Death toll up to 33 in Georgia after Hurricane Helene. Latest on fuel, power, agriculture

Ahead of President Joe Biden’s visit to Georgia to tour communities affected by Hurricane Helene, Gov. Brian Kemp announced the death toll from the storm increased to 33 in an update on relief efforts Thursday.

Biden’s administration has approved expedited disaster declarations for 41 Georgia counties , Kemp said, but the governor urged the president to add more counties in a Thursday phone call.

“I did tell him that I felt certain he would hear on the road that there’s still a lot of counties out there that are expressing frustration that they haven’t been added to that list yet,” Kemp said in the press conference. “So, he’s aware of that situation on the ground.”

Almost 2,000 members of the Georgia National Guard are working across the state, Kemp said. Guardsmen and women helping to load water into trucks, clearing roads, distributing means and helping to set up points of distribution.

Initially, 11 counties were approved but bipartisan support helped get another 30 counties approved for additional resources, Kemp said.

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that the federal cost share was increased from 75% to 100% for the first three months to supplement recovery efforts in affected areas. Officials will continue working across the aisle in the hurricane response, Kemp said.

“We should not have politics involved in disaster response and getting relief for our farmers or the citizens of our state,” he said.

Preliminary results from about 50 counties show the damage from Helene will cost around $417 million, Stallings said, but this number is expected to grow significantly .

Georgia’s agriculture hit hard

Kemp spoke with Thomas Vilsack, secretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about Helene’s impact to Georgia’s crops.

“As you all know, the (agricultural) economy was not good before the storm,” Kemp said. “And it’s worse now.”

Helene caused devastation to the state’s pecan trees and poultry, he said, and he’s appreciative that federal officials will be on the ground in the state to view the damage in person.

“I think the cotton crop will be almost a complete loss,” Kemp said. “A lot of the pecan crop will be a complete loss, or at least a complete loss for the affected counties,”

Addressing fuel concerns

A lot of people in rural areas are running generators to power medical facilities, homes and other buildings, Kemp said.

This led Kemp to work with members of the General Assembly to suspend the gas tax in the state.

“It’ll take a little while for that to get baked into the pricing,” Kemp said. “But eventually we’ll save Georgians up to 32 cents a gallon for regular gasoline and 36 cents a gallon for diesel fuel.”

Along with working to bring the cost of fuel down, Kemp worked with the Department of Revenue to waive the penalties for using off-road fuel.

“We started getting reports when we were on the ground about how there’s plenty of fuel out there,” he said. “But the problem is getting the fuel out of the tanks into vehicles or into storage containers because of the power situation.”

People are now able to use off-road diesel on the road, Kemp said.

Hundreds of thousands still without power

There were still 270,000 customers suffering power outages Thursday, Kemp said. That was well down from the peak of 1.3 million.

Georgia Power estimates they have about 200,000 customers without power, Kemp said, and they’ve restored power to about 1.14 million customers, or 85%.

The storm had far more significant impacts for Georgia Power than any prior weather event. The utility company’s previous worst experience required 1,700 poles that needed to be replaced. Thursday, there were more than 8,000 poles to be replaced and over 21,000 spans of wire. Over 1,500 transformers were damaged and more than 3,200 trees needed to cleared from power lines, Kemp said.

Some of these were over swamps, he said, and crews are using helicopters to remove trees from transmission lines.

Georgia Power has over 20,000 personnel working to get the power back on, officials said.

Several electric member cooperatives have to completely rebuild their network because the damage was so bad, Kemp said.

The governor warned people using generators to place them a safe distance from homes after three people died in Chatham County because of carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator.

“This is a significantly larger power outage storm than we’ve ever dealt with in the history of our state,” Kemp said.