Three drone pilots for a Hopkinsville-based company have become a lifeline for people stranded in remote areas of North Carolina following Hurricane Helene.
“People have lost their livelihoods out here,” Jeff Clack said Thursday afternoon in a phone interview with Hoptown Chronicle. “They’ve lost family members. They’ve lost everything that they know on this planet. Everything that they have in life is gone.”
Clack, who is from Florida, is working with pilots from Alabama and Minnesota. All three are employees of Bestway Ag. The company manufactures and sells agriculture spraying and liquid hauling equipment. Headquartered in Hopkinsville, it also sells drones.
The drones that Bestway sells would normally be used to map fields, check crop health and spray crops, said Danny Vowell, the company’s marketing manager. But the drones also have capabilities that make them useful in a natural disaster. Thermal imaging allows the pilots to find people otherwise hidden under dense tree cover and inside their houses.