Columbus didn’t take direct hit from Helene, but some residents still dealing with damage

Hurricane Helene made its way through the state of Georgia throughout Thursday and into Friday morning. While the storm shifted and moved east of the local area, Columbus wasn’t fully unharmed by the effects of the storm.

A part of Sherri Priest’s house and a good portion of her yard on Forestside Drive are covered by a giant oak tree that fell Thursday night. Priest said she wasn’t home when the tree fell on her house, but her dogs were.

One of her dogs was in the kennel where the tree fell on the roof. Thankfully, the dog is alright, she said..

Priest said the experience has been “devastating.”

“The whole inside of my house is flooded,” Priest told the Ledger-Enquirer.

Priest said her homeowners insurance dropped her a few months ago because of low-lying limbs over her house. Those limbs were on the tree that fell.

“We had somebody planned to come out to cut it, but they had gotten too busy, and then this happened,” Priest said.

At the time she was interviewed, Priest’s dad and uncle were there with a chainsaw starting to clear parts of the tree.

‘I was kinda scared’

Around midnight, another tree had fallen over a roadway one block away on Berkley Avenue andtook down some power lines.

Paul Lewis said there was a medium-hard rain when he heard the sound of crashing and told his wife, “I think a limb fell or something.”

The limb actually was a tree which fell from the front yard of a house on the other side of the street, over Berkley Avenue and into Lewis’ yard.

“I was kinda scared because a friend of mine had been parking his car in front of my house, and it was raining too hard for me to go out there and look at it,” Lewis said.

When he was able to go out and look, his friend’s car wasn’t there.

Lewis said, at the time of the interview, he had been without power since the tree fell.

As of 12:46 p.m Friday, the Georgia Power Outage map shows 11 outages in the Columbus area affecting 118 customers.

This story was originally published September 27, 2024 at 1:18 PM.