This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WABE and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
It’s been a year since Hurricane Helene rampaged through the center of Georgia, quickly becoming one of the deadliest and most damaging hurricanes in state history.
Now, the hardest-hit areas are rebuilding, and many people are changing how they prepare for the next storm.
When Helene slammed into Valdosta last year, it joined a litany of disasters that struck the area, starting with Hurricane Idalia in August, 2023. In 2024, new storms hit almost monthly: a tornado, a straight-line wind event, flooding. Then Tropical Storm Debby struck in August, followed by Helene in September.
It started to feel biblical, said Ashley Tye, the emergency management director for Lowndes County.
“We were kind of joking, ‘Well, you know what’s next, the plague of locusts?’” he said. “Well no, what was next was a snowstorm of the century for our area.”
The impacts of those storms added up. Strong winds battered buildings already damaged by Idalia. Debris from Helene made the later flood worse.
And the effects of the storms go beyond the physical and financial.
“Anytime that the skies turn gray, or there’s an ominous forecast, people get a lot more anxious,” Tye said.
The regular threat of hurricanes has been an adjustment for the area, around two hours from both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. But seas superheated by climate change are strengthening hurricanes, meaning Lowndes County and other inland communities are more at risk.
So county officials are learning how to cope. In Lowndes, they’re building up a network of local resources so they don’t have to wait on unpredictable federal help. And they’re shifting their storm prep advice based on the disasters they’ve experienced.
“The rule of thumb is be prepared to be without power, what we would say was 48 hours, three days,” said Meghan Barwick, the county’s public information officer.
But it can take longer to restore electricity in rural areas, with the houses spread far apart and downed trees blocking many roads. After Helene, she said, they now know to be prepared for longer power outages.
“I mean, I was without power at my home for 14 days,” Barwick said.
Helene also taught a cruel lesson in preparedness on the other side of the state, in Columbia County, near Augusta. There, an overnight shift in track brought the storm straight into a part of the state that wasn’t expecting it.
“We all went to bed thinking that we were probably gonna get a lot of heavy rain, maybe some wind,” said county manager Scott Johnson. “We weren’t expecting a hurricane to hit us.”
Many people weren’t just caught unawares that night, he said. Living even farther from any coastline, they hadn’t prepared for a hurricane to hit ever, despite the official advice to have emergency supplies on hand.
“We can say all those things, but it took us living through it to really understand that you really need to do all those things,” Johnson said.
The storm utterly devastated Columbia County, not only damaging houses, knocking down trees, and taking out power and internet lines but even taking local radio and TV stations fully offline.
“For many days we had no way to communicate with loved ones to let them know we were okay,” Johnson said.
The one exception was the county’s own broadband network. With all its lines buried underground, it never lost service, keeping emergency services online and allowing people to access public Wi-Fi hotspots. That was a critical lesson, Johnson said, and the county has expanded the public Wi-Fi system.
He’s also encouraging other counties to set up similar systems.
“I would really encourage all local governments to have some kind of redundancy because it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when it’s gonna strike your community,” Johnson said.
For his own part, Johnson said he now has a backup generator and emergency supplies of food, water, gas and cash — because he never wants to be caught unprepared again.
You must be logged in to post a comment.