Days after Hurricane Helene a powerless mess remains in the Southeast

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 for over a half-mile to get that water. The city hasn’t said how long the outages for both water and power will last.

At one location, a line wrapped around a massive shopping center, past a shuttered Waffle House and at least a half-mile down the road to get water Tuesday. By 11 a.m. it still hadn’t moved.

Kristie Nelson arrived with her daughter three hours earlier. On a warm morning, they had their windows down and the car turned off because gas is a precious, hard-to-find commodity too.

“It’s been rough,” said Nelson, who still hasn’t gotten a firm date from the power company for her electricity to be restored. “I’m just dying for a hot shower.”

All around Augusta, trees are snapped in half and power poles are leaning. Traffic lights are out — and some are just gone from the hurricane-force winds that hit in the dark early Friday morning. That adds another danger: while some drivers stop at every dark traffic signal like they are supposed to, others speed right through, making drives to find food or gas dangerous.

The problem with power isn't supply for companies like Georgia Power, which spent more than $30 billion building two new nuclear reactors. Instead, it's where the electricity goes after that.

Helene destroyed most of the grid. Crews have to restore transmission lines, then fix substations, then fix the main lines into neighborhoods and business districts, and finally replace the poles on streets. All that behind-the-scenes work means it has taken power companies days to get to where people see crews on streets, utility officials said.

“We have a small army working. We have people sleeping in our offices,” Aiken Electric Cooperative Inc. CEO Gary Stooksbury said.

There are similar stories of leveled trees and shattered lives that follow Helene’s inland path from Valdosta, Georgia, to Augusta to Greenville and Spartanburg, South Carolina, and into the North Carolina mountains.

In Edgefield, South Carolina, there is a downed tree or shattered power pole in just about every block. While many fallen trees have been cut and placed by the side of the road, many of the downed power lines remain in place.

Power remained out Tuesday afternoon for about 75% of Edgefield County's customers. At least two other South Carolina counties are in worse shape. Across the entire state, one out of five businesses and homes don't have electricity, including still well over half of the customers in the state's largest metropolitan area of Greenville-Spartanburg.

Jessica Nash was again feeding anyone who came by the Edgefield Pool Room, using a generator to sell the double-order of hamburger patties she bought because a Edgefield had a home high school football game and a block party downtown that were both canceled by the storm.

“People are helping people. It's nice to have that community," Nash said. “But people are really ready to get the power back.”