If Florida could organize flights to rescue stranded citizens in Israel as rockets "rained down" and save residents in Haiti when it went "haywire," then it shouldn't be a stretch for the Sunshine State to return Floridians stuck in crumbling western North Carolina back home, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Monday.
This is part of his newly announced Operation Blue Ridge, which allocates some of the Florida state and national guards, the state Division of Emergency Management, law enforcement, the Fish and Wildlife Commission, and the Department of Transportation to North Carolina to help provide resources after the disastrous Hurricane Helene and to airlift Floridians out of the desolate mountains.
Plus two massive Chinook helicopters, which can carry up to 40 people each.
"If we can bring people back from Israel by the hundreds when Hamas is raining rockets down, we should be able to get some [helicopters] into the Blue Ridge Mountains and get people out of there," Gov. DeSantis said at Monday morning press conference in Steinhatchee, a coastal city mere miles from where the Category 4 Helene made landfall. "Just like we did when October 7 happened, and Floridians were caught up in the Israel-Hamas war, just like we did when Haiti started going even more haywire than normal...we authorized rescue missions to be able to bring people back to the state of Florida.
"So we are doing that now in the state of North Carolina," DeSantis continued, adding that if someone knows of a Floridian stranded in the Blue Ridge mountains, they should report that at floridadisaster.org/operationblueridge.
If Florida completes its airlift missions into and out of North Carolina, this would be the third time in a year that DeSantis has deployed aircraft on out-of-state rescue missions. After the terrorist group Hamas slaughtered thousands of Israelis on Oct. 7, he issued an executive order to retrieve over 700 Americans from the war-torn nation. In March, he chartered a slew of planes into Haiti after gangs took over the Caribbean island and led a massive prison break of Haiti's two largest detention facilities.
Between Florida and the U.S., all 400 stranded Americans were rescued and returned.
The death toll from Helene has reached at least 116 people across six states, CBS reported. Among the hardest hit is North Carolina, where at least 46 people between the ages of 4 and 75 have been killed and over 600 more are missing. The cities of Swannanoa and Montreat appear to be almost entirely wiped out, while the I-40 interstate into and out of Asheville was partially destroyed and inoperable for days after the storm.
At least 27 people were killed in South Carolina, 25 in Georgia (which is also dealing with a BioLab chlorine fire), 13 in Florida—10 were in Pinellas County, which experienced record flooding, four in Tennessee, and one in Virginia.
Helene first made landfall in the Big Bend's Dekle Beach just after 11 p.m. on Thursday before traveling through the Southeast as a tropical storm. Over 500 miles wide, this resulted in massive power outages from Florida up through parts of Ohio and Indiana. As of Monday morning, there are still over 2 million Americans without power, with the largest concentration living in South Carolina (740,000).
Unlike Florida, whose homes are built to sustain large hurricanes, western North Carolina was not prepared for a massive weather system to wipe out communications, homes, and towns—likely adding to the drastic state of affairs experienced by the Tar Heels.
