A year ago, Hurricane Helene drove its way up from the Gulf of Mexico through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Virginia, devastating areas that have rarely — if ever — endured so powerful a hurricane. Many communities are still rebuilding as they wait to see what another hurricane season will bring.
We asked Helene survivors in some of the hardest-hit areas one simple question: Did the storm change how you prepare for a disaster? Some are rethinking their own lives and choices, and some are even rethinking their futures — whether they should move away, beef up their own emergency preparedness, dig in and get to know their neighbors, or some combination of the three. Because ready or not, the next one could be on its way. Here’s what residents and community leaders — emergency management workers, foresters, teachers — told us. As devastating as it was, did Helene truly change anything?
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Florida: To stay or go?
Cricket Logan
St. Petersburg, Florida
“My neighborhood was a ghost town, when I finally got back to it.”
The storm surge rushed in overnight. A wall of water raced toward Cricket Logan’s low-lying neighborhood in St. Petersburg. By the time dawn broke, many streets were underwater and nearly all of the homes inundated. “I got the number, I think it was from a FEMA person who was driving around St. Pete, but they said something like, as far as they knew, it was 47 percent of the houses in St. Pete had received some sort of flood damage, which is crazy,” Logan said. Pinellas County deemed at least 16,000 houses to be uninhabitable.
Logan works as a wastewater technician, and took shelter at work during the storm, on call to address any problems that arose. The city’s sewage infrastructure sustained so much damage that Logan spent four days at the treatment plant making repairs.
“My neighborhood was a ghost town, when I finally got back to it,” said Logan. “All the houses in my neighborhood, they had 3 or 4 feet of saltwater in them, so it was just giant piles of everybody’s belongings the houses have just thrown up out on the street side.”
Positioned on a higher swell of the street, his home was one of only two houses in a three-block radius that didn’t get totally flooded.
This hurricane season, Logan’s taken new steps to be better prepared, with a plan to get his most cherished items, including his motorcycles and tools, to a raised parking garage at a nearby hospital. “They can yell at me about it once the storm passes,” he added. Still, he’s not confident his luck will hold. Logan says for older folks like him, who live right on the water, preparation can only go so far.
“I used to think, ‘I’m going to be fine here.’ And now, I just assume it’s a matter of time,” he said. “That’s kind of my attitude about my place now, is just either I’ll get out before it happens, or I’ll get out because it happened. I’m not going to try and restart here in Florida.”
Kelsey Sanchez
Oldsmar, Florida
“We had no real hurricane plan. We didn’t even have a go-bag.”
Twelve hours before Hurricane Helene swamped the Tampa Bay region with the highest storm surge in roughly a century, Kelsey Sanchez and her husband heeded warnings to head east and stayed with family. Good thing they did, too, as the storm flooded their apartment complex, blew out windows, and knocked over scores of trees around her home.
“We had no real hurricane plan. We didn’t even have a go-bag,” said Sanchez.
Not even two weeks later, as Hurricane Milton approached, they fled again. They were terrified by the warnings issued by local officials like Tampa mayor Jane Castor, who couldn’t be more clear when she said, “If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die.” This time, the couple headed north, in a desperate attempt to get out of the monster storm’s forecasted path.
The back-to-back evacuations cost them thousands in gas, food, and rental car fees — an experience that convinced Sanchez she was done living in “hurricane alley.”
“Right after, we just really sat down. We’re like, ‘OK, this is going to be the reality for this state,’” Sanchez said. “Are we prepared to spend thousands of dollars on the fly like this?” They’ve decided to move to St. Louis. Sanchez says anywhere else is better than hurricane-prone Florida.
They would have left already, but are waiting until closer to when their lease ends in November. If a hurricane hits before then, they’ll be prepared: They now keep a go-bag stashed with medical supplies, batteries, and important documents. She’s also spent the last year stocking up on fuel, food, and water.
“People die almost every year” during hurricane season, Sanchez said. “I don’t want to be one of them. It’s just really, really stress-inducing. So we’re leaving.”
Georgia: A new perspective on readiness
Megan Varner / Getty Images
Ashley Tye & Meghan Barwick
Lowndes County, Georgia
“I really think our residents are prepared and are listening.”
When Hurricane Idalia hit Lowndes County in August 2023, Ashley Tye, the county’s emergency management director, felt it “was by far the worst disaster that we’ve experienced in my lifetime.” Little did he know, it marked the start of a yearlong barrage of disasters to hit the region that included Helene.
For the county, which borders Florida, 2024 brought in a succession of storms almost monthly: a tornado, a straight-line wind event, heavy rain that caused flooding. Then, after a short reprieve, Tropical Storm Debby struck in early August. A month or so later, Helene, which Tye called “Idalia on steroids,” produced a “mountain” of debris. Heavy rains brought another flood in November. Then in January, a snowstorm, of all things, hit southern Georgia.
“So it’s just kind of been one thing after another,” Tye said. That’s left the region with little time to dig out from one disaster before the next. Much of the debris that Helene created was still on the ground when the rains came in November, making the floods worse. “One of the challenges from a community recovery standpoint is how those things compound,” Tye said.
Adding to the challenge, the county — landlocked, but not far from the Gulf coast and the Atlantic Ocean — faces different threats and requires different preparation than coastal communities. But residents might hear what’s happening in those areas and expect the same.
“The coastal communities will get sandbags ready because they’re expecting a storm surge,” said Meghan Barwick, the county’s public information officer. “That’s not realistic for Lowndes County, but the residents in the community want to know where those sandbags are.”
They’ve been working to update and tailor the county’s messaging to make sure people are ready for the actual risks they’ll face and to temper the frenzy that can build up online. This year, Lowndes County is also adjusting its recommendations based on recent experience. The standard advice had long been to stock emergency kits with enough food, medicine, and other supplies to survive three days without electricity. Helene obliterated that timeframe.
So the county is now advising people to prepare for longer power outages. The good news, Barwick and Tye said, is that people seem to be heeding the warnings. The January snowstorm brought fewer car crashes than previous storms, which they took as evidence that residents abided by advice to stay indoors and off icy roads.
“Going into this hurricane season with what we’ve seen the last two years, I really think our residents are prepared and are listening,” Barwick said.
Scott Johnson
Columbia County, Georgia
“We only had just a couple of hours to prepare for these high winds.”
Scott Johnson wasn’t all that worried about Helene when he went to sleep the night before the storm made landfall. “We all went to bed thinking that we were probably going to get a lot of heavy rain, maybe some wind, but we weren’t expecting a hurricane to hit us,” said the county manager in Columbia County. “It really turned on us in the middle of the night. So we only had just a couple of hours to prepare for these high winds.”
Residents woke up to near-total devastation. Days of rainfall had already saturated the ground, allowing gale-force winds to tear centuries-old oaks up by the roots. Power, cell, and internet service went down for weeks, and even local radio and TV stations went dark. Gas stations couldn’t pump gas and grocery stores couldn’t operate, even if people could get past the debris blocking the roads.
“I could describe it all day long. Until you’ve lived it, until you’ve seen it, till you’ve been in that, you really don’t understand,” Johnson said. “I think people here now realize they never want to be caught that short again.”
That’s also true of Johnson, who now has a generator, satellite internet connection, and emergency supplies on hand. He also keeps some cash socked away, because power outages make credit cards useless. “Cash is king in emergencies,” he said.
Luckily, Columbia County provides public internet that uses underground broadband lines and remained online during and after Helene. That allowed county officials to run emergency operations and dispatch help to those who needed it, Johnson said. It also was the only way many people could contact loved ones.
So the county is expanding it, Johnson said, to ensure residents can access Wi-Fi in places like local parks. And he’s talking with officials around the state about the importance of local broadband as an emergency lifeline and taking other critical steps, like securing backup power for water and sewer systems and being ready to establish an emergency shelter quickly.
“I would really encourage all local governments to have some kind of redundancy because it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when it’s going to strike your community,” Johnson said. “So I think we just have to be ready.”
Western North Carolina: Finding possibilities in recovery
Steve Exum / Getty Images
Chloe Lieberman
Barnardsville, North Carolina
“It touched the land where all of us live.”
Chloe Lieberman keeps her life simple. She’s part of a thriving community of folks who mostly live off-grid and prize self-sufficiency. They use solar panels and dig their own wells, grow their own food, and build what they need, including outdoor kitchens. Such skills proved invaluable during Helene. The storm didn’t change much about her approach to life, only made her feel more settled and prepared. What the storm did change is how she views her neighbors.
Lieberman was already aware that the simplicity of her life is a choice. Helene made her sharply aware that for many members of her community doing without amenities and conveniences isn’t something they would choose. The storm highlighted the plight of those at the margins — the people for whom homelessness or food insecurity is not the result of a storm, but a constant threat.
So Lieberman and her friends recently formed the Barnardsville Area Resilience Network, and began distributing boxes of free food to neighbors who needed them.
“Every Thursday we meet and people drive up different roads in Barnardsville,” Lieberman said. “That’s how that food gets distributed. So like, ‘Oh, I know there’s an elder on my road who can’t get out and really loves to cook. Let’s put her on the list.’ Or, ‘Oh, I know this person just went through a tragedy. Let’s bring them some food.’ It’s really neighbor to neighbor.”
She began to feel a new sense of love and camaraderie with her neighbors.
Now that many of the state and federal Helene relief programs are expiring, though, she’s worried that her community’s needs will only increase. At least now, they have the collective experience of surviving together. “It touched the land where all of us live,” she said. “There was this sense of like a silver lining of it, of taking people out of that isolation and loneliness.”
Jazz Maltz
Barnardsville, North Carolina
“There’s a lot of things hanging in our community, and no really clear way forward for people.”
Jazz Maltz sees more in downed trees than most people. To a trained forester like him, they’re not waste, they’re fuel — not just for dangerous wildfires yet to come, but for the homes in his community. When Helene toppled hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, he saw both danger and opportunity.
“So much of the downed wood from the storm is just getting chipped and put in these giant chip piles that are catching on fire and smoldering,” Maltz said. The next disaster he’s most worried about isn’t a flood. It’s a wildfire. Conflagrations in Western North Carolina stunned the region during the first spring after Helene, and more could be coming as dead trees continue to dry out.
Maltz has lived in the Western U.S., where there’s a lot of community wildfire preparation, and he hopes to bring some of that knowledge to Barnardsville. His group, Full Circle Forestry Collective, started a community lumber mill, helped by a friend who crowdsourced funding to buy an old mill from a manufacturer right after the storm. Last winter, he and a small crew cut up trees felled by Helene and provided it to families in the region to warm their homes. Then they set up a firewood bank, where people could get what they needed. They also hope to turn downed timber into free lumber for rebuilding. Such work could bolster people as funding for things like debris removal begins to dry up.
“There’s a lot of things hanging in our community, and no really clear way forward for people,” he said. Especially the looming wildfire risk: “Folks don’t have the money to mitigate hundreds of acres of fuel.”
Jennifer Rambo
Spruce Pine, North Carolina
“I don’t know how we lived through that.”
A year ago, in the immediate aftermath of the storm, Jennifer Rambo, principal of the Spruce Pine Montessori School, was just trying to manage the chaos. Some families hadn’t yet been heard from. Water, power, and internet service were out.
By mid-October, she could check three things off the list: All the kids were fine, and the internet and power were back. While the school still didn‘t have running water, Rambo received donated pumps and portable toilets. Service was finally restored in November, so she put that stuff in storage and set about updating the school’s emergency plans and closure policies.
Rambo hopes clearer procedures will minimize chaos in the event of another disaster.
“I don’t know how we lived through that,” she said after school one day recently.
By the spring, life’s rhythms settled into something like normalcy. Not only were power, water, and internet fully operational, but businesses had begun to reopen, debris had been cleared, and green at last began to grow over the mud on the scoured riverbanks of the North Toe River that runs through town. But when a water main burst the week before school let out, Rambo went back into storm mode.
“We were under a boil water advisory and I had to reach into all of the water that we had stored,” Rambo said.
Her kids are resilient, though.
“I was wondering, are these kids going to be traumatized when they see these hand sinks?” she said. “And they got really excited. They were like, ‘This is just like after the hurricane, it’s so fun.’”
There’s still more work for Rambo to do. She’s looking to get the school a generator. And she sees her closets of hygiene supplies as a resource for the rest of Spruce Pine.
“If somebody else needs it, it’s there,” she said.
Allen Cook
Bakersville, North Carolina
“We want to be ready.”
Head in palm at his desk — surrounded by, among other things, floodplain maps, business cards and flyers from debris removal and construction companies, and a burnished copy of the Bible — Mitchell County’s county manager Allen Cook talked a constituent through the ins and outs of clearing brush and other debris from their property. Most of the mountains Cook has had to move lately are just mountains of garbage.
After hanging up, he sighed. “I’ve been living debris for going on a year now,” he said.
Though a career public servant, Cook admits this has been an unexpected part of his job. “It was all a blur,” he said of the storm. When he wasn’t coordinating supply drops in rural areas, he was busy dispelling misinformation and conspiracy theories — including one outlandish rumor that officials were hiding bodies. A lot of the work focused on building his community’s trust in their local government and assuring people that they were being looked after.
“Even myself and my family, we don’t trust the government very well,” he said. “It takes a long time to earn that trust.”
Cook did this through many face-to-face conversations in his community, often referring people to the institutions that could answer their questions. Another rumor spread at one point that kids were missing; Cook would tell people to go check with the local school system. Because it’s a smaller community where people know their neighbors, that reassurance often helped people realize that what they were seeing online may not necessarily reflect reality.
Cook is uncertain about the science of climate change, saying he feels unqualified to discuss it. Nevertheless, he’s getting his county ready for the next storm. After Helene, he sees no real reason not to beef up emergency plans. Mitchell County now has its own emergency alert app, and they’re working to mitigate wildfire risk, which he fears is the next looming disaster.
“We’re fragile right now,” he said. “So we want to be ready.”