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By Buzz Trexler

Star Correspondent

 It’s a Thursday afternoon, and vehicles of all types are scattered throughout the parking lot at Harmony Free Will Baptist Church on Gap Creek Road. Services are going on, but not of the Sunday or Wednesday night worship type.

 Five grey-shirted women sit at two tables pushed together in the church’s fellowship hall. The women — who hail from Missouri, Indiana, Colorado, and Nevada – serve as the intake and dispatch point for an ongoing disaster relief effort. 

 The Hampton congregation is partnering with Team Rubicon, a veteran-led humanitarian organization based in Los Angeles, and a team of 30 is now on-site and able to help residents with various disaster recovery needs related to Hurricane Helene. The church offered the use of the fellowship hall and youth center as a volunteer reception center, providing a place to eat, shower, and sleep – though with a workday that begins at 6 a.m. and a seven-day workweek, one wonders just how much sleep Team Rubicon gets.

 Pastor Brandon Young said the partnership began with an Oct. 16 meeting with Carter County Emergency Management Agency and Team Rubicon. “They were looking for a place to stay and had not had any luck finding a place to host them in Carter County,” Young said in an email. “They let us know during the meeting that they were planning on moving to another county to assist. I felt that the work they do for free needed to happen in Carter County, and we gladly offered our facility.”

 Young said some of the leadership team arrived on Oct. 17 and the rest of the team arrived the next day. “We have 30 individuals and thankfully we had two shower trailers donated for them to use,” the pastor said. “One of the trailers has a washer and dryer. They immediately got to work within Carter County. They are up at 6 a.m. and work seven days a week.”

 It’s no secret that the storm recovery work in Carter County will go on for a long time.

 On Sept. 27, the remnants of Hurricane Helene brought high winds and flooding to Northeast Tennessee and Western North Carolina, leaving 17 confirmed storm-related deaths in the state: eight in Unicoi County, four in Washington, two in Cocke, and one each in Greene, Knox, and Johnson counties. There were no deaths in Carter County, but the damage was widespread.

 Team Rubicon was birthed in 2010 when U.S. Marine Corps veteran Jake Wood led a small team into Haiti following an earthquake that devastated the small island nation, according to the humanitarian organization’s website. In the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the group has deployed disaster relief volunteers in five states. 

 “With more than 300 disaster relief volunteers — or Greyshirts — deployed in dozens of communities, it’s the most Forward Operating Bases the veteran-led nonprofit has ever stood up in one geographical area at a time,” Team Rubicon’s website says. There are scores of volunteers, known by their grey shirts, helping in Buncombe County, N.C., particularly “in and around Asheville, conducting muck outs, chainsaw operations, flood mitigation work, debris removal, roof tarping, and heavy equipment operations.”

 Those who need assistance can call the disaster relief hotline, 423-830-2696, at Northeast Tennessee Disaster Relief Center at Bristol Motor Speedway. The center will take information and forward it in real-time to the church’s disaster relief team — led by the church’s disaster relief coordinator, Quana Roberts —  and Team Rubicon, who will assess the need before contacting the requester. 

 Team Rubicon member Jeri Norman said Thursday that while most requests have come from site-survey teams, information about people in need comes from various sources. “We receive leads from Bristol, we receive leads from the church, crisis-cleanup, people calling in, word of mouth,” Norman said as she and others listed points of contact.

 Team Rubicon will serve in Carter County at least through Nov. 19, and Norman said three to four waves of people will be coming in every week.

 The church produced an informational video, “Together We Rise,” to help get the word out.

 “We want to see my friends and neighbors get free assistance,” Young said. “Harmony Church will always be willing to utilize what God has given us to help our community. Everything we have belongs to God, and we are stewards over it. We will use it for God’s glory, and to show love His love to our community.”

 

Team Rubicon

Team Rubicon is serving communities all over the nation, from a glacial flood in Alaska to the devastation of Hurricane Helene in the Southeast, from long-term recovery operations in Kentucky to wildfire response in California. 

 

To find out more about Team Rubicon, go to teamrubiconusa.org.

 

Harmony Free Will Baptist Church

Harmony Free Will Baptist Church, 3405 Gap Creek Road, Hampton, was founded on June 13, 1977. In recent years, the church has provided a warming center for the community when frigid temperatures strike. The congregation is now partnering with Team Rubicon to help residents with various disaster recovery needs. To find out more about this partnership, watch “Together We Rise” at tinyurl.com/hfwbc-team-rubicon on YouTube.

To find out more about Harmony Free Will Baptist Church, go to harmonychurch.org.