Help Is On The Way
The sun came up on Friday morning and revealed a land torn asunder. Helene had ripped across the region overnight, rocking homes, blowing off rooftops, smashing windows, toppling trees and destroying the power grid like a wrecking ball smashing through brick walls.
Safe and sound in Northwest Georgia, I saw the devastation on the news. My calls weren’t connecting. I pulled up the outage map on Canoochee EMC’s website and gasped at the numbers and shaded regions on the graphic. I worried about my mother, my people, and my friends living in Toombs, Tattnall, Montgomery Counties and beyond. I finally reached my cousin, Renee Lively.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” Renee texted back. A few minutes later, she drove across the Ohoopee bridge to my mother’s home to make sure Mom was okay. She texted me, “Aunt Wanda is fine,” bringing my siblings and me a swell of relief and gratitude. Renee was not the only one who continued from page
checked in on Mom that day. Daniel, a neighbor across the highway, had walked over in the first few minutes of daylight. Wayne Hall made his way over there, too, that morning. This checking in on one another is the way of my people — neighbors, friends, family members and loved ones rushing over to help because they care.
Again, here in the high country of the Peach State, the storm spared us, though flooding prevented me from leaving my home for a few hours on Friday. On Saturday, as I drove southward to Atlanta, I saw a beautiful sight. Dozens, if not hundreds, of power utility trucks streamed down the interstate heading south in a convoy. The trucks from several different states brought tears to my eyes — that in this day and age, as the majority of people and lawmakers can’t seem to work together and get anything done, that power companies and line workers are a different breed that work together for the greater good, all year long. It’s what they do.
These teams carry specialized equipment to weather-ravaged regions, but they also take the expertise and grit needed to face down damaged infrastructure and unpredictable conditions. These teams roll toward the devastation.
I have interviewed linemen before.
“During outages, a lot of people don’t understand that there is a protocol involved in troubleshooting and repair work,” a lineman told me a few years ago. “No matter how angry or upset a customer is, we have to follow proper safety protocol, because at the end of the day, we do not want to jeopardize anyone’s life.”
“We can’t just ride out somewhere and reconnect a cable,” he added. “We have to ride it out and make sure that it isn’t resting on the ground somewhere before we re-energize the line. We have to put our eyes on it because that’s the safe way to do it. It would be horrible if we simply reconnected a line and a child was down the road touching the line on the ground. Most people don’t think about that, but we do.”
I asked him about how he felt about leaving his family to travel out of town. “When we need them, they come here and help us, and when they need us, we go there and help them,” he told me. “It’s neighbors helping neighbors.”
With thousands of homes without electricity, it will take a long time to restore power to the rural areas of Georgia, and this will be a difficult time for the broken-hearted residents dealing with the trauma of the storm.
“Hang on! The cavalry is coming! Help is on the way!” I whispered to myself on Saturday, as I saw the utility trucks racing down the interstate. I waved at some of the drivers and blew kisses to others, because in my book, they are heroes — superheroes, really. As in other natural disasters, I’m reminded of a quote by Mr. Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” It’s true, there are so many helpers among us, and these helpers — friends, family, neighbors, linemen, food pantry workers, etc. — fill me with such hope for humanity.
