A South Carolina pilot who flew stranded Hurricane Helene victims in flood-ravaged North Carolina to safety claims he was told he would be arrested if he continued the rescue missions.
Jordan Seidhom was flying victims out of the devastation over the weekend when local leaders told him there was a flight restriction on the area and that they would have to arrest him if he continued making flights.
“There were other victims. As we were flying out leaving the area, we spotted within 300, 400 yards of their location [people] were waving for help as my son and I were leaving,” Seidhom told Queen City News.
After the storm wreaked havoc on the region, leaving hundreds of people stranded as entire roadways washed away, Seidhom read about a family that was stranded without water on a mountain in Banner Elk, a ski town heavily battered by the storm, and knew he had to take action.
“I thought, I have a helicopter, maybe I can help,” he told the outlet.
Seidhom, who once led the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office narcotics unit, and his teenage son Landon flew out bottled water and food to the family on Saturday and decided they would set out to find other people in need of help.
The father and son, both volunteer firefighters, flew four victims to safety on Saturday, including two women stranded at the top of a mountain and two vacationers trapped inside their Airbnb.
“They only had one day of supplies, which was gone by Saturday. They didn’t have any food, water, no running water, no power. And we were coming back this direction anyway, so we actually took them to Charlotte-Douglas Airport and they were able to fly home from there,” Seidhom said.
After sleeping in recliners in a pilot lounge at a nearby airport, the father and son went back out on Sunday and found a husband and wife who waved them down from their partially washed-away home.
Only equipped with his small helicopter, Seidhom had his son exit the aircraft to make room for the wife, whom he flew to a group of first responders about three minutes away.
“I originally left my son, co-pilot, on the side of the mountain. [The helicopter] was kind of unstable, so I didn’t want to put more weight on the helicopter to lift it back off. So, I left my son with the other victim. And I was just going to take one person down at the time,” Seidhom said.
Seidhom’s plans to return for the other victim and his son were squashed by an unnamed Lake Lure fire official, who allegedly threatened to have him arrested if he continued picking up stranded victims, Seidhom told the outlet.
“I explained to him that I left my son on the side of the mountain, and I left another victim. I was going to go back and bring them, it was already set up for the landing spot and then I would get out of his area. He told me I wasn’t going to go back up the mountain to get them, I was going to leave them there,” he said.
The official, however, held his ground and reiterated his threat to arrest Seidhom if he were to get the other victim and fly him to the first responders, Seidhom claimed.
Defeated, Seidhom returned to retrieve his son and explained what happened to the husband, whom he was forced to leave stranded in his crumbling driveway.
Within half an hour of the confrontation with the fire official, Seidhom said, a temporary flight restriction was enacted over Lake Lure, where he had been trying to save the stranded couple.
By the time the restriction was lifted on Monday, Seidhom reloaded his helicopter with food and bottled water and flew back to Lake Lure with the Carolina Emergency Response Team, a volunteer group dispatching pilots where people need to be rescued.
While he is now doing everything he can to help those in need, Seidhom says he believes the Lake Lure fire official’s decision to stop him from picking up victims on Sunday put lives in jeopardy.
“I can only imagine what the people were thinking. You’ve been stranded for 24, 36 hours. No way to speak with anyone. You don’t know what’s going on and you see a lifeline fly over and they keep going. I can only imagine what they were thinking.”
He added: “If I had to do it over again, I would have stopped and I would have rescued as many people until they decided they were going to arrest me.”
Officials in the town of Lake Lure could not immediately be reached by The Post on Wednesday.
Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida on Thursday as a powerful Category 4 hurricane before tearing a destructive path through the Southeast, causing mass devastation and killing at least 140 people.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were scheduled to travel on Wednesday to North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia to assess the wreckage.
