Days after Hurricane Helene, a powerless mess remains in the Southeast
Power is still out for well over 1 million people in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina five days after Hurricane Helene tore down trees and destroyed much of the electric grid
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Sherry Brown has gotten nearly the entire miserable Hurricane Helene experience at her home. She's out of power and water. There is a tree on her roof and her SUV. She is converting power from the alternator in her car to keep just enough juice for her refrigerator so she can keep some food.
Brown is far from alone. Helene was a tree and power pole wrecking ball as it blew inland across Georgia, South Carolina and into North Carolina on Friday. Five days later, more than 1.4 million homes and businesses in the three states don't have power, according to poweroutage.us.
It's muggy, pitch black at night and sometimes dangerous with chainsaws buzzing, tensioned power lines ready to snap and carbon monoxide silently suffocating people who don't use generators properly. While there are fewer water outages than electric issues, plenty of town and cities have lost their water systems too, at least temporarily.
Brown said she is surviving in Augusta, Georgia, by taking “bird baths” with water she collected in coolers before she lost service. She and her husband are slowly cleaning up what they can, but using a chain saw to get that tree off the SUV has been a three-day job.
“You just have to count your blessings,” Brown said. “We survived. We didn't flood. We didn't get a tree into the house. And I know they are trying to get things back to normal.”
How long that might be isn't known.
Augusta and surrounding Richmond County have set up five centers for water for their more than 200,000 people — and lines of people in cars stretch
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