Turkeyslapper makes a good point. 30-40 years ago, the military was pretty much the only kid on the block with a credible rotary wing element for disaster relief. Today, there are any number of civil opertors with all sorts of kit, some of it, (thanks to, IMHO, some really flawed decisions on retirement/replacement of the military's rotary wing force), probably better suited to civil disaster relief than much of the military RW equipment.
I was very much in the thick of it in a Huey in both the '73 and '74 floods, doing, (if I say myself), some pretty silly things (with the benefit of hindsight) to get people out of some very tricky situations. We flew from first light to (usually) just after last light, and I was too knackered at the end of every day to take up any of the many offers of a free beer from the many people we brought in from flooded farms. It was usually just a stubby while we did the post flight paperwork, then back into town for a meal and straight to bed.
We spent the first few nights on task camping in the civil terminal at Narrabri airport, and would have to pack everything up and have it out of sight each morning before the pax started arriving to take the morning ANSW F27 flight to Sydney.
We had exceeded our mandated maximum monthly hours before two weeks on task. I remember contacting Op Com to tell them of this. Their reply was: "Keep flying."
I remember coming into (forget the town now. I think it was Wee War) with... shall we say "a goodly number" of Aboriginal children literally filling every square inch of space available in the Huey's cargo compartment to find a Caribou had come in while we were away packed with television crews and newspaper reporters. Luckily, my Crewman spotted all the cameras, allowing me time to put down briefly on the airfield with the Caribou blocking the view between us and the cameras. Kicked off "a goodly number minus seven" children and our second Crewman, then hover taxied in to unload seven grinning children for the cameras.
At least one of the media types did ask where the "goodly number" of kids who wandered in to the terminal area from behind the Caribou a few minutes later, shepherded by a lone RAAF Crewman, came from. We shrugged and said: "dunno; from out of the sky".
It's also instructive to see the way the mainstream media reported our efforts then versus they way they have reported the AAAvn crews equally great efforts in the recent floods. Back in 73/74, with Vietnam still fresh in the collective media mind, we were still all warmongering killers of women and children to most of the media types of the day and the only time I recall them taking any notice of us was when Reg and his crew were killed up near Wee War - and then they were just looking to get one of us to say something controversial on camera.
I can recall one of our highly esteemed superfitters (Hoss, are you still out thre?) made a point of exaggeratedly scratching his genital area any time the media pack approached with cameras rolling. (In those far off, genteel days, that was enough to ruin the shot for the evening news.) We loved them about as much as they loved us...