LISTEN: Limited surveys of the Augusta area from the Georgia Forestry Commission suggest over 30 acres of tree canopy was lost from public property alone. GPB's Sofi Gratas reports on the aftermath of Helene nearly a year after the storm.
The city of Augusta is still recovering from Hurricane Helene a year later.
Helene hit East Georgia as a tropical storm with hurricane-force gusts of wind on Sept. 27, 2024, causing substantial damage along its path from the Gulf and up through South Georgia. For weeks, thousands of homes and businesses were out of power. People traveled on foot to get things like food, water and batteries, and cars lined up at gas pumps across the region.
Today, some Augusta neighborhoods homes still have tarps instead of roofs.
Driving around town with Richmond County’s University of Georgia Extension Coordinator, Campbell Vaughn, is like time-traveling back to the days just after Helene.
“I mean, there was an oak tree on this house right here that was — it had to be 3 feet in diameter,” Vaughn said while driving near Augusta’s Murray Hill neighborhood on July 29, 2025.
Yards like this one show evidence of where a tree once stood. Usually, there’s a grassless patch of dirt, or a root ball.
These neighborhoods lost acres of towering pine trees.
“God, house after house after house was just destroyed,” Vaughn remembered. “You couldn't see anywhere through here because of the trees, and now you can just see for miles on top of these hills.”
In Augusta, Vaughn is a trusted source on landscaping. He has a regular column in the local paper about it. After Helene, friends, neighbors and family all called Vaughn asking for help with the trees in their yard.
He would tell them: “Do everything you can to get it as cleaned up as possible, and then sometimes it's an opportunity to try something new.”
“Everybody kind of just needed somebody to kind of vent to and just say ‘Is everybody in as bad a shape as we are?’” Vaughn said.
For months, trees were piled up along the roads in Augusta. Vaughn said most got cleaned up ahead of the Master’s Tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club in April, but even out-of-town patrons of the renowned event couldn’t escape Helene’s impact on the environment.
Limited surveys of the Augusta area from the Georgia Forestry Commission suggest over 30 acres — about 20 football fields' worth — of tree canopy was lost in the city on public property alone. Surveys were done in cemeteries, parks and rights-of-way in Augusta’s commercial district.
It’s estimated that losses on private land, which the commission is still trying to measure, would raise total losses much higher.
“Helene drove a very steady path right up through the state ... Like I've never seen before with a hurricane in Georgia, to be honest,” said Seth Hawkins, public information officer and team leader of the commission’s Urban Forest Strike Team. “Augusta will feel the impacts from Hurricane Helene for years and years to come.”
So far, replanting efforts in Augusta have been largely self-funded or driven by philanthropy. Residents have had the chance to get free saplings from nonprofit giveaways, for example.
The city of Augusta is running short of cash as a result of damage from the storm, leaving little room for city-funded recovery efforts or the replanting of Augusta's trees.
At a recent county commission meeting, Timothy Schroer of the finance department warned local leaders of a nearly $11 million budget shortfall. The city is still waiting on money from the state emergency management agency, and $16 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agencies to cover storm clean up.
“Just because of the magnitude of Hurricane Helene and the timing we're not sure if FEMA is going to give us all our money back,” Schroer said at the Aug. 5 meeting.
The Rev. Christopher Johnson is executive director of Greater Augusta’s Interfaith Coalition, a volunteer-led organization that, as he describes it, tries to “provide what the government does not.”
After Helene, the coalition deployed 260 volunteers to help with hurricane relief. Then, last year, Johnson and a professor from the University of Georgia applied for federal money from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Community Change Grant Program. The grant would have, according to their application, funded local weather stations, the replanting of trees in Augusta’s hard-hit neighborhoods, and renovations to the coalition’s headquarters near downtown to help it serve as a shelter during extreme weather events.
The coalition got approval from the county commission for the project, Johnson said. But the EPA canceled the grant program, among others, earlier this year under President Donald Trump’s directive to cut costs at the federal government.
Johnson said he would like to see the city prioritizing investments in both hurricane recovery and preparedness.
“[We will] keep the discussion going,” he said. “I think we need take life and health serious enough to plan for disasters that we know are inevitable.”
Not only has the loss of trees changed the landscape of the so-called Garden City, but it's left lots of houses without shade.
Outside one house in West Augusta, Campbell Vaughn lays aerial photos of the area side by side. The photos were taken three years apart, before and after the storm.
The tree canopy is gone. Vaughn pulls out a temperature gun. He's been doing this a lot lately to see just how hot it gets in places that lost their trees.
Here, the surface of the ground is over 100 degrees.
“And that's on grass,” he says. “I mean, that's 103 [degrees].”
He measures under some shade. It’s 16 degrees cooler on a July day.
At the hottest parts of the day in Augusta, there was about a 10-degree difference in what’s called the "feels like" temperature standing in the sun and shade, according to measurements from a wet bulb thermometer.
Scientists confirmed that last year was the hottest year on record. And with every warming year, data from our environment suggests that the chance for powerful storms like Hurricane Helene goes up.
At Pendelton King Park, TomMac Garrett broke a sweat at the disc golf course. He said this first summer since Helene definitely feels different.
“It changed the city,” he said in between holes on the course. “It's known as the Garden City, so we're going to get cooked from the summer heat.”
At Pendelton King, Garett said they lost trees that were hundreds of years old. He is not too confident that the city is going to invest in replanting. That puts the damaged landscape at risk.
“All these trees that were protected are no longer protected,” Garrett said. “Now there's no trees to block the wind from them ... when the wind hits them, it just topples them over.”
In downtown Augusta, where a $40 million reimagining of the Broad Street streetscape means the sidewalks are now bare of towering trees, it’s hard to escape the heat.
“You don't have to be a scientist, right, to know that trees cool things down,” said Tony Giarusso, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of City and Regional Planning and associate director of the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics.
To mitigate losses from commercial and residential development, Atlanta issues fees and penalties for cutting down trees, called a “recompense.” That local policy drives the city’s replanting, Giarusso said.
He says it’s important to consider other options, like buying land to protect it from development.
“The bigger thing with trees in my opinion is you're going to have a hard time stopping your tree loss by just planting trees,” Giarusso said.
But in Augusta, there are no plans to invest in the city’s urban canopy.
Hawkins of the Georgia Forestry Commission has advice for people and communities replanting on their own.
“We want to make sure that people plant the right tree in the right place to make sure that we're being sustainable and resilient towards future events such as this,” Hawkins said.
In Augusta, that could look like planting native Georgia trees with roots that stabilize the soil. The Forestry Commission offers resources for Natural Disaster Recovery including grants to supplement the cost of replanting.
“I always try to tell people, don't get so discouraged,” he said. “I mean, yes, we won't have 300-year-old trees still, but in 80 years, we can have a community forest again.”
Or, at least the next generation of Augustans can.
