Oregon Volunteers Drive Across the Country To Support Hurricane Victims
By Craig Reed
Nick Williams didn’t know anyone on the East Coast. But that didn’t matter. He knew people needed help after hurricanes Helene and Milton hit their properties and their lives.
Helene roared ashore in Florida on September 26, wreaking havoc as it moved north. Flooding claimed 200 lives, making it the second-deadliest hurricane in the past 50 years.
2 weeks later, Milton hit Florida and moved north. Nick, co-owner of Oregon Brothers Construction, which operates out of Tualatin, Oregon, as well as his hometown of Lookingglass, watched from his home as the damage unfolded.
“I knew people needed help,” he says. “We had the resources and equipment to help our brothers and sisters over there and to do whatever we could.”
Nick talked to his wife, Samantha, and his business partners, father-in-law John Dunbar and Akili Alvarado, about making the cross-country trip. They approved. Nick, Samantha, and employee Logan Royal headed east.
“John and Akili wholeheartedly agreed that if we were in a position to help people, we should,” says Nick, a 2016 Roseburg High School graduate.
Logan knew personally how storms could wreak havoc on people’s lives. In 2023, his family suffered loss from an Oklahoma tornado.
“It kind of hit home,” he says. “It felt like a message from God to go help those people in need, to bond with those people in their time of need. It was a time to drop everything we were doing and go help. We had to.”
The Oregon volunteers drove an F-450 pickup truck pulling a 40-foot flatbed trailer. Supplies and donations—including food, water, generators, water pumps, flashlights, propane, fuel, and other everyday necessities—were strapped down and covered with tarps. They picked up more donated supplies during a stop in Nashville, Tennessee.
They drove on, arriving on Day 4 in Asheville, North Carolina, at a church serving as a distribution center for incoming supplies and donations. After unloading their cargo, the Oregonians joined other volunteers the next few days, using chainsaws to cut trees and branches off houses, other structures, and roadways.
Nick worked for Douglas Electric Cooperative in 2019 as a groundsman. He attended lineworker school and a lineworker apprentice program, so he had some knowledge of how to remove trees from power lines safely.
The volunteers then moved on to Swannanoa, North Carolina, where they helped transport supplies and continued to remove trees and branches.
Their next stop to continue providing help was in Maryville, Tennessee. For several days, they worked with other volunteers from Southern Oregon. They also provided condition updates to many locals who had no means of communication.
“We spent 2 weeks helping,” Nick says. “It was nothing any of us had ever seen, cities and towns washed away or covered in mud. There were 10- to 15-foot walls of mud and debris in places.”
Basements were filled with mud. Entire roads had washed away.
“We ran into a lot of people who had stayed with their homes during the storms,” Nick says. “The general response we received was that people were truly thankful. Whether it was providing a shoulder to cry on removing a huge tree from a house or throwing a tarp over a house to protect it from rain, those people were truly caring and loving. They couldn’t believe people—young adults from Oregon—would be willing to help them out, to do whatever they could do to help.”
Logan says they helped an older man dig items out of a shipping container completely packed with sand. The container was the man’s storage unit. It ended up 200 yards downriver from the man’s house. When the water receded, it left a container full of sand that had to be removed by hand and shovel.
“I felt I was there to help care for people, and yet I felt they took care of us,” Logan says. “So many times when we went to help people, they were in tears, but they were very, very grateful, and they did everything in their power to give back to us.
“Personally, this experience made me become closer to people around me, to reach out and keep loved ones close. It also gave me faith in humanity. You see crap on social media about dividing and fighting, but when it comes down to it, we’ve got each other’s back. At the end of the day, we’re all 1 big family.”
Nick and Logan say they followed Oregon Brothers Construction’s motto in taking the 3-week trip out of their own work schedule to help others: “Faith to start, the courage to keep going, and the will to finish.”