This is the first of four stories looking at South Carolina one year after Hurricane Helene.
September 27 marks one year since Hurricane Helene made landfall – as a tropical storm – in South Carolina.
Helene blew through the state in a few hours. But it devastated parts of every county in the Upstate.
Before it got here, the storm system generated days of rain that drenched the ground all over the region, loosening the grip old-growth trees had on shallow ground.
By the time Helene blew itself out, it had dumped 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South. That’s about the volume of Lake Tahoe, and enough to drown every square inch of California in 14 inches of water.
Helene killed 49 people in South Carolina, the second-most fatalities behind North Carolina’s 107. South Carolina’s storm-related deaths included two of three line-of-duty deaths attributed to Helene. Many of those killed were killed by fallen trees that couldn’t stand in mushy ground.
Dozens of buildings and thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed.
The South Carolina Forestry Commission reported total timber damage of $83 million across 20 counties.
According to numbers from the state Emergency Management Division, Helene wrought at least $1.4 billion in infrastructure damages in South Carolina and washed out 912 bridges and roads in the state. In counties like Saluda and Abbeville, there were no roads fully passable immediately following the storm.
There was more destruction from Helene than from almost any other storm in U.S. history.
Drive around the Upstate today, from Greenville to Greenwood to Aiken to Pickens, and you can still see the fallen trees not gotten to; the blue plastic tarps on roofs awaiting repair.
To reach some of these residents, the South Carolina Office of Resilience (SCOR) has been spending much of the past year setting up intake events at libraries, community centers, and churches in counties stretching from Cherokee to Anderson.
What SCOR needs, said the agency’s public information coordinator, Kevin O’Dell, is to earn the trust of residents who’ve felt that help never came quickly enough when disaster hit.
“One of the ways that we're hoping to earn the trust of communities and get them to be familiar with these services is by doing these mobile intake events,” O’Dell said.
It’s been a slow process that will continue into 2026, he said. And it’s not always easy to win residents over when the reality of what still lies ahead comes up.
South Carolina received a $150 million grant from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development in response to Helene. SCOR is managing much of this money to get nearly 1,000 seriously damaged homes repaired or replaced.
This grant has a six-year performance period, meaning that the money can be used for projects for that long.
And the backlog of cases and repairs could actually take that long to get through, given that, according to SCEMD, there were about 6,300 homes damaged by Helene in South Carolina.
O’Dell said residents in the SCOR program can get frustrated by the wait.
“Someone will have their house repaired, replaced, or rebuilt years from now,” he said. “So what are we going to do in the meantime?”
The short answer, O’Dell said, is to make sure SCOR stays in contact, and that people in the queue don’t fall away.
It’s a tenuous hold on the public trust, which was weakened by criticisms, misinformation, and conspiracy theories that arose as Helene’s catastrophic destruction – particularly in and around Asheville, N.C., -- emerged last October.
In parts of South Carolina, like Edgefield, Saluda, and Greenwood counties, crews from as far as Nova Scotia worked on thousands of downed power lines for weeks. Even so, frustration with the speed of recovery spilled into social media and turned into questions of whether agencies like FEMA were even worth keeping.
The Trump administration has even hinted at dismantling FEMA by the end of this year, a conversation sparked directly by the fallout of Helene.
Were FEMA to disappear or shrink, states would bear the main responsibility for responding to disasters.
State Emergency Management Director Kim Stenson, at least, is not concerned, yet, for how any changes at FEMA would affect South Carolina.
“We're certainly keeping an eye on it,” Stenson said. “We're not going to know really too much until the FEMA Review Council makes their recommendations to the president. And that's probably going to be sometime in November.”
Stenson said SCEMD doesn’t expect major changes in FEMA support to South Carolina, but also that South Carolina doesn’t tend to ask FEMA for much to begin with. Even if there are to be big changes, he doesn’t expect them to affect anything this year.
“Now, what 2026 looks like,” he said, “it's anybody's guess.”
Stenson’s main job is to make sure the state’s emergency responders are in communication with each other and able to share resources when a disaster hits. For the most part, he said crews all over the state met the disaster about as well as they could have.
But while the disaster response worked well, the storm did highlight a few things that still need attention – fuel supplies, for one.
“Because of the power outages we had to order bulk fuel,” Stenson said.
In the year since the storm, he said SCEMD has coordinated with local authorities to make sure fuel can be available for when (not if”) another disaster strikes.
“That's one of the areas that we certainly want to sustain,” he said.
One other set of relationships to maintain for state and local officials is with the National Guard.
In Greenwood County, National Guard troops were vital in keeping the peace as fights broke out in the few gas stations able to stay open following the storm. They were also embedded in cleanup crews that were trying to get power back up and roadways cleared of enormous amounts of debris.
State Rep. John McCravy, R-Greenwood, was glad to get National Guard help in his county, and said the storm helped him to learn to better communicate with agencies that help in times of emergency.
“People were calling me, [asking] where's the National Guard? They should be out here,” McCravy said. “And I said, ‘Well, I agree with you.’ So, I got in touch with National Guard and they clarified some things that we needed to do.”
Mainly, what he needed to do was know how to ask for what he needed.
“They said, ‘Well, your emergency management team needs to ask for X,’” he said. “Once they asked for X, then the National Guard had no problem providing that. So, we got security teams in here.”
Discord at the gas stations also sparked McCravy to sponsor a bill awaiting the State Legislature’s return next year. It would require gas stations to be rigged for backup generators in order to keep fuel flowing in a crisis – both to short-circuit unrest over supplies and to make sure that if evacuations are needed, everyone can fuel up for the drive.
Something else McCravy needed to figure out was how to reach people in Greenwood County while the power was down, internet was out, cell service was spotty at best. Those who could use their phones frequently ended up calling McCravy.
“So, I kind of hit on the idea of using the service that a lot of times is used for political statements to go out to cell phones, to use it to give people the correct phone numbers to call for different needs,” he said.
It worked to get emergency information out.
“In a few days, I'd started coordinating with our emergency management team in the county and they could direct help out to people that needed help,” McCravy said.
A year later, though, Greenwood is one of more than a dozen counties in the Upstate still putting itself back together. And it will be for a while yet.
“We're still facing recovery,” said Robert Cribben, Greenwood County’s Emergency Management Coordinator. “We're trying to get the residents money that still need money to repair their homes or whatever was damaged. We'll be doing that probably for two more years.”
Cribben said officials in the region are setting up a subcommittee to look at how to tap into dollars from national agencies like Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and other large churches for the next time disaster strikes.
In Part 2 of this series, a look at the lingering emotional toll on two first responders in Aiken.
