Was South Carolina prepared for Hurricane Helene’s deadly impact? It depends who you ask

Hurricane Helene sent a tree crashing into former Greenwood Mayor Welborn Adams' kitchen. A day later, on Saturday, Sept. 28, most of his town in western South Carolina was without power. It would stay out for days.

"We were not prepared, I don't think anybody was prepared for this," Adams told The State that Saturday.

South Carolina was caught on the "dirty side" of Hurricane Helene. As the storm charged up through the Southeast, it was the more powerful, eastern front of the storm that dumped up to 15 inches of rain and unleashed tornadoes and wind gusts of up to 100 mph on the west and Upstate of South Carolina.

More than 40 people were killed , according to the most recent tally by The State, making the death toll higher than that of Hurricane Hugo, which killed 35 and devastated large parts of the state in 1989.

But many individuals in the worst hit areas described feeling caught totally by surprise. The key question for many is could South Carolina's leaders and the public have done more to prepare for what is one of the deadliest and most destructive storms in the state's history?

On social media, many in Adams' community lamented that they had not stocked up on food and gasoline. "I can tell you one thing," wrote one poster on a Greenwood Facebook group. "I'm never letting my tank get to empty with rain coming EVER again."

It's a level of shock that seems to contradict the resources utility companies as well as state and local authorities put in place before the storm hit. Planning for the hurricane began the Friday before Helene made landfall, said South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, and utility companies and electric co-ops marshaled line crews , bringing in r esources from around the country and as far away as Canada .

But many individuals who found themselves caught in Helene's path felt blindsided.

"There is always going to be that inherent tension when municipal organizations and companies are getting information, and how they disseminate that to people on the ground could always be improved," said Andrew Beckner, mayor of the town of Central near Clemson and the head of communications for Anderson University. "I am keenly aware that any time you have an after-event assessment there is always a finding on communication, that communication could be better."

There is no easy answer to why so many felt unprepared for Helene. But fewer warnings than usual about the storm's danger, 11th-hour shifts in the storm's path, and Helene's assault on areas of the state that almost never see tropical storms likely contributed to individuals being unprepared for one of South Carolina's worst natural disasters in living memory.

"We get these reports of states of emergency a lot. I think we could have done a better job, not just the Governor's Office or any individual, but overall," said state Rep. Jermaine Johnson, D-Richland. "I truly believe this storm was underhyped. People weren't as prepared as they could've been or should've been."

A historic storm

It was as if Hurricane Helene turned the natural beauty of the Upstate and western South Carolina against itself. Far from the coast and its annual hurricanes, sprawling pine forests cover foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Older neighborhoods in Newberry and Spartanburg boast established pecan trees and oaks growing over the streets.

These trees proved to be the greatest danger in South Carolina as Helene swept through an area that rarely experiences hurricanes .

An exceptionally fast moving storm, when Helene made landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida it traveled between 25 and 30 mph. Then it began to track towards the eastern edge of its cone of uncertainty, the predictive model that shows how far the hurricane might stray from its predicted path, bringing it closer to South Carolina.

By the time the storm reached South Carolina Thursday night and into Friday morning, the winds were gusting at over 80 mph, according to the National Weather Service. Trees snapped and were ripped from the ground, which was saturated after days of rain leading up to the storm.

While the narrow path of a tornado might stretch several hundred yards wide, Helene left tornado-like damage spread over a massive area, said John Quagliariello, the warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Columbia.

While the forecasts were accurate, "I don't know if the public quite comprehended how bad it was going to be, and to some extent I don't know if we quite comprehended how bad those wind gusts could be," Quagliariello told The State.

Few in the Upstate, which is typically spared the hurricanes that batter South Carolina's coast each year, could even imagine what was coming.

Beckner highlighted that for many who live in and move to the Upstate and mountainous areas throughout the Appalachian range, freedom from hurricanes and other hazardous climactic events is part of the appeal.

"A lot of people who live in those communities come here for a specific reason, to have close knit communities and not to worry about those things (hurricanes)," Beckner said.

The result, said Kathryn Harvey, a Spartanburg native and Democratic candidate for South Carolina's 4th Congressional District in the Upstate, was that the area "was completely unprepared for it." While coastal areas are in a "constant conversation" around the impacts of hurricanes and climate change, Harvey said, few in the Upstate were prepared for it.

"I absolutely think that more emphasis on preparedness would have helped," Harvey said. "The severity of the possibility of the storm was not communicated as widely or as strongly as it needed to be, and by proxy I think that a lot of individuals were not expecting it or taking measures ahead of time."

But some question whether that message would have resonated in the communities most impacted by the storm.

"It's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback," said Brian White, a former Republican state representative from the Upstate. "The people complaining 'nobody told me,' well, would you have believed them? You hate the government and you don't believe the weatherman. Would you have believed them?"

There is no easy answer, said Andrea Schumacher, a project scientist who studies messaging around hazardous weather events at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. While the forecasters were largely correct about the storm, the question remains why that wasn't received by many individuals.

But in places like the Upstate, where hurricanes are seen as a coastal problem, officials and forecasters are working against human nature.

"We're starting from a place where people have assumptions from past experience," Schumacher said. "People hear hurricane and they think of a certain risk profile. They think 'people at the coast are going to be most at risk and people inland are going to be less at risk. I am inland so I am less at risk'"

Were warnings enough?

In the lead-up up to 2022's Hurricane Ian, McMaster held three press conferences before even declaring a state of emergency. The storm, which devastated Florida, did relatively little damage to South Carolina. Earlier this year, McMaster held a press conference the same day that slow moving tropical storm Debby made landfall after he declared a state of emergency the previous day.

In comparison, there were few warnings about Helene from the Governor's Office. McMaster did not hold a press conference between declaring a state of emergency at 3:15 p.m. Wednesday afternoon and when Helene struck South Carolina Thursday evening. He held his first press conference Friday afternoon.

This was despite an update from the National Weather Service Wednesday night that the storm's large wind field would extend into South Carolina, with gusts up to 60 mph in the region around the Savannah River and up to 55 mph in the Midlands.

In his declaration of a state of emergency, a necessary step for obtaining FEMA funds, McMaster said, "Although South Carolina will likely avoid the brunt of Hurricane Helene's impacts, the storm is still expected to bring dangerous flooding, high winds, and isolated tornadoes to many parts of the state," McMaster said. "South Carolinians in potentially affected areas should start to take precautions now and monitor local weather forecasts over the next several days."

Tonya Bonitatibus, the Savannah Riverkeeper, said warnings about the storm from the governors of both Georgia and South Carolina were not soon enough.

"Unfortunately, people didn't know this was coming and it is becoming more and more clear we were not ready on the other side of it,'' she said, noting that there "was this kind of hesitation'' from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and McMaster.

Both Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper held press conferences on Thursday, Sept. 26.

For his part, McMaster defended the messaging coming out of his office.

Responding to a question from The State about why he didn't do a media briefing, McMaster stated that after issuing the emergency declaration Wednesday, which "got a lot of publicity and a lot of information in it...We had a number of press events around the state at which these questions came up and we recited all that at those."

A spokesperson for McMaster clarified that these were press availabilities following the governor's two public events that day: the groundbreaking of a new business campus for Google in Ridgeville and the presentation of the Order of the Palmetto to outgoing State Senator Nikki Setlzer.

McMaster held meetings with emergency officials and shared posts warning about the storm on X, formerly Twitter. But state Rep. Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg, said that he believed there was less messaging across the board from all manner of elected officials about the severity of Hurricane Helene.

Previous storms that were heavily messaged but ultimately fizzled — leading to public criticism — may have discouraged elected officials from aggressively warning about the storm.

"I do believe that the Governor's Office and the executive branch were lulled into that false sense of security, just like the citizens were. You do have to wonder if things had been handled differently if some of those folks that passed away might not have," Bamberg told The State.

"Everybody got caught slipping."