Inland Georgia, still battered from Helene, prepares for 2025 hurricane season

HAZLEHURST — It’s hard to drive even a block in this small southeast Georgia city without seeing a construction crew or blue tarps.

Workers cluster around the county’s century-old courthouse, repairing its domed clock tower and the soffits under the roof’s eaves. The high school gym is finally getting a rebuild after its roof collapsed.

ExploreHelene hit months ago. South Georgia is still waiting for help.

In the heart of downtown, the First Baptist Church is missing two steeples. The terminal at the local airport needs more work. The auto parts store next to the railroad tracks still has its entire southwest facade open to the elements.

It’s been almost a year since Hurricane Helene carved an unprecedented path of destruction here and across other inland parts of South and Middle Georgia from Valdosta to Augusta. Its record-setting wind gusts, rain and flooding uprooted trees, altered skylines and destroyed homes and livelihoods in a way many thought could only happen on the coast.

“It was everywhere,” Charles Wasdin, Jeff Davis County’s fire chief and emergency management director, said of the damage and debris from the storm, which he estimated impacted roughly 85% of the buildings in the county. “They’re just now putting it back together.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Hazlehurst, more than 150 miles inland from where Helene came ashore in Florida, is far from the only Georgia municipality still struggling to rebuild from the storm.

That’s added to the challenges for weary local governments and emergency response planners as the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season enters its peak. The federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a 60% chance of an above-normal hurricane season this year.

Adding to the nervousness among some county and municipal officials overseeing hurricane preparedness: President Donald Trump’s administration has threatened to scale back federal storm recovery funding while slashing staff at agencies like NOAA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

ExploreHow a prominent southern city is still recovering after Hurricane Helene

Data shows that hurricanes are becoming more severe because of climate change. Warmer ocean waters can supercharge storms before they make landfall, which means they can unleash longer, more intense paths of destruction inland before weakening.

“Just like it takes your car longer to slow down if you’re going 100 mph versus 50 mph,” said Dr. James Marshall Shepherd, a professor and atmospheric scientist at the University of Georgia.

Shepherd said recent major hurricanes, including Helene in 2024, Michael in 2018 and Idalia in 2023, have proved that “preparation for hurricanes is no longer a coastal matter.”

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Credit: Lowndes County

Preparing for the next storm

By most metrics, Helene was the most destructive in Georgia’s history.

The Gulf storm made landfall Sept. 26 on the Florida Panhandle before crossing into the Peach State, where it killed 37 people and left more than 1 million without power. It led to an estimated $6.5 billion in losses in two of Georgia’s largest industries, agriculture and forestry, according to one preliminary study conducted by the state.

Lowndes County, which includes Valdosta, was one of the hardest hit. Today, tarps remain a common sight. The sky is still visible through several parts of the roof at the county civic center, which sustained major damage. (The county recently approved a contractor for the repair work.)

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

ExploreState aids Georgia farmers, timber producers ravaged by Hurricane Helene

Ashley Tye, Lowndes’ emergency management director, said the county has honed its storm response playbook over the last several storms. That includes lining up contracts ahead of time for key services, like debris removal, and prestaging critical supplies, such as water, around the county.

Before Helene, county authorities recommended residents have enough supplies to take care of themselves for 72 hours.

“Now we are telling people that they need to be prepared for two weeks because that is about how long it took some of our citizens to get both power and water back after Hurricane Helene,” County Manager Paige Dukes said.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

In Hazlehurst, Wasdin has been working with the state to implement a new public alert system allowing authorities to send emergency and public safety alerts based on location, including to travelers passing through Jeff Davis County. (Currently, recipients need to opt in.) He’s hoping the new system will be operational by next hurricane season.

Another top priority is a community shelter for residents who live in substandard housing, particularly the decades-old mobile homes scattered throughout the county. One of the two Helene-related deaths in Jeff Davis occurred when a tree fell on a mobile home.

Previously, a local church was available to temporarily house hundreds of people, but that contract expired and wasn’t renewed roughly two years ago, Wasdin said.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

In the mobile home community where the fatality occurred, there are still trailers with fallen trees on their roofs, piles of mangled debris in yards and homes sliced in half. Many have been abandoned since Helene.

Staffing remains one of Wasdin’s biggest concerns. He was able to secure funding in the county budget to hire four additional firefighters who can help in a storm’s aftermath. But volunteerism is down overall.

Some say they feel as prepared as they can be for the next storm.

In Crisp County, about 70 miles south of Macon, sheriff and emergency management director Billy Hancock said his department has been able to budget big-ticket items over the last several years that can be lifesavers during hurricanes. Those items include things like generators for critical infrastructure, a mobile command post and heavy equipment that can help rescue trapped people.

“I would rate us right up there against a lot of your larger counties as far as the manpower, the knowledge, having our own public safety training center to handle these emergencies out of and having people,” Hancock said.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Digging out from a storm is one thing. But planning so that communities can be stronger for future storms is another.

A recent report by UGA’s Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems warned many communities around the state “face persistent capacity and resource constraints that limit their ability to plan for, finance and implement long-term resilience planning” for natural disasters.

Other factors contributing to the state’s vulnerability, it concluded, are rapid development in flood zones and other sensitive areas; aging power, stormwater and other infrastructure that wasn’t designed to handle today’s extreme weather; outdated tools and a lack of technical expertise to plan effectively; and government bodies that can sometimes be disjointed or disconnected.

The report recommends more coordination between local and regional groups, especially for sharing planning and emergency response data, among other suggestions.

ExploreHurricane Helene was a historic storm. Climate change likely made it worse

Could FEMA overhaul decimate county budgets?

Proposed budget cuts in Washington are also causing heartburn among some local emergency planners who have relied on federal money to clean up and rebuild after storms.

After Helene, Georgia received more than $1 billion in federal disaster recovery block grants, public assistance and aid to households, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, dwarfing what Washington had given the state after other hurricanes and severe weather events.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Earlier this summer, Trump proposed eliminating FEMA, which coordinates the delivery of federal resources to states for cleanup and infrastructure rebuilding after major storms. It also provides direct assistance to households to pay for food, hotel stays and the replacement of important medication immediately after extreme weather.

Trump has suggested shifting much of the responsibility — and costs — for responding to disasters to the states.

“The FEMA thing has not been a very successful experiment,” Trump said in June. “It’s extremely expensive, and again, when you have a tornado or a hurricane or you have a problem of any kind in a state, that’s what you have governors for. They’re supposed to fix those problems.”

The administration has softened its language in more recent months, with officials speaking of shrinking and overhauling FEMA rather than killing it. Among the changes floated by administration officials: significantly raising the amount of damage a state must sustain to receive federal storm aid and eliminating hundreds of millions in grant dollars aimed at bolstering local disaster resiliency.

The White House has also proposed significant funding cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service, which forecasts storms.

In South Georgia, FEMA has reimbursed Lowndes’ government for millions of dollars the county fronted for debris cleanup and other expenses in the immediate aftermath of large hurricanes.

While damage from a major storm like Helene would likely be covered under Trump’s revamping, some emergency planners fear state and county governments could break the bank paying for smaller storms. That could put officials in the tough position of deciding whether to raise taxes on residents.

Now we’re “figuring out, OK, what things are absolutely critical and what would our response look like if that support from the federal level was maybe not as robust as it has been in the in the past?” said Tye, Lowndes’ emergency management director.

In Jeff Davis, a community foundation was set up after Helene to help deliver relief funds to the neediest in the county. But Wasdin worries that eventually the country could hit a breaking point when it comes to paying for disaster relief.

“Our country does so much. We do so much and the cleanup from debris from disasters is part of it,” he said. “But sooner or later, where is the money going to come from?”