Running Towards Disaster | Ep. 5: Flying with MAMA

John Carrico: And I think it’s what Americans do when we’re at our best is like, when these terrible events happen, and like, rallying together to take care of one another. I think that’s, you know, western North Carolina just took care of itself. In those first couple of days, no one could get here anyways. And so you just hear story after story about people just taking care of their communities. And I think, you know, that strength that people showed and rally together to take care of each other, their neighbors and think that’s, you know, the thing that stands out the most for me.

Caroline Parker: Welcome back to “Running Towards Disaster,” a series of stories from people who in times of crisis, head towards it to help. I’m Caroline Parker with EdNC.

That was John Carrico, a paramedic at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, and thanks to our last episode, you know all the training and hours it takes to qualify for the job. 

John has been a paramedic for 17 years, and his career in the industry has really taken flight. 

John Carrico: Officially my title is the business development coordinator and slash flight paramedic for the Mountain Area Medical Airlift, MAMA. 

So we serve about 18 to 19 counties in western North Carolina, and on a routine basis, we work with about anywhere between 16 and 20 hospitals that on a given day may call our helicopter to help transport a patient.

We have two helicopters that are always in service, 24/7, 365. We have eight full-time flight paramedics, eight full-time flight nurses, and eight full-time pilots. And then in addition, we have some support staff that work with us, and we have five full-time mechanics that work with us as well to take care of our helicopters.

Caroline Parker: Another element of critical care in the air? How altitude and medicine mix.

John Carrico: Our flight nurses and flight paramedics have special training for one in the flight physiology world. So when we’re taking a patient from ground level, up several thousand feet in the air, we have to be able to think critically about how that changes for the patient because that does change things, air pressure, oxygen, all kinds of things like that. 

So we have specialized training in flight physiology, and most of our training is on the specialized equipment that we use. It’s a combination of a lot of experience and then specific training for flight and specialized equipment. And then lastly, training in this autonomy to make really kind of physician-level decisions on the fly and on the side of the road and to do that stuff. 

Caroline Parker: Before John found himself flying with MAMA, he had earned a bachelor’s in experiential education. He did a stint with AmeriCorps and worked for a middle school leading wilderness trips after college, but when Hurricane Katrina hit, he found himself pushed in the direction of first responder. 

John Carrico: It was this time of like, okay, this is where my heart is right now. It’s time to get back into taking care of people. And I don’t know why I did, but I said I’m going to enroll in a local paramedic program at the local community college because I want to be hands-on when the next event happens. And I didn’t know if I’d like it or not, but that was in 2006 and I’ve been doing it ever since. 

Caroline Parker: If you were watching news coverage of Helene, pictures and videos from Asheville were most likely what you were seeing. To some people, Asheville is our state’s western capital. It’s a town that welcomes visitors – filled with art, music, good food, and easy access to the Blue Ridge Parkway. 

The French Broad River runs through the city and meets the Swannanoa River at Biltmore Estate. Both broke their previously held river cresting records. And the damage was major and widespread. And John knew the hospital needed him, and the region needed MAMA. 

You are about to hear John’s storm experience. We are thankful for his service and the community college system that trains him and so many of his colleagues. Here he is.

John Carrico: I’ll speak specifically for our helicopter department, the air medical department. I mean, the news had done a really good job of saying, this is going to be a cataclysmic event. From our end, we knew we weren’t going to be flying. And so, we start moving our helicopters into our hangar space because we know, like one – we want to protect the assets because we know that once this weather passes, we’re going to be busy. 

And then also the hospital, we’re preparing everybody. We’re preparing our team. We’re getting people here. They’ve packed bags and all that stuff, even though we had no idea the scale that was going to hit us. 

For me, I was scheduled that Wednesday and Thursday and obviously it was just absolutely raining so much, and so my wife, who also works up here, we live about 45 minutes away, so we didn’t know if we would make it home. We were able to on that Thursday night, despite all the rain. And then from there, you know, the storm obviously hit that Thursday night and then it was radio silence. 

So 45 minutes away, and the communication network was completely down. We sat for about 36 hours of having no idea other than our neighborhood in our town. We had no idea the extent of damage that was out there

I made it here that Sunday morning after the storm. So, we had gotten word that there was a pocket of cell phone service about 25 minutes away from where we lived. The bridges were not underwater anymore, so we could get there. And of course, as soon as my cell phone hit signal, 200 messages from friends, family, all across the country.

First phone call was to my parents to let them know that we’re alive and safe. And then the second one was to my manager her. Her voice was teary eyed, like, oh my God, thank God, another one of her people is okay. Because again, I didn’t know how bad it was. And then she just said, ‘It’s really bad. When can you get here?’ I will get there as soon as I possibly can.

Immediately it was, the difficulty was communications. Normally, it’s a very seamless process of when you need to have a helicopter come through the various dispatch centers. But because, you know, the communications were just down everywhere, that was a little bit more in flux, but we knew that, you know, there was people calling and we had patients to pick up. 

And so we were doing that. But least we had a state radio system that we could use. We have three helicopters – two helicopters are always in service, and we have a spare helicopter when we have to do maintenance on the other. We knew immediately we needed that third helicopter. We got that prepared, and then we started using that, essentially at first, as a logistical helicopter. 

There was doctors that had been on for six, seven days straight, and they couldn’t get home. There was even some of our dispatchers. So we literally started shuttling people.

We took Starlink to our hospitals because the telephones were all down. And so we took Starlink so we could establish communications. We were the easiest way to get from point A to point B because so many of the roads were not passable.

The other thing that we had to do was we had to take patients away from this hospital that were high-risk patients. You know, water obviously was the big issue. You know, we had to deal with water issues here. And so the hospital made a really good decision of patients who are really high water needs, like for example, like dialysis patients, they need a constant water flux. We took a lot of those patients who were high needs, and we flew them to other hospitals so that we could continue to accept patients here, but those patients could be, you know, seen in other hospitals and not have the worry of, you know, water issues.

We had running water here, thanks to Herculean efforts to make that happen. But when it was appropriate, we flew a lot of those patients out too. We were crisscrossing the state, and thankfully, many hospitals were amazing. The whole state came together to allow us to really move patients. 

Once we got in the air, I think it was this, like we started to see the vastness of the destruction. Even to this day, it’s hard to describe because we will fly along, things will look normal, and then you’ll cross a ridge line, and then acres and acres of acres of trees are all down. Just they look like match sticks. In that original couple days of flying, we were the first ones to see that. 

When you’re in our line of work, we have to have difficult conversations with families. When we pick up a patient who’s very critically, critically ill and fly them to Mission Hospital or wherever we’re going, we try not to instill a false sense of security. Just because we’re putting them in the helicopter and flying them away doesn’t mean everything’s going to be all right. Anytime we take someone’s loved one, we try to communicate that like we’re going to take excellent care of your loved one, but they’re in really bad shape right now. And I want you to know that before we go flying them off. So those are difficult conversations that our team does on a routine basis.

It’s part of what we do. But during the initial days after the flood, there were times when we were picking up people and their family members were there living in the hospital because they had no place to go. They had lost everything. And then, now, we have to take their loved one and fly them away. And they have no way of getting here. They have no way of communicating because, you know, we don’t have service. 

They have no way of following up to know that their loved one got on a helicopter and made it safely. You know, normally, when I fly someone, I tell you once we get them settled in a room, I call their loved one to let them know because that’s a traumatic, you just saw your loved one fly off in a helicopter. And so we want to make sure that they know they got here, this is where they’re at. But we couldn’t do that in those days.

Again there were many people who stayed at this hospital who did not know how their families were because they were here during the storm, and then communications were down, and yet, the resolve to stay with the mission of, ‘I’m here to do my job and take care of people.’ There’s a lot of pride with that, you know, that comes with that. I mean, how everyone rallied to take care of each other.

So many of the people who responded and continue to respond are a product of the community college system. I mean, our nurses, so many of our nurses got their start from the community college system. As you’ve already interviewed, our firefighters, our paramedics, our linemen. It really is a testimony to the power of that, that community college system.

I have a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, but I’m probably most proud of my Associate’s degree. It’s the one I use so much on a day to day and kind of got me to where I am today. 

Caroline Parker: You’ve just listened to flight paramedic John Carrico’s experience during and after Helene. We are thankful for his dedication to critical care and willingness to fly where its needed. This is the fifth episode in our series, “Running Towards Disaster” from EdNC. 

In our next episode, we will hear from AB Tech’s president and fire chief. We learn how the campus was used in relief and how cadets and their head instructor served local fire stations. 

This was a production by me, Caroline Parker, for EdNC. EdNC was established to be an independent source of news – providing data, and analysis about education for the people of North Carolina. In short, we tell the stories happening in our state’s classrooms and involving our state’s students. A thank you goes out to Krystal Schuler of Haywood Community College, who after her interview told me about John and MAMA. Music in this series is from the talented locals in Haywood, recorded at their Friday night event, Pickin’ in the Park. For a full bibliography of this episode and all of our coverage, go to EdNC.org.