Aerial video and photos showing a stretch of Elon Road with rows of houses demolished by the April 15 tornado long will be remembered in Amherst County’s history.
The Amherst Lancers Tech Club is working to make sure those once-in-a-lifetime views are captured by using drones to document the recovery and, eventually, the rebuilding.
The handful of students involved in the club’s recently launched Drone Project have been busy in recent days taking aerial video and photography of the damage as part of capturing a perspective most will never see, said Mike Cargill, an instructional technology resource teacher at Amherst County High School.
The idea of the drone project is to give the students hands-on, project-based learning that reinforces concepts they are learning in the classroom while they also work to become certified commercial drone pilots.
“When you do things with your hands, you have a tendency to learn better,” Cargill said.
The use of drones in obtaining footage is intertwined with an overall goal of telling the stories of the tornado called “Beyond the Storm,” according to Cargill. Documenting a major event most will remember for a lifetime is way to give back to the community, he said.
The tornado touched down Sunday evening in the Timberlake Road area of Campbell County. It tore through the city of Lynchburg, crossed the James River and peaked in Elon, reaching estimated wind speeds up to 150 mph before dissipating. That speed put it in the category of EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which measures a tornado’s strength and ranges from 0 to 5.
Students will edit video and create montages to tell the timeline of events, from the April 15 tornado’s immediate destruction to aerial shots of the rebuilding in what is slated as a yearlong project. One student’s girlfriend lost a home, Cargill said in citing many examples of personal accounts of the major event that will be caught on film.
“We’re looking at building stories of hope and then to show folks who are going through this what meant a lot to them,” he said.
The club started in 2003 and gives students the opportunity to learn basics of filming while working with video and photography equipment. Its mission is to help students learn about multimedia in a real world setting and their work is streamed online through portals such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
Cargill said the club’s relationship with the Amherst County Sheriff’s Office led to working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service to fly over the affected areas in Elon and provide the documentation.
By last Friday morning, he said the footage posted on the club’s Facebook page had received 32,000 views.
The drone project kicked off in January with a focus on teaching participants the essential knowledge of flying a drone, allowing students to solve problems with the latest technology, Cargill said.
The group also is working to document the community response to the tragedy, including the hundreds of volunteers from the school system who took a day off from school last week to help in the massive cleanup effort.
Matthew Wells, a junior, helped with the cleanup on April 17 and has rolled up his sleeves to help recovering families along with operating a drone to obtain footage.
One of his fellow soccer players lost a house in the tornado, and seeing images doesn’t make as much of an impact as seeing the damage in person, Wells said.
“When you actually see it, it’s in a different scale. I was a little lost for words,” Wells said. “I wasn’t expecting it to be that bad.”
Cargill said having drone technology available in an event such as Hurricane Camille, which led to more than 100 deaths in Nelson County almost 49 years ago, would have given the community a resource in getting images and data of places that may be impossible to get to. The technology could locate people much more quickly and bring multiple eyes to searches.
The club also serves as a part of a greater community of drone pilots who could respond to disasters or incidents such as an Alzheimer patient getting lost and helping an agency such as the Amherst County Sheriff’s Office more quickly locate that person by searching a specific grid or sectioned area, giving another resource to law enforcement.
As Elon residents lost personal items during the storm, Cargill said the club’s drone project located a photo of a girl that was later returned to the family.
Carl Hayden, a sophomore involved in the drone project, said he likes the idea of helping people while also opening eventual options in filmmaking.
“I like stories and being able to build a story,” Hayden said.
Sophomore Mark Thurston, another student involved in the drone project, recently took footage of the tornado’s path of destruction and said he has seen much sadness in recent days.
“It’s like being a news guy,” he said of using technology to convey the scenes.
Wells, who recalls the gratitude on tornado victims’ faces when relief efforts poured in last week, said the project is sending a message to the community that shows help is needed for those affected.
“No one understands completely until they can see something about it,” he said of documenting the events.
Cargill said the students involved in the project would go through drone school.
“Our goal is to get them certified and go from there,” he said of the student drone pilots.