Part Four of our look at parts of the Upstate one year after Hurricane Helene considers the weight of information in a crisis, in Saluda County — where the storm turned deadly for even first responders.
Saluda Fire Chief Chad Satcher and Fireman Landon Cale Bodie died in the line of duty on Sept. 27, 2025. They had gone out into the worst of Hurricane Helene and were killed by a felled tree in their official truck.
Stacher and Bodie are the only two first responders in South Carolina who died in the line of duty during Helene. Their deaths made national news.
But as the impact of the storm grew more evident, media attention shifted to North Carolina, which suffered catastrophic damage, particularly in and around Asheville.
When the press left Saluda County, the county went back to being a news desert, with no newspaper and no local television or radio station.
Only social media.
“Misinformation is something that we deal with on a daily basis, and a contributing factor to that is the fact that we are sort of in this news desert,” said Josh Morton, emergency management director of Saluda County. “In the absence of what I'm going to call real journalism, we wind up with the Facebook ‘journalism;’ and unfortunately one of the issues that we ran into a lot with Helene was a couple of Facebook pages that people in the community, for whatever reason, that's where they want to get their information.”
The problems that Morton said came to the fore during Helene were twofold. One, the county Emergency Management Office didn’t have all the information about the storm, its reach, or its dangers; and two, the information that was being put out on social media channels was potentially life-threatening.
“Our information that we put out is probably the most reliable,” Morton said. “But it's not always based on a full picture. I've had people ask me, ‘At what point during Hurricane Helene do you feel like you got all the information?’ I'm still waiting on the rest of the information to get here.”
So if anyone read any information about what was happening during Helene – which was tough to do, considering that internet and electricity went down early in the storm and stayed down for more than three weeks in some areas of the county – they were not things that emergency management officials were putting out.
Troublingly, Morton said, what was being put out on social media channels was irresponsible.
“One of our local Facebook journalists … gets on and puts out a call for everyone that has a four-wheel drive vehicle and a chainsaw to please go out and start helping our first responders clear the roads,” he said.
This was while the storm was still going on, giant trees were toppling, and winds were still above 40 miles an hour.
“It's all very well intentioned,” Morton said. “The problem is when you don't have all the facts, it really creates a lot more problems than solutions.”
Part of the issue, Morton said, is that, contemporary media culture being what it is, there is a level of mistrust in government agencies that worsens as information is wanted, but information is not forthcoming.
What Morton wants people to understand is that local government officials are your neighbors – the ones you see at the store and at football games and at church – and are trying to help by not giving residents information that could get people hurt or killed, such as encouraging people to go out in a violent storm that had already taken lives.
To get real information out, Saluda emergency officials went old school in the hours and days following Helene.
“Internet was not really accessible to most people,” said Rachel Porter, the county’s public information officer. “ Some … had internet, but their phones were dead because their power was out, and they had run their car out of gas because it was hot and they were in the air conditioning.”
Porter had been out surveying the county and talking to residents, and then came back to the office with questions of how to get information out about post-storm services.
“I was like, there has got to be a way without the internet to let people know something,” she said.
So she printed flyers and drove them around, leaving small bundles at shops and other places that were starting to reopen.
“I printed off, I don't know how many hundred flyers in English and Spanish,” she said. “I left stacks with each business. If I saw people in the yard, I was pulling over, ‘Hey, here's a flyer. If you need anything, call this number. Here's some easy, quick information’. And people were like, ‘Man, it's like the newspaper delivery.’”
Still without a local paper, radio station, television station, or independent newsroom to turn to, county emergency officials said they are turning to public electronic billboards as a way to get emergency information out in times of crisis.
“We are applying for a grant right now to install community information hubs,” Morton said. “There are going to be 10 locations throughout the county that will have weatherproof billboards where people can go to get information.”
Morton said the county will use the billboards in fair weather too.
“We're going to be posting information there regularly, not just during disasters, because we want people to get used to, ‘Hey, if I can't get information off the internet, here's a place I can go and find that information,’” he said.
