Tropical Storm Helene leaves 17 dead in South Carolina (2024)

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  • By Jonah Chester and Tony Kukulichjchester@postandcourier.comtkukulich@postandcourier.com
  • Updated

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After racing ashore in the Florida panhandle as a major hurricane, Helene whirled like a buzzsaw through the Southeast, claiming the lives of at least 19 people across South Carolina— with the typically high-and-dry Upstate bearing the brunt of the tempest. The oft-inundated Lowcountry weathered the storm with far less damage.

The speedy and sprawling storm touched nearly every corner of the Palmetto State, dispensing a grab-bag of misery along the way. It spawned waterspouts, snapped trees, downed power lines and engorged swollen rivers as it lashed the landscape with heavy rains and tropical-storm force winds.

Tropical Storm Helene leaves 17 dead in South Carolina (13)

The storm claimed lives in Aiken, Anderson, Greenville, Newberry, Saluda counties and Spartanburg counties. In that last county alone, five people perished. Among the dead in Spartanburg: an Inman woman who had a tree fall on her home, a man in Landrum whose vehicle was swamped by a flooded creek, and two others in that town who had a tree fall on their golf cart, according to Spartanburg County Corner Rusty Clevenger.

“I hope we have no more,” he said.

Still, Gov. Henry McMaster said he expects the official death toll to climb in the coming days, as recovery efforts begin. There were no initial estimates on total property damages as of Sept. 27, state Emergency Preparedness Director Kim Stenson said.

More than 1.3 million South Carolina businesses and households were without power at one point during the storm, according to PowerOutage.US. It could take until the middle of next week for power to be fully restored across the state, said officials from Dominion Energy, Duke Energy and Santee Cooper. A final timeline for the work remained unclear, as crews had only just begun to make assessments of damage at noon Sept. 27.

Of those outages, about half were in six Upstate counties, including all 12,000 residents of Fountain Inn.

Tropical Storm Helene leaves 17 dead in South Carolina (14)

SC Dominion Energy President Keller Kissam compared the widespread outages to those caused by Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

“Life is not gonna be back to normal until probably the middle of next week from a power standpoint, just because of the sheer damage that we have,” Kissam said.

Hugo, a legendary and powerful storm, made landfall 35 years ago in Charleston County. It's considered one of the worst natural disasters in South Carolina history, killingat least 35 people as it raged across the state,according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Helene made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region late Sept. 26 as a mighty Category 4 hurricane with winds of 140 mph and packing record storm surges.

While the storm lost some punch as it pushed further inland, it remained a Category 1 threat more than five hours later, spewing hurricane-force winds and generating heavy rainfall as it trekked north across Georgia and into swaths of South Carolina. The system later weakened to a tropical storm and cartwheeled out of the Palmetto State by the early afternoon.

Unlike August's Tropical Storm Debby, which lingered over South Carolina for days dumping heavy rain, Helene's direct impacts were relatively short-lived. But its high speed also resulted in storm-force winds reaching far from its center.

President Joe Biden approved a presidential emergency declaration late Sept. 26. National Weather Service Director Ken Graham urged residents to remain cautious over the weekend as clean-up gets underway.

"After a storm is not the first time to use a chainsaw," said Graham. Officials said carbon-monoxide deaths from unventilated generators are also common, and power lines downed by falling limbs could still be electrified.

Tropical Storm Helene leaves 17 dead in South Carolina (15)

The outer bands of the extraordinarily large storm, which was some 400 miles across, wreaked havoc in South Carolina hours before Helene made landfall. The regular shrieking of severe-weather warnings delivered via smart phones likely made an uneasy night for many in Helene's sights.

Helene was powerful and large enough to impact virtually every corner of the state, though the hammer fell hardest on South Carolina’s Upstate — a region that does not often see such tropical threats.

Tropical Storm Helene leaves 17 dead in South Carolina (16)

A strange path

Helene was the “worst natural disaster that has ever affected the entire county, bar none," saidAnderson County Administrator Rusty Burns.

Even after degrading to a tropical storm, Helene remained one of the most significant weather events in the modern era for the Upstate, meteorologists said. The storm brought ferocious wind, downpours and intense flooding atypical for the inland area.

“It is a horrendous mess,” Burns said.

The National Weather Service on Sept. 27 issued a flash flood emergency for parts of the Upstate and much of western North Carolina, warning of life-threatening floods, widespread road closures and landslide activity across the mountains. Storm damage closed sections of Interstates 40 and 26 in North Carolina and fears of an imminent breach caused officials to evacuate residents downstream from the Lake Lure dam, about 25 miles from the South Carolina border. River levels will likely remain dangerously high in the coming days as all of the rainfall washes out into the sea.

When the skies finally cleared over the region, people flocked outside to see the aftermath. Despite pleas from the city of Greenville for people to stay clear of downtown, crowds filled Main Street and sidled up to the Reedy River, still a roiling, raging brown-and-white mess at 2 p.m.

One of the largest greenspaces in Greenville, Unity Park, looked more like a lake after the Reedy spilled its banks and covered nearly the entire grounds. The lake continued into the Kroc Center, smothering its soccer fields. Not a peek of the Swamp Rabbit Trail showed. Kids splashed in the water and ducks swam. Some adventure seekers even took out their kayaks.

"When are you going to have a chance to kayak on the Swamp Rabbit?" one resident boater asked.

Tropical Storm Helene leaves 17 dead in South Carolina (17)

Helene tracked a historically odd, but increasingly commonbackdoor entry into South Carolina — arriving via land as opposed to coming in directly from the Atlantic. Six recorded hurricanes have tracked roughly that same route over the decades. Four of them have come in the last six years, and three have occurred over the past 13 months, according to federal records.

That wasn’t the only oddity about Helene.

The storm also rapidly intensified from a Category 3 to a Category 4 hurricane in the final hours before landfall, another trend that is becoming increasingly common.

Between the early 1970s and late 2010s, there was a notable increase in storms that underwent rapid intensification (when a storm’s internal winds increase by at least 30 miles per hour in a 24-hour period), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration'sGeophysical Fluid Dynamics Labreports. The agency said that trend is likely a result of climate change, and will probably worsen over the coming decades as the oceans continue to warm.

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Earth just logged its hottest August on record, NOAA reported. That marked the 15th straight month of record warm temperatures, which in itself is a record-long global heat wave.

A 2020 study publishedin the journal Nature suggested that the rate at which hurricanes deteriorate over land is shrinking as the Earth warms—allowing storms to strike further inland with more intensity.

“In the late 1960s a typical hurricane lost about 75 percent of its intensity in the first day past landfall, now the corresponding decay is only about 50 percent,” the authors wrote.

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While the Upstate was hit hardest, it wasn’t the only part of South Carolina damaged in the monster storm.

Barnwell County, a rural area just outside of Aiken with a population of around 20,000, was hit hard. Law enforcement officers said there were dozens of reported car accidents, as well as downed trees and power outages. Local linemen said damage to the lines was some of the worst they'd ever seen. They estimated the storm ripped down around 60 miles of power lines.

Multiple people in Barnwell also compared Helene to what they'd experienced during Hurricane Hugo more than three decades ago.

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  • By Toby Cox and Jonah Chestertcox@postandcourier.com jchester@postandcourier.com

Charleston dries off

In Charleston, the storm passed with strong winds, property destruction and several tornado warnings— but no fatalities so far, according to the county coroner’s office.

Just after high tide, which peaked around 8 feet at 5:24 a.m. Sept. 27, murky flood waters lapped the brick stoop of Donna Hinston and Damon Black's Harleston Village home in downtown.

Each time a car drove through the inches-deep water on Gadsden Street, the wake it produced threatened to enter their home. "We are constantly getting waked," Hinston said around 6 a.m.

Tropical Storm Helene leaves 17 dead in South Carolina (21)

This month, an ordinance went into effect making flooded streets "no wake zones" in the city. The new law makes it illegal to drive a car or boat faster than 5 mph or in a manner that sends damaging wakes into adjacent properties on a street inundated with 6 or more inches of water.

Around 4:30 a.m., theCharleston Fire Department responded to an apartment complex on James Island for reports of a tree falling on a building, the department posted on social media.

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When crews arrived, they found half of the tree had fallen on the structure, the post said. All residents got out safely. Minutes later, the other half of the tree collapsed onto the parking lot.

After being slapped with intermittent tornado warnings and driving rain throughout the early morning hours of Sept. 27, Charleston was largely back on its feet by noon and city officials were out assessing damage.

Reporters Ali Rockett, Sandy Hodson Hannah Wade, Jessica Wade, Anna Mitchell, Mitchell Black, Komlavi Adissem,April Santana,Caleb Bozard,Christian Boschult, and Caitlin Bell contributed to this story.

Photos: Hurricane Helene leaves damage in Florida, South Carolina and Georgia

Hurricane Helene roared ashore late Sept. 26 as a strong Category 4 hurricane with winds of 140 mph, making landfall in Florida's Big Bend region. Hours later Helene blew hurricane-force winds and generated heavy rainfall as she trekked north across Georgia and continued to swaths of South Carolina.

Reach Tony Kukulich at 843-709-8929.

More information

  • SC death toll from Helene climbs to 19 after 2 more found dead in Spartanburg County
  • Updated: 3 dead from Tropical Storm Helene identified, Storm knocks out power for 92% of Aiken Electric customers
  • Myrtle Beach area spared worst of Helene as tropical storm sweeps through
  • Live updates: Helene damage leaves thousands without power and injures multiple in Midlands
  • Helene's water dump in Upstate pushes rivers and streams to brink

Tony Kukulich

Tony Kukulich is an editor/reporter working in the BeaufortCounty bureau. Turning to journalism as a second career, he startedas a photojournalist in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015. Aftermoving to Bluffton in 2021, he wrote for several area publicationsbefore starting with The Post and Courier the following year. Hiswork has been recognized by the National Newspaper Association, theCalifornia Newspaper Publishers Association and the South CarolinaPress Association. Tony covers local government, environmentalissues and development in addition to authoring the Hurricane Wirenewsletter.

  • Author email

Jonah Chester

Jonah Chester covers flooding, sea level rise and climate changefor the Post and Courier's Rising Waters Lab.

  • Author email

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Tropical Storm Helene leaves 17 dead in South Carolina (2024)

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