In parts of Georgia, residents brace for new hurricanes. They haven't recovered from the last ones

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Marion Cummings says a year after Hurricane Helene, he is anxious to see how much of the art and music he's collected over the course of his life he can still recover from his home.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB News

Marion Cummings lives in a tidy neighborhood of small houses not far from downtown Thomson in McDuffie County, about 35 miles west of Augusta. 

On one side, his neighbor flies a Georgia Bulldog flag on the porch. A neighbor on the other side flies a political flag. Across the street is what Hurricane Helene left of his neighbor’s house. She had just moved out before the storm. 

Then, there’s his house. 

Cummings is a Georgia Tech fan. That’s obvious from the Yellow Jacket silhouette still nailed to the trunk of the enormous oak tree that split into half the home that still holds captive a lifetime’s collection of art, music and family photos. 

“If that’d had been a bulldog that would have ran,” he said with a laugh, looking at the Yellow Jacket logo. 

Forecasters have said to expect an above average hurricane season this year. That fits a pattern of ever stronger storms egged on by climate change. 

Meanwhile, in a huge swath of Georgia extending to Augusta, people are still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Helene. Or, in the case of Valdosta, from Helene and Idalia. 

That could leave the many people like Marion Cummings in a double bind: trying to prepare for a hurricane while they haven’t even put the last one behind them. 

Cummings is an Army veteran. He spent his career as a cook. He's also an artist; a painter. He was painting at 2 a.m. as Helene roared through Georgia. He had just gotten up to take a breather.  

“I said, 'Let me get a break,'" Cummings recalled. "By that time, I heard something say, ‘Boom!’”

That was the oak tree, hitting the nook where, seconds earlier, Cummings had been painting. 

"Up front, the rain and everything was coming in,” Cummings continued. “I couldn't get out, so I dialed 911, and they came right on. And my neighbor, my neighbor across the street, they ran over to help me get out. And I got out from the back.” 

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The kitchen and front entrance of another home in Marion Cummings' neighborhood are still exposed a year after Hurricane Helene. A notice pinned to the wall says the home lacks the local permits to rebuild.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB News

Cummings said whatever political divide may have been on his street was washed away from the hurricane. Neighbors helped neighbors.  

He survived, but the house was destroyed. His insurance policy paid off the mortgage but it won’t pay to rebuild.

He’s lived in a FEMA camper for a year. If he raised the window shade up when he drank his morning coffee, his entire view would be the tree still in his house. 

“Can you imagine looking at this every day and knowing that you was in there when it happened?” he asked. 

He leaves the shades down. 

“I go to therapy, and they said ‘You need to let it out, just let it go.’ I tried, but I can't.” 

It might be tempting to write off Marion Cummings’ experience as one man's bad luck. But Scott Parrish, disaster response coordinator with the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church, said Cummings isn't alone. 

“Right now, in our system, we're working in three counties,” Parrish said. "We've got over 230 requests for assistance."

That’s the same three-county area Parrish calls home, just three out of the over 40 counties officially given a disaster designation after Hurricane Helene.    

“I've been doing this sort of work for 35 years," he said. "Traditionally, we would send teams to Florida, to the Gulf States, to the Carolinas. So for the first time ever, I'm living in the impact zone.” 

And being so close to the damage, Parrish knows how fragile the recovery still is. 

“If we get hit by anything else in the six-month or year period — or even two-year period — we're forever trying to play catch up,” Parrish said. 

The next storm could see a weakened federal response, too, if the Trump administration succeeds in eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

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Amid his art supplies is a painting by Marion Cummings of one of the workers from FEMA that he says still calls to check on him a year after Hurricane Helene.

Credit: Grant Blankenship/GPB News

At the other end of Helene’s path through Georgia, Valdosta Mayor Scott Matheson remains astonished by last year’s FEMA response to Hurricane Helene. 

“I got nothing but praise for FEMA," Matheson said. "FEMA, in our community, for Helene especially, wrote $59 million worth of direct assistance. So you can do the math on what, 44 other counties in our state and multiple states beyond that. I don't know how they do it.” 

Like Parrish, he worries about how the city of Valdosta would manage another storm of Helene’s intensity without FEMA. 

“We had vast cash reserves in Helene to respond to immediately,” Matheson said. That was American Rescue Plan money the city shuffled after Hurricane Idalia. 

“But if I get another storm, I truly do not know where that money's coming from," he said. "I will just have to change the expectation of our citizenry. It's going be a lot longer in recovery or I'm going be lot slower to respond. We just, we don't have that resource again.” 

Back in McDuffie, some of the FEMA workers who first found Cummings after Helene still check in on him from time to time. It was FEMA that reached out and connected Parrish’s Methodist group and the Red Cross to Cummings. 

“FEMA could be like an octopus; they could just reach out to the other organizations you don't know anything about,” Cummings said.  “That's what happened to me.” 

Parrish said that’s what FEMA did: It connected groups that could help with the people that needed them.   

Cummings can now look forward to leaving his FEMA camper. 

A Mennonite charity from out of state (another link in the chain FEMA started) is coming to rebuild his home in collaboration with Scott Parrish and the North Georgia Methodists in October.  

“We’re pulling out 30 major rebuilds, major to total rebuilds that they'll do in a six-month time period,” Parrish said. 

Cummings said maybe then, a year and a half after Helene, he’ll be able to put the storm behind him. 

 GPB's Orlando Montoya contributed reporting to this story.