LISTEN: It's now been over 1.5 years since Hurricane Helene cut a path across Georgia. Since then, people in the 62 affected counties have been rebuilding homes, routines and their sense of security. But there is good reason to believe the recovery is only beginning. GPB's Grant Blankenship reports from the scene.
By midmorning on a cool spring day, a crew of carpenters had already been working for hours at a construction site outside in rural Columbia County, west of Augusta.
Amid the drone of an air compressor parked near a magnolia tree not yet in bloom, they measured the distance between wall studs and cut two-by-fours to size with a circular saw. This crew had only recently picked up where another crew of carpenters like them, from an Amish community from up in Ohio, left off just a few days ago.
Hurricane Helene was what brought them. The storm left the modular home that had been here unfit for living. It had to be demolished, completely.
The construction here was brand new and, as crew leader Matthew Miller explained, built to withstand a hurricane.
"These straps right here hold the roof to the wall," Miller said, pointing to long metal straps spaced about a foot apart and screwed into the wall studs. There were similar straps tying the walls to the floor.
Miller, a full-time carpenter when he is home, said this is not how he builds in Ohio.
"Just around here," he said. "Yeah, just for the hurricanes."
It's now been over 1.5 years since Helene cut a path across Georgia, from Florida to the Carolinas.
Since then, people in the 62 affected Georgia counties have been rebuilding homes, routines and their sense of security.
But while the state closes in on two years since one of the largest disasters in its history, there is good reason to believe the recovery from Hurricane Helene is only beginning.
It was about a year ago when Scott Parrish started laying the groundwork to get volunteer crews like the one in Columbia County, from the group Mennonite Disaster Services to his part of Georgia.
Parrish works in disaster response all over the country. Today, that’s for the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church. And he lives nearby, on a farm in the town of Thomson.
He said in 35 years of disaster work, Helene was the first disaster to find him at home.
"Quickly, I realized Asheville and western North Carolina had terrible flooding, and they were all over the news coverage," Parrish remembered. "They had the huge influx of funding and volunteers."
But Georgia? "Quickly, our story was lost."
That was even despite the loss of running water in Augusta, billions of dollars in timber losses, hundreds of destroyed or damaged homes, and 37 deaths.
Blame it on the news cycle, Parrish said. But at the time, he told colleagues in Florida: it was frustrating.
"When I whined about Augusta's being overlooked … 'We need some help' … they said, 'Oh, this Amish group has worked with us,'" Parrish said. "'We're not standing up recovery. We're gonna send them to you.'"
That was Mennonite Disaster Services. When the group wraps up around Augusta, it will have done about 80 home projects in the metro area, almost half of them total rebuilds. That’s in just around a six-month period.
Parrish is still getting requests for help.
"At least six every week seem to be hurricane-related: vulnerable, uninsured, underinsured," he said. "So that meets our criteria."
Parrish said many people who come to him had home insurance, just not the coverage for a hurricane.
Underinsurance was the homeowner's problem at the next house. It was in Augusta proper, on a street within sight and sound of one of the city’s busy arterial roads. Another crew of young Amish men was on the roof, replacing beams and decking they’d first cut to proper size on the ground.
"Oh, they've got the back roof all the way off!" Parrish enthused. "Sweetness! Yeah, this was totally just tarped over even days ago."
Helene had tossed a tree into the roof. Shreds of the blue tarp which had been there since 2024 were hung up in the blooming Loropetalum just off the front porch. With the home made unlivable, the owner had gone across the Savannah River to live with relatives.
As the roofing crew hauled newly cut roof beams into place, another group of workers, young women in skirts and bonnets, chatted with each other in a dialect of German (which they call “Dutch”) as they scraped the siding of the house to get ready for a new coat of paint. Cora Yoder led them.
"I've been here 11 times; Gid's been here 13 times," Yoder said
Gid is Yoder's husband. She explained he was a professional carpenter for 40 years before taking those skills to work in disaster areas.
"This was always his dream," she said.
Gid's job is making sure the pace of the crew's work doesn't outrun the permits needed to keep all their work legal. He gets up at 4 a.m. every day. Cora gets another hour, until 5 a.m.
Cora Yoder said they have done this work in disaster areas all across the South.
"We've been to Texas, I think, in three different areas," she said. "We went to Lake Charles for two years, like in a row. We were in Alabama. We were in Ironton, Louisiana, last year. Now here. So, we keep going from year to year."
Elders like the Yoders who make these trips are the adult guidance for the crews of young workers who may have never left their home communities before. Cora explained the work is meant, in part, to add context to Amish traditions.
"They enjoy helping people," she said. "And it's like when people go home, they have a new perspective of what they were taught because it's so different."
Different from the world of the people they have chosen to help.
Scott Parrish, himself a Methodist minister, said he’s come to learn this work is core to the faith of the Mennonite and Amish volunteers.
"It’s a very practical, expressed theology," Parrish said. "'Love God, love neighbor.' And so if you've got a skill that can help a neighbor who's hurt and can't rebuild their home and their life, why not go?"
Parrish said after the Amish leave, a Jewish volunteer group will be on the ground. An Islamic group will follow as will other volunteers from other faiths. He says this work will continue here for two or three more years.
Rachel Young, associate professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, said in terms of hurricane recovery, even two years of hurricane recovery is still just the start.
"We're talking about even further down, like 15 years after a storm, these places that are getting hit have a higher likelihood of mortality," Young said. “Particularly amongst infants and Black populations.
In 2024, Young had a post-doctoral position at Stanford University. There, she was lead author on a paper co-authored with Solomon Hsiang, looking at the long-term health effects hurricanes in the United States.
They looked at 501 storms over 85 years. And what they saw were lingering waves of excess death in storm-struck places long after the storm itself was gone.
"This implies that these populations are very vulnerable, and having experienced a storm in the previous years means that they have less resources to care for themselves in the future months," Young said.
And that lack of resources — really, money, in most cases — creates lots of stress. Extreme stress of any origin can hurt health in several ways. From heart disease to diabetes, suicide and, in the case of Young’s study, even increased infant mortality.
"The condition that the mother is in when they're giving birth is leading to those infants that are born five, 10 years later to be more vulnerable to dying prematurely," she said.
The statistical link to some kinds of long-term health effects and storms is so tight that the paper even makes death projections based on wind speed.
And so, while Helene officially killed 37 people in Georgia, Young's research suggests the eventual death toll could be more like 15,000.
"I think our findings really suggest that we're significantly under-investing in both resilience before a storm and then recovery after a storm," Young said. "The fact that we are seeing these elevated mortality rates for so long really means that there's something that's not happening that should be happening."
Augusta is at the northern end of Hurricane Helene’s track through Georgia. Douglas, in Coffee County, 140 miles to the south, is at the other.
There, on another cool spring day, another coalition of mostly faith-based groups had brought families to a milestone in their hurricane recovery.
In a cul-de-sac called Sims Park (named for a volunteer from Kentucky killed on the road between Georgia and home), people who’d been displaced by Helene when the storm made their homes unlivable received keys to their new houses.
At the heart of this building effort was Mennonite Disaster Services, the same group building in Augusta. Rollin Ulrich of MDS said in Coffee County as in Augusta, the homes were built to the MDS hurricane resiliency standard.
"They're tied down from the top all the way down to the bottom, meant to withstand 150- to 160-mile an hour winds," Ulrich said. Helene’s winds, which destroyed the homes of these nine families with new house keys, were clocked by the National Weather Service at around 80 mph in Coffee County.
"It’s a security for them just knowing these homes are going to stay there," Ulrich concluded.
This kind of hurricane resiliency was added to Georgia’s state building code in January, but for now it’s optional for builders.
Ulrich has done this work for decades. He said he has seen the stress of disaster recovery take its toll.
"The sad thing is that depression sets in after about 18 months, the despair that goes along with where we're at," he said. "So yeah, this is remarkable here that they rebuilt in 18 months."
It could be that the families in Coffee County got the keys to their new homes in the nick of time.
Ulrich said he knows volunteers like him will be in this for a much longer haul.
"I can tell you that post-Katrina we were in New Orleans nine years," he said. "And I can tell you that we revisited some of those houses we built back then."
But Ulrich said even though powerful hurricanes came after Katrina in 2005, those houses still stood — just like the builders meant them to.
An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Cora Yoder's husband, Gid.
