GRANITE QUARRY — Each year the Granite Quarry Fire Department Auxiliary holds one large fundraiser, a Port-o-Pit smoked chicken dinner, which funds the group’s actions for the year.

According to Brittany Barnhardt, Granite Quarry mayor and auxiliary board member, the event usually raises between $7,000 and $10,000.

“We use the money to support the department in ways outside of what their budget allows,” she said. “If someone gets sick, or if God forbid a department has a line-of-duty death, anything like that, we provide meals, gift cards, anything that family might need.” She said they have also purchased items for the department that contribute to the camaraderie, such as a grill for outdoor cooking, of the team that spends 24 hours together at a time.

The auxiliary is made up of spouses and partners of firefighters, and the six-member board does the planning and much of the work. They help with a number of events, including the annual banquet, the Trunk or Treat, coming up Oct. 31, the yearly Granite Fest, Arts in the Park, and other events.  They also provide food for staff meetings and Christmas gifts for the department.

They started this particular fundraiser in 2020, “when COVID hit,” Barnhardt said. “It was great, because so many places ran out of food and we were here. We started it with the drive-thru, which was go great that we never did anything else.”

Tickets are always available in advance, but she said there are also always enough to sell to people who come the day of. But when they are sold out, they are sold out.

This year was not expected to be any different than years past, until Hurricane Helene hit. A number of Granite Quarry Fire Department’s volunteers are also Kannapolis firefighters, who were deployed to assist with search and rescue and welfare checks in the small town of Bat Cave in western North Carolina.

They came home this past weekend and decided, with the members of the auxiliary, that they wanted to donate half of whatever funds they raise to the small town’s fire department.

“They have lost so much, and they can’t fundraise,” said Jake Chambers, who serves both Granite Quarry and Kannapolis. “We are two and a half hours away, but when we came home, we came home to homes and families and electricity and our lives as usual. For them, it’s going to be a long time before things are back to normal.”

“We are absolutely glad to be sharing with them, because they have almost nothing left,” added Travis Barnhardt. “And we can sent them funds, or if there is equipment they need, we can order it from here, where we have electricity and internet and a reachable place, and we can deliver it to them.”

Both men said they were stunned by what they saw, noting that “pictures don’t do it justice.” They said it will be years before life is back to normal, if it ever is in some spots.

Captain Kevin Strobel, who has volunteered with Granite Quarry for 24 years, was helping pack box meals of chicken, beans, slaw, bread and a dessert, said “fire departments are a close family, so it’s natural that we would want to help them.”

“Most of us started out as volunteers on small departments,” said Captain Brian Peeples, a full-time firefighter in Granite Quarry. “I started out when I was 13. Most of us got into this because we want to help. And this is a family — a firefighter is a firefighter, whatever the department — so it’s very important for us to donate to them.”

Bat Cave is an unincorporated community in Henderson County along the banks of the Broad River, within the Hickory Nut Gorge. A bridge that connected the Bat Cave community to the outside world was so damaged during Helene that people have used a makeshift ladder and makeshift bridge to get in and out of the area on foot, and repairs to that are still underway. That made it all the more difficult for first responders to actually reach Bat Cave, but Granite Quarry and Kannapolis crews managed to get to the community and help with both search and rescue and going door to door to check on those who were cut off for days.

“I think we’ll always have a connection with them,” said Chambers.