SALISBURY — Rowan County first responders have been hard at work in western North Carolina, but County Manager Aaron Church made sure to also mention the hard work that all of the county departments are doing during the Rowan County Board of Commissioners meeting on Monday.

The discussion by Church came as part of a request to the commissioners to approve time-and-a-half pay for sheriff’s office employees ranked captain and below and time-and-a-half pay for all non-law-enforcement, non-exempt employees that assisted in the efforts. Both pay rates were approved for official mutual aid or state-approved operations outside of the employee’s normal hours. Both requests were approved by the commissioners unanimously. 

Church said that the county would be sending a request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for reimbursement for the additional costs.

Church and Sheriff Travis Allen also took the opportunity to provide an update on all of the efforts that county employees are undertaking.

“They’ve just done a tremendous amount of work. The sheriff’s office has been up since the very day after. I just can’t thank and praise all the directors and the sheriff enough, they’ve been selfless and volunteered to go. They’re getting paid, but they’re volunteering to go do the work and I just can’t say enough about how hard they’re working and how much help they’re providing to the folks up there,” said Church.

Rowan County Emergency Services has an employee in Polk County providing public information support and an employee in Ashe County providing 911 support. Rowan County Social Services employees are working to support a shelter in Henderson County for people that have been displaced. Randy Cress, chief information officer, spent 16 hours over the past weekend providing assistance to Watauga County with IT requests. The health department, emergency services and parks and recreation department all supported the shelter in Salisbury by providing necessary items and medication support and storage.

In the coming weeks, the county plans to deploy animal services employees to Henderson County to provide pet support and animal control support. The Building Inspections Department also has two employees rostered to help whenever repairs and inspections begin. Commissioner Judy Klusman said that the county also plans to deploy two nurses from the health department to western North Carolina.

Allen said that the sheriff’s office has had a presence in western North Carolina since the day after the hurricane hit the area. Originally, the department was tasked with transporting and housing 30 inmates from Avery County in the Rowan County Detention Center before being assigned to the Elk Park Volunteer Fire Department district in Avery.

“If there’s heroes in this, the volunteer fire departments were unreal. They already started in their little communities, and we were able to go to them and they were able to tell us what we needed. Then, they started reporting in person every so often to headquarters and giving updates. We learned real fast that the best way to function was to assign people to the volunteer fire departments,” said Allen.

The department has now scaled down its response to a four-man response team that the Avery County sheriff requested to respond to incidents of looting, said Allen. He said that the department expects to be able to withdraw its deputies by Wednesday as they are relieved by Orange County and Lee County personnel.

Allen also said that communities were asking for investigators with experience recovering and processing dead bodies, but that Rowan County’s Criminal Investigative Division was currently too busy to provide help.

“We’ve tried to keep expenses down and we don’t want to interfere with what we do here, because our priority is that we want to take care of our neighbors, but at the same time, we want to make sure that we fulfill what we can for our citizens as well,” said Allen.