Lindsey Graham calls on Congress to reconvene, pass storm relief

Pallets of water are unloaded at the Aiken County government building parking lot on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, where Red Cross volunteers and National Guard troops were staged (Abraham Kenmore/SC Daily Gazette)

AIKEN — Congress needs to come back into session and pass a hefty relief package in the wake of one of the deadliest hurricanes on record, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said Thursday in a South Carolina county hit hard by Helene as it blew through as a tropical storm.

He floated a figure of $150 billion without any details, noting the full scope of the needs are still unknown.

“I think $150 billion is probably going to be needed, and President (Joe) Biden sort of agreed with that,” said South Carolina’s senior GOP senator.

One thing is clear, he said: The damage is extensive, and residents can’t wait.

“Aiken County needs more and it needs it now,” Graham said, speaking at the county government building after receiving a briefing from local officials. “This is a disaster of monumental proportions, we need to be back in Congress in my opinion to pass a supplemental bill.”

Congress is currently out of session after voting Sept. 25 for a stop-gap measure to fund the government through Dec. 20, narrowly avoiding a shutdown. They are not scheduled to return until a lame-duck session starting Nov. 12, following the election.

Of the 41 deaths in South Carolina attributed to Helene, six were in Aiken County. The storm’s death toll across six states tops 200.

Graham’s visit to Aiken County came a day after he and other South Carolina officials, including Gov. Henry McMaster, met with Biden in Greenville as part of the president’s trip to see the damage in the Upstate and western North Carolina by helicopter.

Traveling with the president on the Air Force One flight to Greenville, Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters the $20 billion for disaster relief in the stopgap bill won’t get the Federal Emergency Management Agency through hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30.

Asked about the lack of FEMA funding on Thursday, Graham again said Congress needed to return to work and pass a full spending bill.

Once the needs are assessed, Congress needs to return and fund them, he said: “Get on with it.”

Graham also called again for Biden to pause a dockworker strike that shut down ports from Maine to Texas, including the Port of Charleston. Thursday represented day three of the strike.

Biden can use emergency powers under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act to get a court injunction to suspend the strike, something he has so far declined to do.

“(Biden) described the problem. I’m looking for an answer,” Graham said, when asked about the president’s response to his request. “I don’t begrudge people for trying to get a better deal.”

But, he said, without the ports open, necessary supplies will start running short.

Graham said no one from FEMA had been to Aiken yet, something he said would change by Friday morning. In a release later that afternoon, he said FEMA confirmed people would arrive no later than Friday. But he also cautioned against criticizing any agencies, given the scope of the problem.

Graham was joined by a number of local elected officials, including state Sen. Tom Young, R-Aiken, who gave a sense of the scale of the storm damage. The county government building where the press conference was held saw winds up to 77 mph, Young said.

About 2,000 power poles were broken by the storm in Aiken County, Young said.

As of Thursday evening, nearly 40,000 customers in Aiken County remained without power, according to PowerOutage.US. Power won’t be mostly restored until late next week.

“This is unprecedented in Aiken County history,” Young said.

Storm damage visible a week on

The damage was clear in Aiken County, where power lines still dangle.

Bill Goetz came from Lexington, Kentucky, as a Red Cross volunteer. On Thursday afternoon, he was in the parking lot of the Aiken County office, where the Red Cross and National Guard were unloading pallets of water.

Mostly the Red Cross has been distributing food and water so far, Goetz said.

“The cleanup really hasn’t started yet, especially because the power isn’t on,” he said.

Goetz said that the local community has been pitching in to help, and some Red Cross volunteers traveled from as far away as California.

“Since Saturday it’s been boots on the ground, and we’ve been delivering,” he said.

Ken Padgett was moving branches from a downed tree on Chesterfield Street North in Aiken on Thursday. A large tree in the median of the road split on Friday morning, blocking off the street and crushing two cars Padgett had parked in the yard.

A crew cleared the portion of the tree that had been blocking traffic, and Padgett said he got power back Sunday, but the uppermost part of the tree trunk still lay on his cars. Padgett said he hoped someone – FEMA or the city – would help clean up that part as well, especially as the tree belonged to the city.

In 50 years living in the area, Padgett said he had never seen anything like it, even living through the February 2014 ice storm that left almost 350,000 homes without power.

“When the ice storm hit in ’14, you know it was pretty bad, power lines down, trees snapping,” he said. “But it wasn’t crazy like this.”

At Hopeland Gardens, a popular public park, crews worked on a tree that had toppled a portion of brick wall and power lines.

Grif Lee, a manager with Collins Tree & Stump Service out of Aiken overseeing the work at Hopeland, thinks his company will be cleaning up the aftermath of the storm for years.

“This is ten times, exponential, to the ice storm” of 2014, he said.

Contracting with the city, his crew of 21 cleared multiple roads within the first day of the storm. Then they prioritized clearing homes for vulnerable residents.

The city provided gas for the chainsaws and Lee had access to diesel. The biggest challenge has been finding bottled water, he said. Some of his employees are sleeping on air mattresses in the office to get power and air conditioning.

“Everybody’s tired,” Lee said. “Pretty much every employee I have started cutting at 5 o’clock on Friday morning to try to get to here, like cutting out of their own houses.”

He hopes residents will be patient, and not try to tackle dangerous trees on their own.

“Don’t risk anything,” he said. “Trees are so unstable right now.”