On Sunday morning, if you shut your eyes, downton Landrum would sound as normal as any September Sunday morning in this little city Upstate. You can hear the traffic going up and down East Rutherford Street, the city’s main business avenue; you can hear leaf blowers and crunchy leaves still settled on the sidewalk.
But open your eyes, and you start to notice what’s going on. Every shop is closed. Not because everyone is in church, but because everyone is in the dark.
Landrum is a city of about 2,600 in Spartanburg County, near the North Carolina border.
And two days after Tropical Storm Helene blew through, Landrum is entirely without power. None for the traffic lights, none for the businesses, none for the gas stations. Residents can’t fill up their vehicles or their generators, which they’re relying on for any kind of power.
Most energy customers around here are customers of Duke Energy, which dispatched 10,000 workers to various corners of South Carolina Friday, and which reported, as of noon Sunday, at least 151,000 power outages just in the Spartanburg area.
And it’s like this pretty much everywhere west of York County and stretching down the Midlands into Aiken County. By Sunday afternoon, the United States Power Outage Map reported hundreds of thousands of power outages in 29 South Carolina counties. Some, like Spartanburg, Greenwood, and Saluda counties, were almost entirely without power. In at least eight counties, at least eight in 10 energy customers of all providers were still without power by noon Sunday.
On South Church Street in Landrum, time has essentially stopped. About a hundred feet of fallen power lines, and a piece of a utility pole woven through the cables, are down. Crews are working everywhere to clean scenes like this up in Landrum and everywhere else Upstate, but they haven’t gotten here yet. This is not as high a priority as things like hospitals and emergency services and major roads blocked by fallen power lines and trees. So anyone looking to drive down South Church Street will have to wait.
The downed lines fell in front of Dakota Ayers’ house. I meet him while I’m taking photos of the scene.
"All this happened early Friday morning," Ayers said. "That's when they said we were supposed to start getting, 60- to 70-mile-per-hour winds. I got out and started driving around lunch, and it was all about like this. The only way in the Landrum was US 176. Coming this way, you couldn't get in down any of the side roads or anything like that. They were all blocked by trees and power lines."
Ayers owns this house that was, he’s grateful, spared the worst of the storm. But he says he and his brother are still stunned by the scale of things.
"I'm 29 and my brother's in his forties and he said he's never seen anything like this come through here before," he said.
Across the street from Ayers’ house, multiple parts of what look like multiple trees are in a pile on a neighbor’s property. Looming over us as we talk is a tall, broad oak tree towers just a few feet from the house and waving gently in the morning breeze as if nothing had happened around it.
Ayers loves this tree. It brings him shade in the summer. But after seeing Helene’s aftermath, he’s considering cutting the stately oak down.
"Before this happened, I was wanting to cut some of these down, some of the larger ones," he said. "But now, for sure."
It’s the trees that proved to be the deadliest aspects of Helene’s wake. By Saturday evening, the death toll wrought by Helene in South Carolina hit 23, as confirmed by various county coroners and public safety officials.
In Landrum, this small city of just over 2,600, three people died as a result of the storm. County Coroner Rusty Clevenger said that two of those were killed when a tree fell on a golf cart. The other was washed away in floodwaters.
But every other South Carolina death so far confirmed as a result of the storm involved falling trees. Five in total died in Spartanburg County — the most in any single county in the state. But multiple deaths were confirmed in Anderson, Aiken, Greenville, Saluda, and Newberry counties. One death was reported in Greenwood County.
Amid all of this, 9-1-1 systems remained down in much of the Upstate and Midlands, and cellular phone service was almost non-existent, even as far east as parts of Cherokee County Sunday.
There is no word when power or cell service will be restored for so much of the upstate, or even when some roads blocked by fallen trees and power lines will open.
Some residents of Landrum said they were bracing to be in the dark for at least a week.
