TOLEDO, Ohio — Truckloads of water bottles, tissues and cleaning supplies will soon to be sent to Erwine, Tenn. as a relief effort for those in need after Hurricane Helene slammed parts of the southern U.S.
"We're delivering to a church down in Erwine Tennessee, the three trucks will leave by 5 AM tomorrow morning," said Drew McGuire, the owner and president of McGuire and sons trucking company in Findlay, Ohio.
He said they're teaming up with Liberty Benton Schools and other companies including Hyway Trucking, Ohio Logistics, and Garner Trucking to collect donation items from the community and load up the trucks.
Liberty Benton Local Schools superintendent Bruce Otley said he was open to the plan the moment McGuire asked him.
"Service is so important to us as a community, we're blessed to be a blessing, and it's the right thing to do to help other Americans in need," said Otley.
And locals who are showing up to donate, couldn't agree more.
"My brother went through a hurricane, I know how wonderful it was all the people that came and helped when he went through that," said resident Greta Schrock.
"I brought a lot of water, toilet paper, paper towels, cleaning supplies, diapers, wipes, so hopefully it'll help some of those in need that are in the affected areas," said resident Jan Kotey.
McGuire said the inspiration comes after knowing what it's like to go through something like this, as Findlay has had a history with flooding displacing lots of people.
"We don't get a lot of natural disasters around here very often but we always look at it as if something ever catastrophic did ever happen here, we'd want people to come in and help us," said McGuire. "So the least we can do because we're able to and have the resources is to be able to travel out of state to go help the people who need it the most."
And while he said they didn't originally plan on sending three trucks, the community made that possible with a larger than expected turnout.
"This just shows you how selfless people are," said McGuire. "We actually had people that are rolling in before 8 o'clock this morning, so it's been nonstop, we got a lot of items, now we're just trying to kind of organize and make sense of it all and about the the time we start making progress on it, we get a bunch more items which is a really good problem to have."