TULSA, Okla. — While many crews are heading to Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton, volunteers who were doing the same for Helene in the southeast are now on their way home.
Trevor Gilroy, a lineman with the Public Service Company of Oklahoma is among them. He was quick to put his name down to help with recovery efforts after the last major storm.
"It’s just kind of what we do, a storm happens, we go,” said Gilroy.
He and other PSO linemen shipped out to Florida on Sept. 26th but were detoured to Virginia at the last minute. They were there for nearly two weeks, restoring power lines across the state.
While they weren't prepared for that specific environment, the team did what they could to provide even the smallest amount of relief by turning the lights back on.
“Some of the machines and stuff that we brought were not as well versed for the mountains," said Gilroy. "So we had to take a lot of our own equipment, backpack it in, climb up the side of a mountain to fix what we needed to fix.”
The Virginia terrain made getting that job done more challenging than they expected, with roads getting completely washed away.
As a born and raised Oklahoman, Gilroy wanted to get into this line of work to give back.
After living through several tornadoes and watching resources pour into his community in their time of need, Gilroy was adamant about returning the favor.
2 News asked Gilroy how tornado damage compared to what he saw in Virginia.
“It was different, mostly because of the amount of rain and stuff that they got, so they had mud slides and high waters that, you think of a flash flood here and it gets into a house, well you don’t think that it’s going to wash away the house," he said. "A couple of the jobs that we went to, poles and everything, all of our equipment would be gone, we’d just be rebuilding brand new back to what used to be a house.”
Watch how Tulsan's are helping Hurricane Helene victims.
Knowing he needed to answer the call, Gilroy didn't think much of walking into the eye of the storm.
But once he was there, the Oklahoma native was struck by the sheer magnitude of destruction this storm left behind.
“The thing that was a lot different from a tornado here versus there is the flooding aspect," said Gilroy. "You see a tornado here, you can still see debris and stuff from when a house or something was there, and a lot of what we saw there were concrete slabs. The houses were completely gone.”
A PSO crew is heading out to Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton.
Gilroy's message to them is to work diligently, but more importantly, to get home safely.
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