Driving around Greenville City a week after Tropical Storm Helene landed is a surreal thing. Few businesses are open. Gas stations are mostly closed too; their minimarts taking only cash for now. And yet, the roads are packed with drivers, seemingly going nowhere in particular.
Tree removal crews and utility linemen occupy numerous streets, with traffic lining up, awaiting flagmen to wave them past fallen power lines and upturned trees.
Hundreds and hundreds of trees lie in neatly cut pieces on aprons and right-of-ways in neighborhoods everywhere.
It all gives the city a distinct feeling of discord; something between the ghost town atmosphere of the Covid pandemic, the slog of cleaning up storm damage, and a craving to be doing something normal. Residents walk dogs down sidewalks until tree debris funnels them out into the streets. The air is pregnant with the sounds of chainsaws and leaf blowers and rumbling trucks and generator hum.
In Nicholtown, a community often touted for its turnaround from neighborhood to avoid at all costs to vibrant working class community, the air is briefly filled with the sounds of neighbors gathering at the Nicholtown Community Center to get food.
This kind of event happens every Thursday around 12:30, says Oscar Bennett, community engagement coordinator at Sustaining Way. That’s a nonprofit community outreach organization in Nicholtown.
What’s different about this particular Thursday’s event is that it is focused on getting residents here through the next several days with food, because Helene did more than just knock down local utility poles. The storm also damaged several power substations in the city, leaving some residents without electricity, even as some of their neighbors can turn the lights back on.
This is why there is so much nonperishable food on the table today. Bennett says, however, that Sustaining Way has also partnered with Meals On Wheels to distribute prepared hot meals to residents, many who’ve not been able to cook in a week.
“It's just not, have everything that's cold,” Bennett says of the food rapidly disappearing from the table. “We're just trying to give people a little something warm to put in their belly.”
They’re also trying to get generators to people in the neighborhood. The air might be humming from generators in houses in various parts of the city, but not so much here, where residents tend to be older and less financially resilient than others in town.
Connie Jones is one of the Nicholtown seniors here to get some food, because the storm effectively took much of hers.
“It’s been devastating, it really has,” Jones says. “My power has been out for six days. I had a freezer full of food, I lost a bunch of food.”
I ask Jones if she has a generator or access to one.
“No, I don't have access to that,” she says. “I had no way of getting anything.”
She does, however, have something not everyone in the city does yet.
“My hot water heater is gas,” she says. “So I do get to take a hot shower.”
Amanda McDougald-Scott wasn’t quite so fortunate with her heater.
“Our basement flooded, so it killed our hot water heater,” McDougald-Scott says. “We had to buy a new one.”
A gas one. So the house does have hot water again
McDougald-Scott lives in a neighborhood very close to Nicholtown. We sit in a screened sunroom with fans blowing to keep the hot, muggy air from sticking to us. She has a generator going, but she’s being judicious with how she deploys it – power is going to things like the washing machine, to keep up with laundry from her baby, Fitz, who finally cools down enough to snooze in his mom’s arm while we talk.
McDougald-Scott is the chair of the Greenville County Democratic Party, a job she says has put her in front of a lot of city and county residents who are grappling with different levels of chaos from the storm. And she wants people to not forget how much damage Greenville will have to deal with for a while.
“I see a lot of efforts that are focused on helping people in North Carolina,” she says. “And I certainly think that they deserve it. The devastation is horrible. But we live in Greenville County and we have these vulnerable communities that need help. I don't want people to lose focus on here.”
She says communities in the county need to be served because “they were vulnerable before the storm. Now they're even more vulnerable.”
McDougald-Scott says that while the city is recovering, and doing a good job addressing widespread, multiple issues related to Helene, she’s also looking at what kinds of realities residents are going to face as the storm’s aftermath evolves and daily life restarts – for example, residents who will need to apply for relief or aid or insurance.
On Friday, the South Carolina Department of Insurance hosted an event in Greenville to put residents in touch with companies and DOI’s Insurance Fraud Division, as well as the National Insurance Crime Bureau. Those agencies shared tips to avoid contractor fraud.
Read more about contractor fraud and get some tips on avoiding it by clicking here.
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Around the city, there is a kind of order to the remnants of chaos. Even with downtown businesses dark, the traffic lights have been working since early post-storm.
That was by design, says City Councilwoman Dorothy Dowe.
“We pre-purchased a number of generators to power traffic signals,” Dowe says. “Go around town, you'll see traffic signals working, and more often than not, there's what appears to be a very small generator locked up beside it that's powering it.”
Dowe says this was a city priority because by powering up traffic lights, city police and fire crews don’t have to station people at intersections.
“We had people trapped in their homes, we had the need for water rescues,” she says. “And all of those response needs take … more than one vehicle. And you really want to have all your first responders available for that, versus traffic management.”
Overall, Dowe says the city handled its response to the crisis admirably. What city officials are waiting on is for the utility repair work to complete, which is the domain of Duke Energy, which, between its own crews and contractors, has hundreds of workers out in Greenville County.
A perspective from one county over: Andy Sevic, general manager of Easley Combined Utilities in Pickens County, says that for every utility pole that goes up, a crew spends four hours doing it. And that’s without having to clear any trees of other debris first. And, there are thousands of utility poles down in South Carolina because of the storm.
So Dowe has no complaints about the immediate past, even if she shares residents’ frustrations with the present. Spotty phone service and uneven power restarts, she says, are getting under people’s skin. She, like state and federal officials – whom she also praises for their response to the storm – asks residents to keep being patient.
Dowe is, however, looking at the city’s official response for the future. She wants to take a look at the city’s trees, for one thing. So far, it’s not known how many came down or what the ultimate cost to clean things up will be, but Dowe says it’s a good time to revisit how the city repairs its depleted canopy.
Another thing the city will likely visit is putting infrastructure, like power lines, underground. She’s aware that it won’t be an easy conversation.
“Undergrounding is extremely expensive and extremely complex,” she says. “But I think it is time that we look at that and I will certainly be championing that.”
In the more immediate future, residents in various, scattered neighborhoods in the city are looking at several more days, possibly another week, in which all the above-ground infrastructure struggles to get energy back to residents and businesses.
Residents like Annie McClinton, who’s replenishing some of her lost food at the distribution table in Nicholtown, says she at least has a generator, if not a big one.
“Just for the kitchen,” McClinton says.
She also says she’s “used to being a country girl,” and so she feels she’ll get through things fine.
“I know how to survive,” she says.
