By Jeff Whitten
Special to the Effingham Herald
Sand Hill resident Amber Scott said Sept. 30 she didn’t realize the racket generators made until her neighborhood lost power Friday morning after Hurricane Helene blew through Effingham County.
“I never knew how loud they were until about three days ago,” Scott said, while she and her family took a break at Sand Hill Baptist Church, taking advantage of one of a number of cooling stations set up in Effingham County to give those without power a place to cool off as well as provide access to water and the Internet.
Like many, Scott doesn’t have a generator for her home and was waiting for electricity to be restored.
“They’re saying Oct. 2,” she said, a reference to Georgia Power’s online outage map, an online tool estimating when power will be restored. “I know I’m ready for it. I know it could be worse, though.”
It also showed how resilient people can be.
Michael Bechtold, who lives in Clyo, said his home lost power around 2:30 a.m. Friday morning and “everything hit the fan after that.”
While his home was spared and no one was hurt, a gazebo was tossed into nearby scrub brush and a massive tree dropped onto the Atlantic Waste recycling wheelie bin parked at the edge of his front yard and blocked part of the road.
Chain saws had already gotten the top of the tree off the road by Monday, and the steady hum of a generator could be heard coming from the backyard.
“If (losing the recycling bin) is the worst thing that happened to us, then we came out of this storm pretty good,” Bechtold said, after he noted Helene had convinced him of one thing.
“This one made it so that I will never ride another hurricane out,” he said.
Helene, which came ashore in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, was technically a tropical storm by the time it entered Georgia and passed to the west of Effingham County on Thursday night, which may have lulled many into a false sense of security. But hours before dawn Friday morning, trees were falling across the county, taking power lines and the electricity they deliver with them.
“I first thought it wasn’t going to be that bad,” Scott said. “Then I got up and saw the bucket trucks, and the trees down everywhere … this is the worst storm I’ve been through.”
One of those who had power lines go down near his home was Max Sellers, who lives on St. Thomas Drive just south of Rincon.
A retired electrician, Sellers said he and neighbors spent hours Friday and again Saturday trying to keep drivers on the usually quiet street to turn around and avoid the lines – and even went so far as to put trashcans in the road as a barricade and put solar lights from his driveway onto the trashcans to increase their visibility at night.
He was mostly unsuccessful, and so asked a power company employee on Saturday if they could cut the lines to keep them from potentially getting tangled up with a passing vehicle.
“I know some people were probably frustrated with me, because we blocked the road,” Sellers said. “But I was anxious somebody would come barreling down here and hit the power lines. Being a former electrician, I know better than messing with power lines. You’ve got to think of safety, of yourself, and of other people.”
Out-of-state help came
The following day, linemen from Alabama Power came out “and worked all day Sunday to get it put back together,” Sellers said.
The work included replacing a power pole near Sellers’ driveway and a powerline downed by a massive tree that snapped in half further up the road. It took linemen and tree cutting crews several hours to get that single road finished.
Sellers, along with others on St. Thomas Drive, got power back late Sunday.
“I feel fortunate, considering the scope of the storm and the damage all around us, that I was able to get my power back so quickly,” he said, praising the work of the linemen responding to the storm.
Josh Weaver is foreman of the Alabama linemen who got the power back on St. Thomas Drive.
“We work for Alabama Power, and we’re like a sister company to Georgia Power, so in any kind of hurricane or storms, we always help each other out,” Weaver said.
Initially, Weaver’s seven-man crew – just one of many from around the South and Georgia EMCs working in the Savannah area -- was held in Birmingham until it was clear the city wouldn’t be hit by Helene.
“Once we got released, we headed straight here,” Weaver said.
The crews got to Effingham County about 3 p.m. Saturday and were given a map with 16 locations on it, Weaver said, “but it ended up being more than that. The grid I had had 1,250 customers on it.”
Still, the crew hit the ground running, getting power back up on Stephens Drive within hours of arriving in Rincon.
The next day, they were on St. Thomas Drive.
Not a nine-to-five job
Currently staged in a camp at an industrial park in Claxton, the linemen’s workday begins at 6 a.m. and ends at 10 p.m. – though that also includes time spent driving to downed lines and breaks for meals. But it’s not a nine-to-five job, Weaver said.
“You don’t stop in the middle of a job,” he added.
Weaver’s next assignment as of Sept. 30 included some 1,904 customers, waiting for their power to be turned back on. Being able to help make that happen is why he’s been a lineman for 11 years.
“I do it to help people and it’s a good living for me and my family,” Weaver said. “If you work these hurricanes when you heat up a line (restore the power) and hear everybody hollering and cheering you on, it makes it all worth it. And the people in Georgia have been awesome to us.”
Cooling centers remail open
There were still more than 9,610 outages in Effingham County early Monday night – and rising temperatures were the reason for the cooling stations at Sand Hill Baptist, Compassion Christian in Rincon, the YMCA in Guyton and the Clarence E. Morgan Recreation Center in Springfield.
Suzanne Poole, wife of Sand Hill Baptist Church pastor Dr. Derward Poole, said her church had refrigerated bottled water inside and cases of bottled water available to take away, and a faucet outside near the playground for those who might want to fill containers. With school out Monday, a big screen TV inside the church’s community room showed a Minions movie to a handful of kids while at a table near an outlet, a software developer worked on his laptop because his home near Roebling Road was still without power.
There was some discussion Monday that the worst damage from Helene was caused by multiple tornadoes – though none of that has been confirmed.
Sellers, 86, said he’s been through several hurricanes, and evacuated for two of them, and he suspects the storm spun up tornados that caused much of the tree damage.
“I suspect that’s what happened right here, we got a little bit of a twister, and then you go a mile down the road and hardly see anything,” Sellers said.
Still, the result of Helene was “more damage than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” he said.
But in the end, it could’ve have been worse compared to what’s happening in other states hit harder by Helene – which reportedly has now claimed the lives of more than 125 people in six states.
“I’ve got relatives all over the state and in other places, and as far as I know none of my relatives have been injured,” Sellers said. “I feel like we were really fortunate. The damage that was all around us, we came through it without anybody being hurt or being a big burden to everybody. God was in control.”
