Stowe’s wife coordinated with a school bus mechanic to dispatch a third fuel truck. Stowe secured a ride in a fire truck back to his office to get the third fuel truck and find out where his son was. He was located in the early evening at the Fairview Fire Department in a hard-stricken area of the county. On Sept. 29, Stowe received word from emergency management to coordinate fuel logistics. “We were running out of unleaded [gasoline] in the
area and people were in a bit of a panic mode. I had roughly about 15,000 gallons of unleaded on hand. Between my off-site storage tanks, I keep around 75,000 gallons of diesel fuel on hand,” he said. “I had to find a way to get the unleaded fuel out of the ground with no power or fuel management devices for area fire trucks, police cars, municipalities. I was able to get some of my mechanics and an area electrician. We got the genera-
tors online and began fueling trucks with a makeshift pump until we got a large generator on site. Once we got power going to our fuel island, we started fueling every- thing in sight that was emergency response.” Continuing the next day, Stowe worked with emer- gency command to bring emergency shelters and large diesel generators online. In Asheville, communication towers on mountain peaks ran on diesel generators. With only five days’ worth of fuel remaining and no power restoration in sight, Stowe’s team fashioned four-wheel drive, pick- up service trucks with makeshift portable containers, assessed the roads, brought back information to emergency command, Army Corps of Engineers, and emergency logisitics management so they could send bulldozers out to start plowing roads where trees had fallen.
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