NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — It turns out some National Guard troops from Western New York are now directly involved in handling a very grim assignment in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene which caused death and destruction in southern states last week.
2 On Your Side was able to speak with the commander of this specialized unit who is now in North Carolina and his name may seem familiar in the town of Amherst.
Deputy Amherst Town Supervisor Shawn Lavin actually apologized on social media to town residents that he cannot now attend town budget meetings. That is because he is now on duty as Captain Lavin with the Air National Guard 107th Air Attack Wing from the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station. His unit's mission is to find and recover the bodies of some of the over 230 regional victims who died after Hurricane Helene swept through North Carolina with wind, heavy rain, and devastation.
Captain Lavin and the 11 other members of the specially trained Fatality Search and Recovery Team deployed from the airbase a week ago on 24-hour notice and headed to the now storm-swept mountain communities of western North Carolina. They are specifically operating in and around the small town of Burnsville in Yancey County.
Lavin explained "Our primary role and responsibility here is to help out the local medical examiner with any kind of fatality collection, any kind of fatality storage. A lot of them are just overburdened based on the amount of tragedy that's occurred down here. So we've been pretty active with our resources to help them out."
He added "It's a pretty rural county. Just to verify. Look through riverbeds, look through homes that might have been ravaged by the hurricane for any possible fatalities."
Lavin also noted "We had one person we had to store that was in a riverbed. We're actually going and looking at debris piles in the future so every day it's a little different."
The captain says there is a deeper purpose to this mission. "For the closure to the families in this absolutely terrifying, horrible time. You know, it's something that I think we can do our best to bring some closure. So it's a hard mission. But at the end of the day we all know how important it is. So it's one of those things where yes it's hard but you know the value of it when you're doing it."
The length of their mission is indefinite until they finish their difficult mission. They sometimes sleep in trucks and work out of a local high school gym with some family contact and counseling available. Lavin says "You see just absolute devastation, the pictures do not do justice. At the same time you know you're here to help."
Lavin's unit was last deployed to recover local residents who died in the December 2022 Christmas Blizzard here in Buffalo and then during the COVID crisis in 2020 when many died in New York City.