A pair of beds at Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (Skylar Laird/SC Daily Gazette)
GREENVILLE — After Hurricane Helene tore through South Carolina, killing 39 people across the state, the state opened eight shelters with enough space for 200 people with medical needs that require electricity or round-the-clock care but not hospitalization.
They included people who couldn’t recharge the oxygen tanks they need to keep breathing. The state’s Department of Public Health didn’t have portable oxygen canisters available to hand out until Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, about half of the agency’s supply was gone.
Also on Wednesday, President Joe Biden visited the Upstate as well as North Carolina to see the storm’s damage and meet with officials. South Carolina officials asked Biden to declare an energy emergency in the state, which would give the federal Department of Energy the authority to reroute power as needed, they said.
Gov. Henry McMaster and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham also asked Biden to step in to end the union dockworkers’ strike, which shut down ports all along the Gulf of Mexico and East Coast, including in Charleston. A prolonged strike, in combination with the storm, could destroy the state’s economy and delay the delivery of essential medical supplies, they said.
“If you have this port and other ports on the coast shut down in this critical time, it will be a calamity,” Graham said.
When officials, including McMaster, toured the Bon Secours Wellness Arena — an event venue turned into a medical shelter — on Wednesday, around two dozen patients were sitting in chairs and lying in hospital beds. That’s about half of what the arena housed at its peak after the storm blew through Friday morning, said Edward Simmer, director of the state Department of Public Health.
The dwindling number follows fewer people being without power, which is a major reason people have come to the shelters.
By Wednesday evening, about 454,000 homes and businesses remained without power — the vast majority in the Upstate and along the Georgia border. While some may still not get power back until early next week, that number was a big drop from the 1.3 million customers without electricity at the height of outages.
Officials urge residents to be cautious as they clean up. The 39 deaths attributed to Helene exceed the 35 killed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989.
Unlike in North Carolina, where people are still missing, South Carolina’s death toll continues to rise largely because of post-storm accidents, such as people using chainsaws incorrectly, running generators inside their houses or starting fires with candles used for light, McMaster said.
“We’ve had enough tragedy. We don’t need any more deaths,” he said. “So, we would ask people to be very, very careful.”
Medical concerns
For people with medical needs, long periods without power can be devastating, officials said. Oxygen tanks can’t refill. Electric wheelchairs can’t recharge. CPAP machines that that keep people breathing as they sleep can’t function.
At the events arena in Greenville, hospital beds and chairs lined the outer walls, where people once found their seats or bought food and drinks. Instead of crowds of fans, medical professionals pushed people in wheelchairs and moved beds.
“We never want to lose someone because they couldn’t get their medical care or the medical supplies that they needed,” Simmer said.
On Tuesday, his agency began handing out portable oxygen tanks at three locations so people who use canned oxygen to breathe could stay at home despite having no power. Other than the Greenville arena, distribution sites were set up in Anderson and Aiken counties.
Around 700 tanks, half of the newly purchased supply, were still available as of 2 p.m. Wednesday, said an agency spokesman.
The department purchased most of the tanks through state vendors, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered some, said public health spokesman Casey White. Outside the Bon Secours Arena, oxygen tanks sat waiting along with boxes of wheelchairs and dollies to transport canisters.
Arena officials are lending the space, which is still set up for ice hockey in the actual stadium section, to state officials for no charge. To check into a medical needs center, a person first has to call and answer a set of questions to ensure they need around-the-clock medical care and can’t go instead to another shelter.
When a person checks out, they receive a bag full of things they might need in the coming days, such as adult diapers, sodas, water, chips, instant noodles and hand sanitizer. For the people still staying there, the health department is prepared to keep the shelter open.
“We will be here as long as they need us,” Simmer said.
In Easley, a city of 25,000 a few miles from Greenville, state Rep. Neal Collins started getting texts and calls from people who needed power to refill their oxygen canisters and other medical devices not long after the storm hit, he said.
“I wish I had access to tanks Sunday,” the Easley Republican said Wednesday.
Instead, he started asking people to loan spare generators to those who needed them most. By Wednesday, he had helped get generators to 11 people with medical concerns. Tuesday was the first time since the weekend he hadn’t received any texts asking for help, he said.
Dan Bracken, an Easley realtor, bought six generators over the weekend. Since then, he has handed them all out to people who need them. His only stipulation is that he asks people to return the generators once they’re done so he can repackage them and donate them to groups on the ground in western North Carolina, where Helene wiped entire towns off the map.
“This is what we thought we could do to contribute,” Bracken said. “Other people are out there that have been working 18, 20- hours days and doing way more than I am, but this is the small way that we can help out.”
His first generator over the weekend went to a client who used an oxygen canister. Bracken heard a neighbor had been coming over to help, but without power, she was running out of air, he said.
“When I got to her house, (the neighbor’s) eyes teared up,” Bracken said.
Another went to a fellow realtor’s elderly mother-in-law, who was using her car for electricity and air conditioning. One went to a woman who needed a CPAP machine to sleep. Bracken has made sure to only donate generators to people who are elderly, making them extra susceptible to health problems from heat, or people with medical needs that require power, he said.
“It’s frightening to me, because what I’ve picked up on from that older generation is that they’re tough, and a lot of them won’t ask for help,” Bracken said.
Those who can drive have relied on the local YMCA to plug in their devices, said Sid Collins, who runs the branches in Easley, Picks and Powdersville. Monday, he opened the doors of the Easley location, which never lost power, to anyone in the community who needed air conditioning or electricity.
On Tuesday, nearly 1,200 people came in, which is double what the gym sees on a typical Tuesday, he said. Most of those people needed somewhere to work where they could charge their phones and laptops. A few plugged in motorized wheelchairs.
“I think every outlet in the building was pulling power on something,” Collins said.