Cadets help community impacted by Hurricane Helene

Today, we had 540, more or less, cadets who volunteered to get engaged with their community and help out with the recovery from the effects of Hurricane Helene. Our prime objective is to live and act within the spirit of Ut Prosim; that I may serve. And I think today is a wonderful example of some of Virginia Tech's best representatives putting that principle into action. So today at Narrows Fire Department, we were relocating water, clothes, just sort of every household goods. So anyone that in the town can just go to the church and get any of the supplies they need. I'm very big in community service, and so being able to do that just means a lot and to be able to help those that are less fortunate. And so we're putting in practice to help the community out when they need it the most. So far today, we've done a lot of trash pickup. So any kind of loose debris, loose leaf items we found, we put in bags, if it was trash, and we took it to the road. We see a lot of debris wrapped around trees very far past the bank of the river, kind of indicating how bad the flooding was. We've seen a lot of damage of porches, decks and households just because the water was so high, it kind of came through and it really caused some issues for a lot of people. Service is the foundation of what we do. It's the foundation of why the corps exists, and I want them to understand that all the training that we go through and all of the character building that we do as a team, it's for reasons like these, because you are going to go out into the real world. You're gonna have to help people. And so I want to set that foundation now, and I hope that that's what they take away from this. So, our engagement today is totally a cadet-driven activity. After the events of Helene unfolded in the community, it became clear that our longstanding tradition of using the Caldwell March to mark the end of the first phase of cadet training was not going to be appropriate. And instead of that, our cadets generated the idea of this type of engagement in the community. To bring the cadets together while becoming more relevant, more active, more of service to our neighbors.