Officials: County better prepared after hit from Helene

When Hurricane Helene roared through Laurens County last year, there was barely time for bewilderment as area leaders and emergency personnel moved quickly to act.

Trees were down throughout the county as were power lines. The destruction of a wayward storm that rumbled up I-26 from the South Carolina coast on Sept. 27, 2024 was devastating.

Lives were lost. Property was destroyed.

Thomas Carson Lawson and Richard Dylan Rathbone, both of Clinton, were killed when a tree fell on their vehicle, and Carl Thomas Bailey of Cross Hill died when a tree slammed into his camper.

During all of it, the Laurens County Department of Emergency Services was in flux. Director Sonny Ledda, who had recently retired as chief of the Clinton Police Department, had yet to officially take over his new post. Yet, Ledda was at the county offices every day.

There was work to be done.

“We just asked, ‘How can we help?'” Ledda said. “We didn’t ask where you lived or who you voted for. We asked, ‘What can we do to help?'”

In addition to emergency personnel from the county and Clinton and the City of Laurens, members of the South Carolina National Guard and S.C. State Guard arrived to help.

Police and firefighters picked up chainsaws to help clear roads and debris as local and visiting utility crews worked to restore power.

All hands in the community seemed to be on deck, clearing paths back toward normalcy.

“I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how much help was out there and how much neighbors helped one another,” Ledda said. “I still think that we wouldn’t have had the roads cleared and some people wouldn’t have gotten the help they needed without our citizens and without the entire county staff. Everybody came together. We had librarians come in and help us. We had DSS. If you could get out of your home and get to the office, there was somewhere we could put you, and people were knocking down the door trying to help.”

In the aftermath of the storm, Ledda and Assistant Emergency Services Director Becky Bagwell said their department has made improvements.

Bagwell said the ability to communicate with people in such a dire situation needed to be improved. So, emergency services is now part of IPAWS (Integrated Public Alert and Warning System) and has satellite phones, so if cell towers go down, they can still communicate among themselves and with other local, state and federal agencies.

“If we need to send something out where everybody in a certain area needs to know it, we can send that message out,” Bagwell said. “It’s geographically based, and you don’t have to sign up to receive an IPAWS alert. So, now we’re able to communicate better.”

The county government had to receive IPAWS certification, but Bagwell said that were no issues in doing that.

The department has also added pet shelter kits to help people bring their domestic pets – cats and dogs – so that they are not left behind if someone has to go to a shelter, Bagwell said.

The Ridge was among the shelter locations and about a dozen people stayed there in the immediate aftermath of the storm. The Laurens YMCA provided a place to stay for visiting utility workers, while churches throughout the county provided meals and shelters for those in need.

Ledda said he would grade the county’s response as a “B,” adding that self-assessments are routinely harsh.

Just as importantly, Ledda and Bagwell said in identical or very similar circumstances, Laurens County is better prepared for such a catastrophic weather event than it was a year ago.

“In addition to the communication (aspects), we’ve beefed up what needed to be beefed up,” Ledda said.

The communication improvements have also been concentrated in the community as the Emergency Services has reached out to many of the same people in the business, service and religious communities who pitched in to help during Hurricane Helene.

“I know that anybody I reached out to during an emergency would help us,” Ledda said. “But wouldn’t it be nice if the first time we met them wasn’t during an emergency? There’s that sense of trust there. There’s already that sense of community.”