Scarred Augusta still digging out from Helene as Masters tees up

When Masters week begins April 7, visitors from around the world familiar with the Garden City’s lush canopy of trees will no doubt be surprised by the jagged, storm-wrought sightlines. For those like Law who call this place home, getting used to the uprooted landscape has become a daily chore.

And full recovery is still a ways off. Many homes in this city of 200,000 residents remain damaged, blue tarps on roofs clashing with Augusta’s storied green.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Law’s house, until the wee hours of Sept. 27, once sat secluded, shielded from Berckmans Road and the Masters parking lots by a wall of trees. Now her place stands out like a triple bogey, her roof still under repair after four trees from her neighbor’s yard landed on it.

Her chickens still aren’t comfortable in their new and unshaded surroundings. The other day about noon, her three roosters wouldn’t stop crowing.

Law called out to soothe them: “It’s OK, y’all.”

Since Helene, the “chicken news network is practically all day, all night,” she said. “They don’t sleep as long. They’re very sensitive to noise and because the traffic is more readily heard. They’re up a lot sooner.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Law, an Army vet who is now a historic preservation advocate and cemetery curator, is the wife of a general contractor. They had an easier route than most to finding help when it came to rebuilding. Two houses behind theirs have been demolished and won’t be rebuilt.

“Luckily, we were insured,” she said. “But it’s been a matter of patience.”

Earlier this month, a National Weather Service report on Helene and the wreckage in its wake blamed “widespread hurricane-force wind gusts,” some clocked at 82 mph, around the storm’s decaying eyewall for 11 deaths in the area — “all from trees falling onto homes.”

The report said that in three Georgia counties — Richmond, Columbia and McDuffie — around Augusta more than 360 houses and buildings were destroyed. Some 3,000 others “suffered major damage.” Another 3,500 were slightly or moderately damaged.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

In Augusta alone, 1,695 houses were damaged in what officials here estimate as $282 million in residential losses.

So far, 4 million cubic yards of debris and 16,784 tree hazards have been removed from the city.

Some of it — stumps, trunks, logs, branches — now lay piled, dead and brown, inside Lake Olmstead Stadium, until a few years ago the longtime minor league baseball home of the Augusta Green Jackets. The scene is apocalyptic. Grandstands sit empty overlooking a field of hurricane-tossed carnage awaiting its wood-chippered fate.

The ballpark is perched on a slope near the Augusta Canal, an offshoot of the Savannah River that supplies the city’s drinking water.

After riding past the old stadium on a recent morning, Tonya Bonitatibus, who is executive director for the Savannah Riverkeeper, shook her head at the debris graveyard within.

“It’s a lasting relic that unfortunately, I think, is not soon to disappear,” she said, “of the storm and its effects.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

‘Still so stark’

As Bonitatibus cruised her hometown by car the other day, touring the destruction with a reporter, it was clear to see that six months of cleanup have at least put a dent in the mess. Aside from debris piles in front of some houses, roads are clear. There is, however, an unseen toll.

“It is also a community that is absolutely reeling with a collective trauma. You can see it every time the wind blows,” she said. “People are terrified.”

Ripped-apart neighborhoods might take years to restore.

“It’s changed our landscape forever,” Bonitatibus said. “It’s still so stark.”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

She lives on the south side of the city, off Tobacco Road. Fifty trees on her family’s property were felled by Helene.

Closer to the heart of town, all around renowned Rae’s Creek and its tributaries, trees are still keeled over on homes.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Bonitatibus said, “the amount of people’s houses that are still missing good chunks of them.”

Statewide so far, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has provided $337 million in individual assistance to people for household and personal property losses and other needs. Richmond and neighboring Columbia counties account for just under 30% of that, said FEMA public affairs specialist Patrick Boland.

Local officials didn’t provide estimates on how many of the area’s damaged homes have been repaired.

The Masters, though, is good to go.

Augusta National Chairman Fred Ridley said in January that “as far as the impact, the long-term impact, we have not quite as many trees as we did a year ago. As far as the golf course goes, it’s in spectacular condition. I think we had minor damage to the course, the playing surfaces themselves, but we were able to get that back in shape, but I don’t think you’re going to see any difference in the condition for the Masters this year.”

Credit: Getty Images

Credit: Getty Images

Golfer Rory McIlroy this week told reporters at a tournament in Texas that he had visited the Augusta course in recent days on a scouting trip to check out any changes caused by Helene. “There’s four greens that are new this year that they’ve redone,” McIlroy said, according to golf.com. “You just sort of, you have a look at those and see if there’s any new hole positions they give you.”

The local hospitality business looks to be in solid shape. Jane Furhmann, who runs a well-known concierge company, arranges lodging, meals and transportation for Masters patrons from around the globe.

“There’s no issues for the clients coming in to stay,” said Fuhrmann, whose contacts include owners of more than 2,000 Augusta-area properties. She said only “a handful” were unable to lease this year because of damage.

Restaurants and shops also largely weathered Helene. Estimated business losses in Augusta totaled $9.9 million, a sliver of the $282 million in damages to the city’s homes, according to city officials.

Nonetheless, Masters-week guests are sure to notice remnants of the devastation.

“They’ll definitely be surprised. There’s no way they won’t be,” Bonitatibus said. “But what you will find from my community for sure is what we do best. We’ll put our best foot forward even if there’s only half a house standing behind us.”

Still, she worries about streams and creeks and swamps around the city. Many of them are clogged by downed trees.

“From a flooding standpoint, we’re in bad shape. We just haven’t flooded. The waterways are going to move differently,” Bonitatibus said. “We’ll find out where the flooding problems are when the rain returns.”

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

‘It looks bare’

At the end of White Owl Forest Drive, barely a mile from the 13th hole at Augusta National, Shirri Trammell’s house looks like it was swallowed by a forest.

When Helene roared through in predawn darkness 250 miles from where it made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast, snapped trees split her roof and turned her yard into a jungle gym of prostrate pines.

For the past six months, Trammell and her elderly mother and adult daughter have been living with a relative across town. The house they bought in the early 1980s was damaged beyond repair. They plan to demolish it soon and, with insurance money, build a new one on the same site.

On a recent afternoon, Trammell’s daughter, Chloe, a dental assistant, stood in their backyard beneath towering pines that survived the storm.

“I wonder what they’re going to do with the rest of these trees,” Chloe Trammell said, wondering “if it were to happen again.”

Shirri Trammell described the damage citywide as “mind-boggling.”

“It looks bare,” she said.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

A quarter-mile to the west of their place, on a Vassar Drive hillside, one of the epicenters of damage surrounding Augusta National, many, but not all, homes have new roofs.

“You can look down this street and you can tell who has had a good insurance company that got on it and then who has had insurance companies that have been (unattentive),” resident Charles Huggins said.

Huggins, an attorney, rents his house to out-of-towners every year during Masters week. Last fall, repairing it in time to do that seemed a long shot.

In his yard, 15 trees fell, as he put it, “like darts.” Some axed parts of his ranch-style house. The roots of a fallen pine yanked up his sewer line. Weeks passed before chain saw crews cleared a path for cars to pass through the neighborhood. Cable television lines have only recently been repaired.

“I think we’ve suffered a lot worse than people are aware of,” Huggins said of the region at large.

Seeing the destruction on a daily basis takes a toll, he said. “People are down. People are frustrated. People are discouraged. It’s almost like, ‘What’s coming next?‘... It is exhausting mentally, physically, emotionally.”

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

One day, he learned his air-conditioning unit was wrecked. Then when debris was being hauled off, his water line ruptured.

“So you’re writing checks for $4,000 here, $7,000 there,” Huggins said. “We’re already up around $100,000 that’s not been reimbursed and we have (a reputable insurance company). And fortunately we have the ability. … We’ll eventually get paid back, but there are a lot of people who just can’t write those checks. It may take two or three years, or you may never actually get back to your house.”

He wasn’t sure how he would have his place ready in time for his Masters tenants. Then one day his renters, representatives of a national company that manufactures lawn equipment, called and asked, “What can we do?”

They’d seen how Augusta was hard hit. They footed the bill for a debris-removal service to clean up Huggins’ yard. It is now free of stumps, sod-ready. Maybe not Masters-manicured, but near enough.

“In Augusta, it’s a mindset,” Huggins said. “The mindset is, ‘Hey, look, things can go bad and the house can look bad and we can get things fixed, but it’s got to be ready by the Masters.‘”

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC