. By the time the state medical assistance team arrived, a group of military veterans, Keystone Dynamic Solutions, had established a “command center” to land helicopters for supply delivery and dispatch teams to assist residents, liaising with the church’s pastor and deacon.
Keystone, which provides tactical combat training to civilians, describes its role in the aftermath of Helene as “a crucial buffer between small isolated communities and the larger state and federal agencies.”
The Big Creek site also provided a base for the local fire chief whose volunteer department was destroyed by flooding, and a rotating set of deputies from across the state.
Marlon Jonnaert, a Marine Corps veteran who helped land helicopters at Big Creek, confirmed there was an effort to assess the threat to government and volunteer personnel.
Jonnaert told Raw Story that Stanley Holloway, the fire chief, received a phone call from the Yancey County Emergency Operations Center stating that “there was a militia threat that included Big Creek.”
Nathaniel Kavakich, leader of the Keystone Dynamic Solutions team and also a Marines veteran, said in a podcast interview he encountered 10 heavily armed men whose questions were markedly similar to those directed at the medics at Big Creek.
“Who are you with?” the men asked, according to Kavakich. “Where are you laying your head at night?”
Kavakich declined to comment.
Jonnaert told Raw Story he wouldn’t call Savage Freedoms a “militia” or characterize their actions as “threatening,” but said: “I will say that in those moments it seemed like they were energetically antagonizing the government and drawing attention to their operation.”
Adam Smith, a U.S. Army Special Forces operator turned motivational speaker who leads Savage Freedoms, told Raw Story his group deployed a “small team” to perform “human remains detection” in Relief, in Mitchell County, 22 miles from Big Creek Free Will Baptist Church.
But Smith said he doesn’t believe it was members of his team who asked questions about where medical workers slept, because the group didn’t receive its first shipment of T-shirts until late on Oct. 12 or early the next day.
“Whoever the medical team is claiming to speak to them, I don’t think it’s possible that they would have our shirt, and I don’t think it’s possible they had any affiliation,” Smith said.
Amid reports of threats across the region that weekend, Savage Freedoms found itself on the defensive, posting a video on Facebook warning against “imitators” and featuring Smith saying unnamed people “use the name to gain access” and “do things that we would not do.”
Following the arrest in Rutherford County for threatening FEMA, Smith said, a National Guard liaison visited Savage Freedoms’ base at a Harley-Davidson dealership in Swannanoa. Smith said the liaison asked: “Do you have any affiliation with any militia in North Carolina?”
“My answer was, ‘No, definitively not,’” Smith said.
Savage Freedoms’ activities also drew the attention of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, headquartered across the state at Fort Bragg. Smith told Raw Story “an individual with direct connections” to the command contacted him to inquire about “a rumor that I, Adam Smith, was leading militia forces to subvert the efforts of FEMA.”
Hostility towards FEMA, fueled by misinformation, appeared to drive a wedge between the state EMS team and the local community, medical responders told Raw Story. With the storm cutting off communication in a region with a longstanding distrust of the federal government, conditions were ripe for rumors supercharged by partisan imperatives in the final stretch of the presidential campaign.
When the FEMA contract workers arrived in Yancey County, state counterparts advised them to remove FEMA placards from ambulances and remove FEMA IDs from their belts, the FEMA contract worker said.
“As the week that I was there went on, there was some rumors about FEMA,” Jerry Zimmerman, a paramedic on the state EMS team, told Raw Story. “That kind of started the division between the state-funded resources, and Keystone and the community.”
Zimmerman went home before the team evacuated, but on the day he left, he mentioned to Holloway “that those ambulances were FEMA-funded.” The response was “very stand-offish and very agitated,” Zimmerman recalled, adding that he apologized to Winslow for inadvertently creating a rift.
Zimmerman said the medical team wondered: “With these rumors going around, are we going to be lumped in with FEMA and is that going to cause an issue for us? It ultimately did.”
The decision to pull out was made by Kimberly Clement, program director for the state Office of Emergency Medical Services, the FEMA contract worker said. Clement referred Raw Story’s inquiry to the NC Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
A DHHS spokesperson confirmed the evacuation, but emphasized the input of the team on the ground while sidestepping a question about the role of state officials in Raleigh in the decision.
"On Oct. 12, 2024, several members of this team contacted the NC Emergency Medical Services (NCOEMS) staff at the State Emergency Operations Center and indicated they had concern related to the current operation of the site," said Summer Tonizzo, a DHHS press assistant. "Their concern justified the team leaving the site."
Justin Graney, chief of external affairs and communications for NC Emergency Management, told Raw Story: “The misinformation that occurred surrounding Helene was unprecedented and helped to generate mischaracterizations of what the response looked like, what resources were available, and how different levels of government were working together.”
The medical team returned to Big Creek four days later and stayed another three weeks, but the evacuation had ruptured community trust.
“Several of us felt a lot of guilt,” the FEMA contract worker said. “This community had no access … These people who normally have a doctor’s office and pharmacy 20 minutes away, now it’s a two-and-a-half hour drive — if they can make it at all.”
Zimmerman noted that the area was already cut off by flooding.
“Whenever this happened, they felt like they were abandoned,” he said. “From the community in Yancey County, they had nothing. The only thing they had was each other. We come up there and provide services for the length that we did and evacuate for our safety. It’s almost like they were abandoned again.”
Members of Keystone Dynamic Solutions criticized the evacuation.
“We do not want to downplay the concern for safety of all government employees and soldiers,” one wrote on Instagram the day after. “We disagree with the decision to withdraw those federal and state personnel that the local population is trying to trust. What we are seeing is a catastrophic loss of rapport.”
The medical team left the Big Creek site without telling any of their counterparts, including Pastor Todd Robinson and the Keystone team, of their plan. Local residents who showed up for appointments the following day discovered the staff had vanished.
They left a trailer and tent. The FEMA contract worker who spoke on condition of anonymity said the team left behind antibiotics and steroids, but a deputy agreed to guard them. The worker said they personally kept all narcotics on their person and no controlled substances were left behind.
Ricky Wilson, who lives next to the church, told Raw Story: “The militia teams that was supposedly threatening them — I don’t know. I told them they didn’t have anything to worry about. Most people would take care of them.”
The medical team gave Wilson’s wife some medicine to help with her Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Wilson said. She has since passed away.
“They checked on people that needed medical help,” Wilson said. “Older folks that was pretty well stranded, they helped them with medications. They was very much a help to the community while they were here.”
Dante Capane, logistics operations chief for the Keystone Dynamic Solutions team, said the medics treated one of their volunteers for a cut on his eye. The FEMA contract worker said they treated another volunteer who got his finger stuck in a log splitter.
The medics also treated two boys involved in an ATV accident, the worker said. A helicopter evacuated one of the boys, the worker said, adding that the other boy sustained injuries that warranted evacuation but his mother refused to let medics treat him.
“We did a lot of family medicine, refills on heart medication, diuretics, people stopping by with rashes and bee stings,” the FEMA contract worker said.
Some members of the medical team questioned whether pulling out was the right decision. But Zimmerman, who left before the evacuation, said they made the right call.
“I agree wholeheartedly with the decision,” he said. “They felt there was a threat of violence. If I walk into a residence and there’s a threat against me, I have all the rights to evacuate that residence, and wait for law enforcement.”
The FEMA contract worker told Raw Story they believe the state Office of Emergency Medical Services chose not to publicly disclose the evacuation out of a desire to avoid controversy.
“I think the amount of negative coverage coming out of the area was already impinging on the government’s attempt to help the community,” they said.
“People were already scared. They had been spun up about the negative aspects. I think OEMS was hesitant to pour more fuel on the fire, especially when [the threat] couldn’t be proven one way or the other.”
