Waiting on a hurricane to arrive is a strange experience. On the afternoon of September 26, 2024, I began watching the radar closely right after lunch. By that time, we knew the storm was headed our way.
It wasn’t a question of if Helene would hit Coffee County. It was how bad that collision would be.
We thought we were ready. We had our hurricane snacks. I had two generators gassed up with about 25 gallons of gas in cans under the carport. That would most certainly be enough, right?
I remember the Hurricane Floyd evacuation from 1999. I got caught in that as I made my way back home that day. I had been in Florida and it took nine hours to get from Hilliard, Fla., to Douglas. That was annoying but not much else.
Then there was Hurricane Irma in 2017. We lost power on that Monday. It came back on briefly but went out again. We stayed in the dark until Thursday. That week, I learned how invaluable generators were.
Helene would most definitely be the worst of all of them. But how bad could it really be?
As the skies turned angry and the wind picked up on the afternoon of the 26th, I decided to go for a run. Once the storm hit, I wasn’t sure when I’d get the chance to run again. It was raining off and on and the wind was growing in intensity. I ran my four miles then we started to hunker down for Helene’s arrival.
Around 9 p.m., we moved into the hallway of our house. Our generators (I have two) were fueled and staged. The extension cords were ready.
When we moved into our house in 2003, we had a front yard full of pine trees. I don’t remember exactly how many there were but around 50 comes to mind. They were planted in rows across the front and down the side yards. At some point a few years after we moved in, we had the trees in the front yard removed. This was when someone would cut down trees for the wood. We had a fence around the backyard and we didn’t want to take it down to get to the trees in the back of the house.
It took us 20 years to learn that we had made a mistake.
The front yard had no trees. The backyard still had plenty, including one that was dead and brittle from a lightning strike. I didn’t know how many of our trees would fall during Helene but I knew that one was coming down.
Heather and Montgomery were on a beanbag in the hallway. It was a little crowded so I went into the bedroom. I was laying on the bed listening to the wind intensify.
Right before midnight, I moved to the other side of the bed – away from the window. I could tell we were going to be in for quite a ride.
Debris started falling on the house. At first, it was just sticks and pine cones. Then larger objects started falling. Limbs were hitting the roof in bunches. As the storm intensified, the sticks got larger.
When Helene unleashed her full fury, trees began crashing down. The gusts would pick up and a tree would fall. I was still in the bedroom and when something fell, I would yell to Heather, “That was a big limb” or “That was a tree.”
After one particularly bad gust, I went into the living room and opened the door to the back porch. Limbs had come through the ceiling. Since there were no trees in the front yard, I figured it was safe to walk out there. I stepped outside and the force of the winds hit me. I could only see shadows but I could tell that trees were bending and twisting in ways that trees shouldn’t bend or twist. I ran back inside and told Heather that the damage was already severe. And it wasn’t over.
When Helene finally decided that enough was enough, we were able to doze off. We knew it was bad but we didn’t know the true extent. We had lost power pretty early on, as had our entire neighborhood, and with no lights to speak of, we couldn’t see just how terrible it was.
We managed to get a few hours of sleep. We woke at daybreak and I immediately went outside. I was speechless.
Our yard and house were annihilated. Zean’s room and the carport took the brunt of Helene’s fury. The ceiling in his room had buckled under the weight of a falling tree. The carport had a large tree across it. Heather’s car was in the carport and was unhurt; however, limbs were blocking the carport and she couldn’t get her car out.
Over the course of the following days and weeks, I began to comprehend the extent of the destruction and the degree to which our citizens banded together to overcome the storm.
I have told the story many times of the nurse I saw help cut away trees that blocked Highway 158. I am forever grateful to the Coffee County Emergency Management Agency/Fire Department for letting me sit at the station for the next month so I could work.
I’m not sure how good of a job I did of letting people know what was going on around town – meals, water, relief agencies, shelters, etc. – but I tried. There was no blueprint for what to do, certainly not for our area, but with the help of first responders, I fumbled my way through.
We were without power for 12 days. The sound of a generator running still churns my stomach. I equate that sound with the destruction of my home and disruption of my community.
I hate that sound to this day.
For the remainder of 2024 and into 2025, I saw the very best of this community. I saw people help their neighbors, their friends, even their enemies. People of faith responded and took care of those who could not take care of themselves. Private citizens responded first. The government followed. The partnership between government and private citizens/businesses put our community on the mend almost immediately.
Two years later, Hurricane Helene’s impact remains omnipresent. You don’t have to look far to see her footprint. Tarps still cover roofs of houses. Vehicles are on the road every day that bear obvious dents and scratches from the storm. Trees remain on the ground as do stumps and root balls. South Georgia State College looks like a different campus. Hundreds of millions of dollars in timber were lost. Helene decimated the timber industry; we won’t the full extent of those losses for another 10-15 years.
For the most part, our house has been returned to its pre-Helene state. We are putting the finishing touches on the last couple of projects but we are mostly done. Many others, however, are not. We have family members who are still fighting insurance companies and may not be back in their houses for another year or more.
We survived what has become one of the defining events of our community. Fifty years from now, when many of us are long gone, people will ask, “Were you alive during Helene?”
Floyd was irritating. Irma was troublesome. But Helene – she was devastating and deadly. I hope I never see anything like that again in Coffee County.
And my trees in the backyard – every single one of them came down except for two. One of those that remained was the old, dead, lightning-struck pine tree. It didn’t lose a single piece of bark.
