The scenario runs something like this:

A hurricane and floodwaters have pushed a car off the road and into the woods.

Trapped inside the car are two passengers. As waters continue to rise along the roadway, there’s no hope of a rescue by someone in another motor vehicle.

Enter the North Carolina Helicopter and Aquatic Rescue Team – HART, for short.

HART is a partnership among the North Carolina National Guard, North Carolina Emergency Management and firefighting stations across the state.

The group is trained to rescue people in the most desperate of situations: from the sides of cliffs to the bottoms of gorges, from capsized boats to raging floodwaters.

HART is the team you would call in an event like the one above, one of four staged rescue missions used to train HART members this week at Salisbury’s Army National Guard base.

HART is made up of members of the N.C. National Guard and civilian firefighters and emergency responders.

Each rescuer is hand-selected by HART crew members and goes through rigorous training before being sent out for a real rescue.

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Brandon King, the National Guard’s lead pilot of the operation, called HART rescues a “dance, of sorts.”

Why a dance? Because HART performs the precarious rescue missions with the aid of helicopters: UH-60s, a UH-72 and a Bell 407.

These aircraft aren’t landing anywhere to complete a mission. They’re sending down rescuers one to two at a time by way of a cable and hoist.

“There’s a lot of practice that goes into it,” King said. “That’s why training and these things like this are so important, so we can work out the kinks and the bugs and the movements and the whole dance of what we do.”

This way, he said, when HART arrives on scene for a real rescue, it’s “just another day.”

The team performs rescue training monthly and at different locations. Annually, it gathers before hurricane season for a more intense training session – like footballers gearing up for a big game.

Training scenarios for this week’s hurricane prep were carefully crafted for realism and to keep trainees on their toes.

For added realistic stress, multiple scenarios were run in tandem, meaning pilots and crews have to search for those in need of rescue.

Volunteers play the part of the rescued — “survivors,” they’re called. This week, volunteers came from the North Carolina Forest Service.

There were cars with multiple trapped passengers, a mix of adults and infants in car seats. Other volunteers were trapped in trees, within and atop buildings or scattered among a staged mobile home park.

According to Maj. Darrell Scoggins, these missions are part of what’s called “multiplatform training.”

“We take the lessons learned at prior events and apply those to these lessons,” said Scoggins. “That way, we make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again.”

King, with extensive experience as a lead pilot on these missions, spoke of some hard lessons.

On one mission during Hurricane Matthew, the team came across a family with a small infant.

“We had to figure out what device we were going to use to lift that baby up because we didn’t have anything that small,” he said.

The team ended up using a rescue basket, hoisting the mother into the waiting aircraft with her infant clasped tightly in her arms.

Now, each helicopter is equipped with a collapsible basket, with scenarios often featuring infants – though dolls play these parts rather than live volunteers.

Hurricanes and hurricane season can take North Carolina’s HART crew any number of places across the United States. They responded to Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey.

Closer to home, the crew assists with Army Special Forces at Fort Bragg weekly ine repelling, parachute training and more.

They are also called frequently to assist with fires or help rescue stranded hikers and campers in Linville Gorge.

One such instance occurred in January on one of the coldest nights of the season. At 2 a.m., King’s team received a call about a stranded camper in Linville Gorge who was suffering a heart attack and cold-weather injuries.

By 4:35, the group was hoisting the victim out of the bottom of the gorge.

“I never touched the controls the whole time,” said King. “We pulled in, and I just sat over there and listened to my guys, these men who  had trained so hard. They make me very proud, for sure.”

Currently, North Carolina is one of only three states with a HART team. South Carolina and Texas are the other two.

In light of recent natural disasters, other states are now seeing the value in these specialized rescue units, King said.

“Other states are beginning to step their rescue up,” said King. “They’re setting the standard off of what we do here.”