Pilot flying Helene rescue missions in NC threatened with arrest

LAKE LURE, N.C. (WJZY) – When Jordan Seidhom woke up Saturday morning, he saw a Facebook post that tens of thousands of people were commenting on and sharing.

A family was stranded on a mountain in Banner Elk, North Carolina. They had run out of water a day earlier and had just enough food to last less than two days.

Seidhom, the former head of the Chesterfield County Sheriff’s Office narcotics unit, knows a thing or two about finding people. He researched the mountain chain where the family was located and found a place to land using his mapping software.

He loaded bottled water and food into his helicopter and headed toward Banner Elk.

“I thought, I have a helicopter, maybe I can help,” Seidhom told Nexstar’s WJZY

His son, a high school junior, went along. Both are volunteer members of the Sandhills Volunteer Fire Department in Pageland, South Carolina. Seidhom is a Class 1 certified law enforcement officer and a pilot with nearly 1,400 flight hours.

He first contacted the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport’s Air Traffic Control tower to get clearance to fly over the airport. Seidhom said he got the clearance and was allowed to fly over the airport, which is a direct shot to the gap in the mountains he needed to get through to Lake Lure.

Once in the Lake Lure area on Saturday, Seidhom landed at the nearest airport and met with multiple law enforcement officers and first responders to coordinate communication channels with them and to find out what was needed and where he should go to help.

Seidhom said he left the supplies he collected at a drop-off point for the family, then lifted off toward Black Mountain to find where he could help.

The first rescue was of two women stranded high up on a mountain.

Seidhom took the pair, who didn’t have water or food, to a community center with supplies and generator power.

When the father and son reached Lake Lure, they saw a bloated Broad River and the damage the raging floodwaters did to the homes and roads along it. The water had ripped through the small Carolina mountain towns taking life and property with it.

After getting four victims to safety on Saturday, Seidhom said he and his son slept in recliners in a pilot lounge at a nearby airport and awoke Sunday morning with a decision to make.

‘You will be arrested’

Jordan and Landon Seidhom were inundated with social media, phone calls and text messages from people pleading for help. Most of the voicemails were from family members who got the elder Seidhom’s cell phone number from Facebook.

“My parents are stuck there,” a woman’s voice said in a voicemail. She hadn’t heard from her parents in more than a day and her voice nearly broke as she slowly read her parents’ number into the phone, “If you receive this, please give me a call back. Thank you.”

“I can hear the desperation in her voice. This is multiple phone calls I’ve received like this. Voicemails, text messages and you could hear people desperate for help,” Seidhom told WJZY. A person they were coordinating with on the ground had texted Seidhom dozens of addresses where people were either missing or stranded.

“I spoke with my son (who is) my copilot. I said, ‘Hey do you want to go back out and try to help today?’ And his response was, ‘There’s so many messages. I don’t think we can’t not go help,'” Seidhom said.

They got back into the black Robinson 44 helicopter and headed west once again through the mountain gap in Lake Lure.

“As we were flying by, my son actually spotted a lady waving for help. And I asked him, I said, ‘Hey, is she waving for help or she just waving?’ He said, ‘No, I think she’s waving for help,’” Seidhom said.

Seidhom and his son conducted a “low and high recon” for power lines and trees that might have been in the way, then gingerly lowered his chopper down onto what was left of the couple’s concrete driveway. The flood waters had washed away most of the ground beneath it.

Seidhom’s video shows him leaving the helicopter to greet the couple and then returning with a game plan a few seconds later. The audio in the recording captured the exchange between the father and son, “Hey, I want you to let me get in. You step out and go out, help her in, put her bag in the back, get her strapped in. I’m going to take her down, come back and I’ll take him. I’ll come back and then I’ll get you, okay?” the elder Seidhom told his son.

Seidhom said his main concern was putting too much weight on the driveway and it crumbling. He left his son and the woman’s husband to make the three-minute flight to a group of first responders positioned along the river below the mountain.

After he and his son loaded the woman into the chopper, Seidhom told his son to stay put and he’d be right back to get the husband, “I originally left my son, copilot, on the side of the mountain. It was kind of unstable, so I didn’t want to put more weight on the helicopter to lift 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 landed in a parking lot at Boys Camp Road and Memorial Highway near the Lake Lure Flowering Bridge where he said he spotted a group of first responders gathered.

“Once we landed where emergency personnel were, I was met by a fire chief or maybe a captain, and he asked me who I was. I told him who I was, who I was with, just a local volunteer,” Seidhom said. The man was from an out-of-state fire department who’d traveled to North Carolina to help with the rescue efforts, Seidhom said.

He believed the chief was from somewhere in Michigan.

“I told him my background experience, law enforcement, firefighting, and pilot and he immediately started helping with coordination. He gave me radio frequencies to coordinate with them on, set up a landing area for me to come back with the other victim, and just basically started the rescue efforts; the policies and procedures that you would take coordinating with someone from an outside source or outside agency. And in the middle of the whole conversation and them blocking the road off, I was greeted by the — at that time I didn’t know — but the Lake Lure fire chief, or assistant chief, maybe. And he shut down the whole operation.”

Seidhom later positively identified the Lake Lure fire official via the town’s website, but WJZY has decided not to name the official at this time. The station called, texted, and emailed the town, including the fire department leadership and the mayor, to get a message to the fire official.

The town of Lake Lure’s official government Facebook page confirmed late Monday night that the fire official Seidhom identified as the person who threatened him with arrest had received the station’s request for comment and that the town’s email was down.

As of this posting, no one from the town has responded, including the mayor who was included in the requests for interviews. The back-and-forth between Seidhom and the fire official continued right in front of the woman Seidhom had just plucked off the mountain, he said.

“He originally asked me who I was. I gave him the same information, who I was with, my background experience, law enforcement, and firefighting. And his response was, if you have that kind of experience, you should know that you should be coordinating with us. And I said, I’ve been coordinating with everybody as I’ve been here just the day before, speaking with local law enforcement, other rescue personnel,” Seidhom recalled.

Seidhom said he tried to de-escalate and asked the official for instructions on how to communicate with the Lake Lure Fire Department while he was flying a rescue mission near the town. Seidhom said the fire official ordered him to leave and not come back.

“If that’s what you want us to do, we’ll leave no issue. And 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.”

Seidhom said he asked the official for a specific reason he was ordering him to stop his rescue efforts. “You’re interfering with my operation,” is the reason Seidhom said the fire official gave.

“I’m going back and getting my copilot. He said, ‘If you turn around and go back up the mountain, you’re going to be arrested.’ I said, ‘Well, sir, I’m going back to get my copilot, I don’t know what to tell you.'”

Seidhom said the official called over two law enforcement officers and again threatened him with arrest if he flew back up the mountain.

“At that point, I had to make a decision. I have a victim, I have my son, and I politely asked the officers, told him the situation again, explained everything, told them who I’d been coordinating with, and I said, ‘Hey if I go back up and get this victim and bring him down to this landing spot that other emergency personnel have designated, am I going to be arrested? And the officers’ response was, ‘Man, I really don’t know what to do in this situation.’ I said, ‘So you can’t tell me if I’m going to get arrested or not?’ And he said, ‘Man, I’m not sure what to do.'”

The out-of-state chief and fire captain Seidhom said he encountered at the landing zone spoke with him before he took off.

“They came back over and said, ‘Hey, man, we can’t tell you to go get the victim. We can’t even ask you to go get the victim, but we can tell you if you come back with the victim, we’ll have you a designated landing spot and we’ll make sure they don’t come over here,” Seidhom told WJZY.

“So, at that point, I felt like the other person was going to pressure him to arrest me when I come back with the victim and then my son would have been left on the side of a mountain with this person to go and rescue him,” Seidhom said.

The fire official told Seidhom to report to the Rutherford County Airport and wait for Federal Aviation Administration officials to meet with him, according to Jordan Seidhom.

The father of two got back into his chopper, turned it in the direction of the mountain and lifted off right back to where he left his son and the woman’s husband. He picked his son up and told the husband what happened at the drop-off with the Lake Lure fire official.

Seidhom took off and looked back at the husband, standing helpless in his crumbling driveway as the help he thought would come for him flew away. Seidhom said the fire official told him the fire department’s ground crew would walk up the mountainside to rescue the man “in a few hours.” Seidhom said it was a three-minute flight from the couple’s driveway to the landing site where he left the woman with first responders.

Seidhom and his son flew to the Rutherford County airport, just as they were directed.

“I did leave the Rutherford Airport. I knew at that point he had no jurisdiction, I was legal in what I was doing, and I was following all FAA guidelines and airspace guidelines. I was on private property,” Seidhom said.

The Seidhoms spent three hours at the airport, but no one from the Federal Aviation Administration came.

Within a half-hour of the fire official and the arrest threat, Seidhom said a Temporary Flight Restriction was set up over the Lake Lure gap, right in the center of where he and the fire official faced off minutes earlier.

Seidhom said the fire official told him to tell any other pilots he knew that they would also be arrested if they came back. Seidhom said he was the only helicopter within 40 nautical miles of Lake Lure at the time.

After the encounter with the fire official, Seidhom decided to fly back to his home in Pageland, South Carolina, and call off his efforts to help.

‘They’re begging for helicopters’

Within hours of the station’s interview with Seidhom on Monday, he saw the Temporary Flight Restriction issued the day before had been lifted. He threw as much water and food into his helicopter as it could hold and left Pageland for Lake Lure once again.

The men stopped off at the airport in Hickory where a massive volunteer effort was underway to dispatch private helicopters to help deliver food and water to landing sites as well as to addresses where victims were thought to be stranded.

The name of the group is the Carolina Emergency Response Team, based in South Carolina.

“They’re basically begging for these helicopters,” Seidhom said in a phone call late Monday night. Seidhom said the volunteer coordination of the rescue effort there was unlike any other privately coordinated effort he’d seen before.

The volunteer group is dispatching pilots from the Hickory airport, Seidhom said.

Seidhom said the military helicopters sent to the area were too large to land in the tight confines of the debris fields and mountainsides where people need to be rescued. Rescue coordinators are asking for smaller helicopters like Seidhom’s to help.

The volunteer group was providing hundreds, if not thousands, of gallons of fuel to private helicopter pilots helping in the rescue and relief effort. They’re fueling helicopters at the airport as the choppers come in and out of the rescue zone.

The fuel, Seidhom said, was paid for using cash donations to the group.

Low cloud ceilings grounded helicopter traffic on Tuesday, but Seidhom expects the traffic to resume Wednesday where he plans to fly straight to Hickory to help.

Seidhom believes the Lake Lure fire official’s decision to order him and other pilots out of the rescue zone on Sunday put lives at risk, “Absolutely. There were other victims; as we were flying out leaving the area, we spotted within 300, 400 yards within their location that they just could not get access to that were waving for help as my son and I were leaving,” Seidhom said.

“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,” Seidhom said.

“I’m sorry, 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,” said Seidhom.