Augusta National back in heart of city after Hurricane Helene horror

National Club played its part in the community's recovery from a storm that claimed more than 30 lives

- Andy Bull

Hurricane Helene made landfall in the early hours of Friday, 27 September, in Big Bend, Florida. Meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center had been watching it building for a week, as it moved away from Nicaragua, up past Grand Cayman, Cancun, and Cuba, and the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, had declared a state of emergency on the Tuesday afternoon.

"The current forecast for Hurricane Helene suggests this storm will impact every part of our state," Kemp said, but in Augusta, over in the east of the state, people felt safe; they had not had a hurricane here in almost 100 years, and this one was forecast to pass it by.

Until it took a turn north-northeast, and started to accelerate. It hit the city at a hundred miles an hour; the anemometers at Augusta airport stopped working at 82mph, right around the time the power went down. "Augusta ended up sitting under the absolute worst part of the storm," reported the National Weather Service. It was not just the wind – more than 12 inches of rain, an entire winter's worth, fell in the space of a few hours. People talk about how the pop-and-flash of the power lines going down lit up the sky.