Help is now on the way to those affected by Hurricane Helene. The American Red Cross Minnesota and Dakotas region is sending four emergency response vehicles south. Volunteers packed up before sunrise on Friday.

“They’re cold, tired and hungry,” said Rick Graft, who’s volunteered for the organization for 15 years. “We’re there to give them some food but we’re also there for some comfort.”

Each vehicle can serve hundreds of meals at a time, according to the Red Cross.

“With any disaster, we will be down there until people are well on the road to recovery,” said Brice Johnson, the regional chief executive officer for Minnesota and Dakotas Region of the American Red Cross.

Minnesotans who moved to Florida faced the storm head-on. Former KSTP photojournalist Travis Rosauer works for Lee County and captured footage of the start of the storm surge on his way home from the county emergency operations center on Thursday evening.

“The water was surging over the sea wall and was starting to flood over the roadways,” he said, describing the situation near Port Charlotte, where he lives. “Once nightfall happened, you could hear the winds just hitting the house. The rain would pick up and die off pretty quickly.”

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office shared a video to its Facebook page of deputies battling the elements during a rescue operation on Fort Myers Beach.

The storm made landfall as a strong Category 4 storm farther north in the Big Bend region of Florida. The flooding up and down the Gulf Coast left homes unlivable and businesses destroyed.

RELATED: Hurricane Helene kills at least 44 and cuts a swath of destruction across the Southeast

“People are going to be looking for places to live here and it’s going to be extremely long recovery,” said Jane Hinrichsen, who retired to Bradenton near Sarasota.

The former Cottage Grove resident told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS her husband has been helping friends clean up as they assess the damage in the Manatee County area.

“Anna Maria Island, Longboat Key, St. Armands Circle, they’re places that people all over the world visit,” she said. “They’re uninhabitable right now.”

Rosauer was out Friday with Lee County officials documenting the flood damage in his area while also knowing other parts of Florida were harder hit.

“We’re definitely praying for everyone who was affected,” he said. “A lot of people are probably hurting and I’m feeling for them, especially since we got hit with Ian, so I know how devastating it is and how hard it is to walk through such destruction like that.”

Three firefighters, a woman and her one-month-old twins and an 89-year-old woman whose house was hit by a tree are among those killed across several states. Moody’s Analytics expects Hurricane Helene caused $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage.