They lived through deadly Helene. Now families across western SC seek to rebuild, help others.

The Spartanburg home of Michael and Ellen Strickland filled with 3 feet of floodwater from nearby Lawson's Fork Creek during Tropical Storm Helene on Sept. 27, 2024. (Provided by the Strickland family)

The unholy crash was unlike anything Danielle Culbertson had ever heard. She and her husband shot up in bed as their home in Greenwood rumbled and shook.

They clamored over each other in the pitch-black room, fighting against the bedroom door that was jammed tight and eventually breaking the frame to get through to their 4-year-old daughter, Haley, sleeping down the hall.

Upon reaching her room, they saw her sitting up in bed covered in black soot and debris from the ceiling. Gallons of heavy rain poured down through the hole that had been opened in the roof by a 100-foot-tall, more than 120-year-old oak that fell on the home, just feet from where their daughter had been sleeping.

It was 5:51 a.m. on Sept. 27.

Tropical Storm Helene had arrived, battering South Carolina with drenching rains and 75 mph winds that snapped power lines and toppled trees, including the one that had just split open the roof of the Culbertson’s home.

Federal disaster dollars are now available to help residents in 26 of South Carolina’s 46 counties — with the addition Wednesday of Chester, Kershaw and Orangeburg counties. But the aftershocks are far from over as residents seek to rebuild lives uprooted like the trees in the storm.

Helene will be a bellwether — a storm that those in the hardest hit areas of the Upstate and along the Georgia border will compare future natural disasters.

When Justin Culbertson saw his frightened child, he clawed his way through the carnage of his home to get her, practically throwing her to her mother as the family dashed to the porch.

They dialed and redialed 911, but no answer ever came. Neighbors and Danielle Culbertson’s father arrived to help. Seeing the damage, he told the family they all needed to leave immediately.

As they pulled out of the neighborhood, a second oak tree crashed down behind them, blocking the only remaining way in and out. They had to drive over live power lines to get to her father’s house to ride out the rest of the storm.

When they got there, Haley refused to speak for hours. She sat there and shook.

“She’s traumatized,” Danielle Culbertson said of her daughter.

‘We had to leave’

Some 50 miles to the north, in Spartanburg, Ellen Strickland woke up around 3 a.m. on Sept. 27 to soothe her crying 1-year-old daughter. Peeking out the window, she noticed water pooling in the driveway of her family’s home in the Converse Heights neighborhood. It was nothing unusual for a heavy rain.

But by 7 a.m., it would be a different story.

She and her husband, Michael, scrambled eggs for the family breakfast, nervously watching as the rain fell harder, the wind grew stronger, and the water crept closer to their home. Then a large oak tree fell in the backyard, landing on their shed.

“That’s when we decided we had to leave,” Michael Strickland said.

The couple quickly packed clothing and diapers, whatever they could fit into a couple backpacks. To Ellen Strickland it was like the twister scene from The Wizard of Oz, when Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are running about frantically, calling for Dorothy and Toto before rushing into the storm cellar.

“It felt very much like this panic of: Do we have everything? Where is everybody? Get out the door,” Ellen Strickland said. “And then to get into the water, it felt like a movie or something that you read or hear about. But it was happening to us.”

Ellen Strickland had 1-year-old Ryan strapped to her front. Michael carried their 3-year-old, Graham, and held on to the family dog, Birdie, as the couple waded through water up to their thighs.

“That wind was whipping, and you could just hear trees creaking and falling all over the place,” Michael Strickland said.

Looking back at the house once more before running to a neighbor’s, the couple wondered when or if they’d ever be back home.

‘Nobody knew it was going to be like that’

Helene made landfall in Florida late Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 140 mph.

As the storm pushed inland, it weakened but was still a Category 1 storm as it moved up through Georgia, tracking slightly more to the East than anticipated, taking by surprise many on South Carolina’s western edge unaccustomed to the perils of tropical storms.

“There was no warning,” Danielle Culbertson said. “Nobody knew it was going to be like that – a hurricane 200 miles from the coast.”

Before moving to South Carolina, Danielle Culbertson lived in Florida when Hurricane Irma wreaked havoc in 2017. Helene scared her more.

The storm left more than 1.3 million South Carolina power customers in the dark — 330,000 of those for more than a week.

Danielle Culbertson said her husband had family in rural Saluda who were bathing in the creek because they didn’t have electricity to pump water from their well.

Living on a private dirt road where county maintenance crews typically don’t venture, they had to cut their own way out to get food and supplies.

And for the first few days after the storm in Spartanburg, Michael Strickland said people waited in line for three hours to get gas. The few restaurants with power were full and lines stretched around the block for a meal.

The storm and its aftermath ultimately led to the death of 41 people in South Carolina and more than 225 people across the Southeast.

Culbertson is grateful her family is not among the deceased.

“We could have lost our lives,” she said. “But I still have the right to be upset by all the things we lost. I feel like you can be both of those things.”

Some of those losses are irreplaceable — a swing set her stepfather had built for her daughter, the handmade outfit passed down for generations that she brought her daughter home from the hospital in.

The home where she had lived for the past six years will likely be demolished. So far, she said, her landlord has refused to help her relocate and stopped taking her calls.

Growing up with a stepfather in the Army, Danielle Culbertson had to move 14 times. This is the longest she had ever been in one place. It’s where she learned she was pregnant, where she brought her daughter home from the hospital, where her husband proposed, where her daughter took her first steps.

“It meant a lot to me; I lived many lives in that house,” she said.

Planted roots

Despite all the loss, Danielle Culbertson said she’s grateful for the kindness of strangers. The recreation department from her husband’s home town of Saluda brought them money, food and clothing. A woman in Irmo gave her daughter a handmade dollhouse to replace the one they lost in the storm.

She has driven back to the Greenwood house a few times to salvage what she could — her daughter’s asthma medicine, clothing, important documents, her grandparents’ wedding album.

With each trip, she also brings supplies for neighbors still there.

“Yes, I lost everything, but I want to help other people who are still struggling,” she said.

In the Stickland’s Spartanburg neighborhood, the community also banded together, cooking out meals as they dragged away branches, sawed away trees and pulled up flood-soaked wall boards and floors from seven flooded homes as they waited for power to be restored more than a week after the storm.

“Since moving there, our street has become like our family, especially this week,” Michael Strickland said. “It has really solidified the fact that we’re in the right place. We planted our roots here, and really have no intention on leaving.”

The Stricklands came to Spartanburg from Georgia in 2020 for work. They had toured more than a dozen homes before driving into the Converse Heights neighborhood.

“We saw a dozen people walking their dogs, pushing strollers, on a run, cutting the grass,” Michael Strickland said. “It was like, ‘This is an awesome neighborhood. There’s such an active community.’”

Then, they came to the brick ranch house tucked away at the end of the cul de sac built in 1956, with the hardwood floors and the wooded green space set aside to be permanently preserved behind it.

After the rain stopped but while flood waters were still high, Michael Strickland and a few neighbors put on waders and walked down to the couple’s beloved home to survey the damage.

He expected maybe a couple inches. What he found was 3 feet of water throughout the home. Once the water receded, it left behind a layer of mud.

The couple started asking themselves whether the house was salvageable. Would they have to bulldoze? Though it sits near Lawson’s Fork Creek, the home had never flooded before. They didn’t have flood insurance. Would they have to move?

Some 30 members from the couple’s church came to pitch in. A neighbor who is a student at Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine also called in 30 classmates to help.

Bolstered by the support of strangers as well as friends, they will rebuild.

As of Wednesday , the Federal Emergency Management Agency had approved $77 million in federal aid for almost 97,000 people in South Carolina to pay for costs not covered by insurance.

All but $2 million of that so far has gone to pay for more immediate personal needs : Replacing medications that may have been lost or gone bad when people lost power, buying water and food, reimbursing for the cost of chainsaws and generators, covering the cost of medical care from storm-related injuries or child care while parents were busy with storm cleanup.

As the rebuilding process continues, those numbers will grow.

Reaching across state lines

Even while South Carolinians were making their own recovery, many have looked beyond the state line to western North Carolina where the storm and floodwaters ravaged the city of Asheville and a multitude of tiny mountain towns.

Pilots began flying in to help out with search and rescue, using small planes and helicopters to get into towns cut off from civilization by floods and washed-out roads.

At first, Gary Venesky offered a place for pilots to stop at his Easley farm before they headed into North Carolina. As a hobby helicopter pilot, he had extra fuel, which he offered to pilots he knew flying up from Florida.

Then, the Sunday after the storm, he got a call from a friend of a friend saying they knew someone trapped in the mountains about 30 miles north of Asheville. So, Venesky found a copilot and went to the spot near Mount Mitchell, he said.

He flew out the friend, his wife, their daughter, and their dog, Venesky said.

While he was there, he talked to other people in town. Most didn’t want to leave their homes, but they didn’t have cell service to reach friends and family.

So, Venesky wrote down about 10 names and phone numbers. He called around to let people know their loved ones were OK, he said.

“All the roads were washed out,” Venesky said. “There was no communication. They couldn’t contact anybody, and most of them had animals there and couldn’t really leave because they had to feed the animals.”

He went back for more — rescuing a couple more people from Black Mountain, checking on the home of someone who had evacuated and flying over the devastation for hours in search of any stragglers in need of aid.

“That’s the hard part,” he said about the search for those who might still be missing.