The Inter-Mountain photo by Taylor McKinnie Pallets of bottled water are loaded onto a truck Thursday afternoon at The First Baptist Church in Elkins. Local donations will be sent to North Carolina to help residents in areas affected by Hurricane Helene

ELKINS — A local church is teaming up with companies to fill trucks full of relief supply donations for victims of Hurricane Helene.

The First Baptist Church of Elkins has partnered with Newlons International Sales, LLC and other local businesses to gather supplies and donations to be sent to North Carolina to help residents in areas affected by Hurricane Helene, which tore through the south last week.

The church will be taking donations in their parking lot at 412 Randolph Ave for 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. until Saturday.

“We have about one truck filled up with 19 tons of water and charcoal, currently,” Rev. Brett Rinehart of the First Baptist Church of Elkins told The Inter-Mountain Thursday. “So this is truck number two we’re working on, and we’re just taking all kinds of donations for those areas affected.”

The First Baptist Church is asking for any of the following to be donated:

Cleaning supplies

Paper products

Non-perishable food items

Batteries

Garbage bags

Bottled water

Pet food

Baby food

Diapers

Rubber gloves

Household items

Rinehart said DJ Miller and Newlons reached out to them with the idea of filling trucks with supplies, even going as far as contacting other businesses, such as Grimes Enterprise, Buckley Akers Trucking, Roy’s RV, Fordland, Tygart Valley Sanitation and Freight Chain LLC, for their support.

“They’ve been calling local businesses, and donations have been pouring in,” Rinehart said. “So they called the church and said, ‘Hey, want some help with this?’ and so we had the people and the location here and God’s working it all together.”

Rinehart said the supplies should be sent out sometime early next week.

“I am just so grateful that we live in a town, in an area, that is willing to support and willing to give from what they have to help others they don’t even know,” Rinehart said. “It’s just a blessing to be a part of that. So, that’s why we’re trying to do what we can just to be a middleman in all this. It wasn’t the church’s idea, it was the community who came together, and we’re just trying to help out best that we can to show God’s love.”

States affected by Hurricane Helene include North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia, with several counties in West Virginia, including Mercer, McDowell and Wyoming, dealing with damage and power outages caused by heavy winds and flooding. 

The death toll from Hurricane Helene has reached at least 200, as of publication, with more than 600 people remaining missing. Helene is the U.S. mainland’s second-deadliest tropical storm in modern history, behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which killed at least 1,200 people, and surpassing Hurricane Ian in 2022 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which both caused around 160 fatalities each.

For more information about donating, call 304-636-3448.