A long haul: Upstate's recovery from Helene's devastation will be a marathon, not a sprint

Driving through Greenville a week after Hurricane Helene, two sights become familiar almost immediately: trees everywhere — on the streets, on houses, on interstate medians — and traffic lights with usually normal cycles serving as four-way stops.

However, residents know that's only the half of the story.

The assessments of just what the damage includes are ongoing. There's the accounting of how many felled trees have struck cars, ripped down roofs, and taken lives. Some still spend nights in the pitch dark and days in stuffy air, wondering when their light switches, stoves, and air conditioning may function again. Many are wondering — worrying — about friends in North Carolina they can't get ahold of.

Most of all, Upstate residents are bracing for the marathon — not sprint — that is storm relief and restoration.

Property damage

Jennifer Diehn, who has been a Spartanburg resident for 22 years, said that she weathered the storm in her house as trees fell around her neighborhood and directly on her property.

"I'm from Iowa, so I grew up in tornado territory, and this felt like being in a tornado for three hours," Diehn said. "The wind and rain whips and howls. You could hear tree after tree coming down. One broke in half and fell on top my house. It's still there, sitting on my roof right now. It didn't put its full impact, so there isn't a hole in my roof, but multiple other trees fell and just smashed my back porches."

Hurricane Helene very quickly intensified throughout the day on Sept. 26. The storm built and built, morphing from a Category 1 spiral into a tight-eyed cyclone, a monster of a Category 4. Though the winds calmed from 140 mph to a much tamer 45-60 mph as it marched across Florida, South Carolina found itself in intense rain and wind it could have never anticipated by the time the storm landed in the overnight hours.

Diehn emphasized that Helene brought a magnitude of fear and damage that South Carolina hasn't seen in some time, if ever.

"The devastation was just... it was so scary, because it just didn't stop," Diehn said. "It just kept coming with the wind and the rain, and the sound. It sounds scary. I've braced for tornadoes before, and they sound sort of like trains, but this — this wasn't like that. All you can hear is the rain whipping, I've never experienced wind and rain like that."

Diehn said the Upstate, in general, was underprepared for the storm because a storm of this caliber is so unusual.

"We just don't have the resources available," Diehn said. "I mean, we've had some bad storms, but I've lived here 22 years, and we've had bad weather, but we've never had something like this."

Diehn said she lived in Ashville for two years and said that "the devastation here is nothing" compared to North Carolina.

"I cry every time I see the news. I've got friends that live there, and I just can't get through to anybody," Diehn said.

Citizen-coordinated relief efforts

Greenville residents like Tracy Roberts, who owns Atlas Home Team at Keller Williams Drive, also saw the damage in North Carolina and felt compelled to mobilize people in Greenville to act. She said she was inspired to help when she saw a post on social media by Isaiah Burch, who runs the local sightseeing tour company Happy Helicopter Tours, sharing his plans to start using his helicopters to fly supplies to North Carolina. Roberts said she replied to it in minutes, offering to help get supplies there "on the ground."

Roberts said they started by loading up three vehicles and a tractor-trailer full of supplies — food, water, baby wipes, diapers, pet food — to take into Edenyville, N.C., a town of about 2,900 people that neighbors Chimney Rock, N.C., which has been left destroyed after Helene raged through.

"The stuff people were telling us was so, so sad," Roberts said. "One lady, had we not gone, may not be alive right now — she was unable to get her insulin cold, and she needed gas, and we gave her some to run her generator and keep her insulin cold. One woman was holding me, crying, telling me about her dog. ... She watched her dog go away in the current and watched it bark until it stopped barking, which is how she knew he was gone. .... You've got people that are only taking one piece out of a four-pack of canned chicken, saying that they 'only need one' and that they don't want to take from anyone else."

Roberts said that witnessing the destruction firsthand fueled her to get as many supplies to affected areas as quickly as possible. Roberts said they have distributed 800,000 pounds of supplies via "no less than 60 box trucks" and at least 50 personal vehicles to towns in North and South Carolina that have been affected.

Additionally, there are efforts to distribute food specifically to those without power. Meghan Barp, president and chief executive of United Way of Greenville County, said United Way is working to distribute boxed meals to those affected, and through this, she saw the impact of the power outages.

"I was chatting with a young woman earlier today whose power is out, and she came by United Way to get some food, and gosh, I hugged her for probably three minutes, because she just needed somebody who cared, her power's been out for a long time," Barp said. "She doesn't know when it will come back on, and she's here by herself in Greenville."

The woman Barp talked about is one of many in Greenville. As of Oct. 4, about 8% of South Carolina does not have power, according to a Paste BN outage tracker, with Greenville and Spartanburg accounting for half of the state's outages. About 50,000 customers in both counties still do not have power.

Many in Greenville, like Deihn, report feeling "lucky" that their only damage was limited to fallen trees and power outages. However, low-income residents who have been directly impacted by the storm don't share the same experience.

Low-income residents uniquely affected by the storm

Andrena Edwards of Greenville, sheltered at the Red Cross shelter at Hillcrest High School, said the storm destroyed her life. She lost both her parents over the past year, has no siblings, and has been "sick off and on" since 2020. In the storm, she lost a lot of valuable items — including some that were sentimental to her family.

"One motel I was staying at stole my oxygen concentrator, I've never been so humiliated after how that manager treated me. At another place, my dishes were stolen, and some heirlooms," Edwards said. "I have lost so much stuff, had so much stolen from me and lost during this transition. No one had checked on me, to see if I made it through, but I did, by the grace of God."

Edwards said that, in her search for post-hurricane lodging, she saw exorbitant prices on many motels. As of Sept. 26, South Carolina's State of Emergency ushered in a price gouging law, making it illegal to rent or sell commodities at unreasonable rates. Regardless, residents of Greenville, including Edwards, have reportedly seen instances of price gouging in real time.

"It's not just me, the devastation of this storm impacted so many families in District 25," Edwards said. "You'll see so many families in these hotels. Us that are the low-income are suffering. Some of us don't know where our next meal is coming from. Some of us got to make the decision to either pay for the room or eat."

She finally found lodging at the Red Cross shelter after multiple calls to the agency, but she said she worries for her future after storm restoration efforts are completed and after her assistance from FEMA expires.

"I don't have a permanent address. I'm tired of being outside," Edwards said. "I don't know where I'm going to go when this is all over. I'm just lucky I didn't get sick, because if I get sick, I might not come back from this."

The long run

As of Oct. 4, 46 people are confirmed to have died across South Carolina as a result of Hurricane Helene. This marks Helene as the deadliest hurricane to come to South Carolina since 1989, when Hurricane Hugo claimed 35 lives, according to the National Hurricane Center.

But the storm's toll doesn't end at the death. It comes in the moments after — in the mad scramble to buy generators that have never before been necessary, to buy gallons of water that will sustain families for who-knows-how-long, to chop up trees with 25-inch diameters that litter the streets.

Residents are in for a long process to restore South Carolina.

"There's a lot of gratitude [for help] from people," Barp said. "This is a very generous community that we live in... But, recovery is going to be long. This isn't something we're going to resolve in just a few weeks, but we're here for people in the long run."

Sarah Clifton covers business for the Montgomery Advertiser. You can reach her at sclifton@montgome.gannett.com or follow her on X @sarahgclifton.