A year after Hurricane Helene dumped catastrophic rainfall across the mountains of northeast Georgia, the cleanup is far from over.
The storm made landfall in Florida on September 26, 2024, and swept north into Georgia overnight. By the morning of September 27, it had triggered record flooding across Rabun, Habersham, Stephens, Wilkes, Hart, and Franklin counties, washing out roads, bridges, and entire neighborhoods. Helene is now the deadliest hurricane to hit Georgia since 1898.
The anniversary week brings two reminders of how much work remains. On Tuesday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency added Stephens and Wilkes counties to its Individual Assistance declaration, giving residents there access to the same recovery grants already available to neighbors in Rabun and Habersham. And on Friday, the Georgia Emergency Management Agency released an updated damage estimate that puts the storm’s agricultural and infrastructure losses in Georgia at $5.5 billion.
“We are not out of the woods, and we are not going to pretend we are. There are still private roads that people cannot drive down. There are still bridges that have not been replaced. There are still families living in travel trailers.”
— Chris Stallings, director, Georgia Emergency Management Agency
What’s been repaired
The state and federal response since October 2024 has, by most measures, been large and fast:
- More than $2.9 billion in FEMA assistance has been delivered to survivors across Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, and Tennessee
- More than $4.4 billion in federal recovery funding has been directed to the broader Southeast since January
- Millions of cubic yards of debris have been removed from public rights-of-way
In Georgia specifically, all primary state routes damaged by Helene have been reopened, and the U.S. Forest Service has restored vehicle access to most of the Chattahoochee National Forest, which lost more than 1,000 miles of road to the storm.
What’s still broken
What remains is concentrated in three places:
- Private roads. The Bridging Together initiative, led by Mennonite Disaster Service and Lutheran Disaster Response, has been restoring damaged private roads and bridges. As of this week, the program has repaired fewer than 200 of the more than 800 private roads identified as damaged in the immediate aftermath. Rural landowners say the gap has left many families effectively stranded.
- Public water systems. Several small-town water systems damaged by the storm — including the Tiger water system in Rabun County — are still operating under boil-water advisories more than a year later.
- Housing. FEMA has approved roughly 3,400 temporary housing units across the affected counties. About 12% of those households are still living in those units, more than 12 months after the storm.
The economic picture
The agricultural damage has been particularly severe. Georgia’s pecan, poultry, and timber industries each lost more than $1 billion in the storm and its aftermath. The Georgia Forestry Commission estimates that Helene damaged or destroyed roughly 2.4 million acres of working forest — about 7% of the state’s timberland.
Federal crop-insurance payments and disaster-relief loans have covered the bulk of the immediate losses, but the longer-term effect on farm and timber-land owner balance sheets is still being calculated.
What’s coming next
GEMA and FEMA officials say the next 12 months will focus on three priorities: finishing private-road repairs, replacing damaged public water infrastructure, and transitioning the remaining households out of temporary housing.
A formal long-term recovery office, jointly funded by the state and the federal government, is expected to open in Clarkesville in early 2026 and will serve as the central coordination point for the remaining work.
Tom Whitaker leads WACN 21’s weather desk and covers climate and disaster recovery. Reach him at twhitaker@wacn21.com.
