Augusta faces daunting task to recover after city's 'worst natural disaster'

AUGUSTA - Across Augusta and the surrounding communities, Tropical Storm Helene has made even the most basic of essentials – power, water and gas – hard to come by, and residents don’t know when things will get better.

Massive trees and limbs are strewn across yards and roads in the city, with some neighborhoods still impossible to leave because of the trees stretched across their streets.

Power lines are strewn across sidewalks and roads, almost no traffic lights work and nearly all the gas stations in the city are without power, leading to hours-long lines at the few stations that do have available fuel.

“This is the worst natural disaster in our city’s history,” Augusta Mayor Garnett Johnson said at a press conference Sunday afternoon. People now have to wait for “simple things that we didn’t have to worry about last week, like food and water, the comforts of hot showers,” Johnson said.

At least seven people have died in Augusta-Richmond County, according to Augusta coroner Mark Bowen, though he cautioned the death toll could rise because people are still stuck in their homes and some roads are still blocked, so officials haven’t been able to get to every house yet to check on residents.

For Qena Fabin, she doesn’t know yet when a massive oak tree in her front yard will be cleared. Before sunrise Friday morning, as Helene’s 65 mile-per-hour gusts battered Augusta, two trees crashed in Fabin’s backyard, narrowly missing her house. But an hour later, the oak tree came down in the front, landing on top of two of her cars and busting the windows in her kitchen.

“I was scared,” Fabin, 26, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “My main focus was just covering my kids to make sure they were safe.”

The only way to leave her house now is by either walking around the oak’s massive, upturned root ball and the crater it left, or clambering on top of the tree. Fabin has been trying to call 311, but no one has answered, she said. Her neighbors used their chainsaws to clear the limbs from the road, but the rest of the oak and the power lines it brought down are still in her yard.

She and her three young kids have been without power or transportation since Friday. Her youngest daughter is seven months old and was nearly out of formula, before Fabin had to walk to the nearest store to get some more.

She worries she’ll be fired soon from her new job working at a factory in nearby Aiken, South Carolina, because she hasn’t been able to leave her neighborhood in days. She can only call out three times before she needs to take a leave of absence, and Sunday was her third time calling out to the job she started just a month and a half ago.

Challenges and setbacks

Augusta has been without power since Friday, but Mayor Johnson is hopeful things will be better soon. On Saturday morning, there were about 1,000 linemen from Georgia Power in the region, but by Monday morning they are expecting more than 5,000 linemen to be on the ground, he said.

Georgia Power has committed to having power restored to 95% of its customers in the region by Oct. 5, according to Johnson, more than a week after Helene ravaged the city.

But the lack of power has also impacted the area’s roads and highways.

Will Volk, Georgia Department of Transportation’s East Central district spokesperson, which stretches from Oglethorpe County to Laurens County and includes Augusta, said they’ve been seeing drivers blow through downed traffic signals.

Interstate 20 and Interstate 16 are in Volk’s district, and both interstates are open in all directions. He said his district was hit particularly hard, so of the 27 counties, about 70% of their routes are experiencing moderate to heavy impacts.

He said the goal is to have most of them cleared by tomorrow night.

Volk suggests people avoid traveling unless absolutely necessary because it will give crews space to work on clearing the roads and many gas stations don’t have power to pump gas.

There’s also damage to traffic signals in the “majority of the district,” he said, some of which will need complete rebuilds, so they don’t have a timeline on when those repairs will be finished.

Shortage fears

On Sunday morning, Augusta shut off water for 24 to 48 hours because the floods caused by Helene’s torrential rains are washing trash and debris through the Savannah River and into the Augusta Canal, clogging the filters at the city’s raw water pump station. Workers have to shut down the system for about 30 minutes every time they need to clear the screens.

The city opened one distribution center for cases of water on Sunday and is working to open more centers in the coming days. Officials are also making plans to bring water to residents who are trapped in their neighborhoods and can’t reach a center.

But Johnson stressed there are no water or gas shortages in the city, despite residents fearing otherwise.

At a Chevron at the corner of Gordon Highway and Highland Avenue in Augusta, a line of cars waited about three hours to fill up their tanks, according to Blake Sullivan, a resident who was in a separate, but also long, line in 80-degree heat waiting to fill up the gas cans he’d brought.

Sullivan said the long gas lines were similar to when people panic-bought toilet paper and hand sanitizer at the beginning of the pandemic because they were afraid of a possible shortage, which then led to supplies running out.

“I assure you, once we get either generators or we get power restored, we have plenty of inventory of gasoline,” Johnson said.

But Kimberly Lyons, an Augusta resident who was waiting with her cousin at the Chevron, said some people need gas because they are driving to check on family, to go to the grocery stores or to get to hotels that have electricity.

People were looking far outside of the city for gas, too. Near Crawfordville, more than an hour away from Augusta, police cars were stationed at two gas stations where people were waiting for their turn at the pump.

A community rallies

In nearby Grovetown, a 77-year-old Hispanic man died after a tree fell on his mobile home, according to the town’s Mayor Gary Jones.

”The tree was so big, we had to bring in a crane to lift it off so that we could even get in there and remove him from the scene,” Jones said.

Through the devastation, officials have focused on clearing the roads, getting fuel into the town and making sure residents are fed.

Since the storm knocked out power, residents’ frozen foods and perishable items were about to go bad, so Jones decided to invite the community to bring the food to the town’s street maintenance facility and town employees cooked it up on a Blackstone and large grill out back, across from John Deere mowers.

On Saturday, Jones estimates a few hundred people were fed, as residents brought steak, pork, chicken, even quail, to the center. On Sunday morning, the grills were going again, as city employees cooked deer burgers, ribs, porkchops, bacon and scrambled eggs.

Aleysa Jacobson, 33, came to the cookout with her husband, Jesse, and two young children. Originally from Wisconsin, she moved to Grovetown about three years ago. She said she’s been through winter storms, but never anything like Helene.

“It’s honestly the scariest thing I’ve ever been through,” Jacobson said. The storm sounded like a tornado, she said. Luckily, her house only had a little water leak into the laundry room but was otherwise fine.

As she sat at a table at the cookout with her 4-month-old daughter sleeping in her arms, her husband collected multiple takeout containers of food to bring to neighbors and family.

But despite the devastation in the region, Jacobson is grateful for the way the community has shown up, bringing food and helping each other out.

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