Mayor Garnett Johnson didn’t want to put his troubles in front of people wrestling with despair in his community of Augusta, Georgia. On Friday, he was upbeat as he spoke about shelter availability and repair trucks a week after Hurricane Helene mowed down trees and ripped roofs off of houses, leaving half the city without power. But as he talked about unburying Augusta while helping hand out boxes of grapes and bananas and carrots in a church parking lot to a line of cars stretching a mile and a half, he let something slip.
“We got seven confirmed deaths as a result of Hurricane Helene. I personally was … unfortunately, I had to witness one, but we’re getting through it.”
The night of the hurricane, his cousin Melissa Carter needed help.
“She called me,” Johnson said. “One of the lowest points in all of this was on Friday morning, I was wondering why she called me so frantically. She said: ‘I need you to come to my house. Daverio. I can’t … there’s a tree on him, and I can’t get the tree off.”
Daverio Carter, her husband of 11 years, had been crushed by a tree that fell on their house. Johnson drove there in the storm. “Of course, you know, there’s nothing I could do.”
Carter died in front of them while they waited for help. He was 51, and had five children.
“They were able to recover his body at about 9 o’clock that night,” Johnson said. “They actually had to call in a crane to remove the tree to recover him … You’re looking at her as a mayor. I could do a lot of things. But I couldn’t get a crane to get it off of her husband, and for them to see him actually take his last breath while he’s laying in bed.”
Daverio Carter’s funeral was Saturday. Johnson made that much time to grieve.
“I literally don’t have power in my home. No water,” Johnson said. Debris still blocks his personal vehicles, he said. “On Friday, I had to literally climb old trees and power lines just to get out of the neighborhood to get down to the emergency operations center. So, we have so many dedicated city employees that have been working tirelessly, sometimes 16, 20 hours a day just to try to get this city back running around. I think we’re close.”
Johnson has been burying himself in work while his family buries its dead. He did talk to Kamala Harris about it when she came for an emergency management briefing Tuesday, he said. Harris also spoke to Melissa Carter.
“Mayor, I want to thank you for your leadership, in particular,” the US vice-president said in Augusta on Wednesday during a visit to access damage and console families. “I was just talking with one of the members of the community and her daughter who lost her husband. And there is real pain and trauma that has resulted because of this hurricane and what has happened in terms of the aftermath of it.”
Thanking first responders and local leadership, she said: “The local folks are folks who have personally – and their families have personally – experienced loss and devastation. And yet they leave their home, leave their family to go to centers like where I was earlier to do the work of helping perfect strangers. And it really does highlight the nobility of the kind of work that these public servants have dedicated themselves to, which can be, in moments of crisis like this, so selfless in the way that they do that work.”
Harris pointedly toned down her presence in Augusta, giving little advance notice of her arrival last week. She toured some of the poorest parts of the city, where the downed trees on roofs and in yards from the storm compete with rotten siding and missing windows after decades of decay.
People living in these neighborhoods who turned out for the fresh produce said they understood why Harris would play things quietly, even five weeks before election day. At the time, people were still struggling to find a gas station with the lights on, dodging price gougers selling gas in five-gallon jugs for $40 on the side of the street.
“It shows concern, and shows that she cares,” said Annie Gardner. At 95, she’s the oldest member of Augusta’s Good Samaritan Missionary Baptist church, where people were redistributing food from nearby DeKalb county to local residents. “I’m very impressed already, I was liking her already, and I even like her even more now.”
She’s a skeptic of political theater right now, though. “Trump’s not coming here in this neighborhood. He’s out with the rich white folks. If he does, I’d be really surprised. I don’t think nobody cares if he doesn’t come, either.”
Both Harris and Donald Trump have a delicate dance to perform. Visibility matters.
Michael Thurmond, DeKalb county’s CEO, arranged for the delivery of hundreds of thousands of dollars in produce to Augusta after seeing the reports of devastation in Augusta. “People are looking to see that their leaders are doing something,” he said.
But photo-op politics in a crisis leads to images like Trump tossing paper towels at hurricane victims. The former president and Republican presidential nominee seemed somewhat more aware of that in his appearances in Georgia over the last week.
“If [Trump] brought a thousand trucks like this, he would still not get my vote,” said April Terry, an Augustan waiting for a box of produce Friday morning. “All that is showing that he’s got money, showing that all he wants is your vote.”
Trump spoke to reporters in Evans, Georgia, just north-east of Augusta, on Thursday. There was no attempt to stage a massive rally, though about 100 supporters staked out the road near the venue to wave flags. But he did appear side by side with Governor Brian Kemp, whom the former president has pointedly attacked as unsupportive of his election claims.
On Thursday, Trump said Kemp “is doing a fantastic job”.
Kemp in turn praised the former president for “keeping the national focus on our state as we recover”, then recited the litany of destruction, noting that major Georgia crops had been all but wiped out. The Georgia governor noted that that the federal government is quickly approving his requests for federal disaster declarations, which will help move relief funding and federal reimbursement.
Ahead of those comments, the state insurance commissioner John King took issue with the political implications of Harris’s promise of 100% federal reimbursement. Doing so would require an appropriation that hasn’t yet been made, essentially daring the House speaker Mike Johnson to refuse. “It’s political blackmail,” he said.
Evans, in Columbia county, Georgia, is comparatively affluent. But it also sustained catastrophic damage, and its mostly conservative voters are digging out of much the same hole as everyone else in the region.
“You’ll see, if you go in there, at least our street, all the yards along the road are lined with cut-up logs,” said Gage Gabriel, a 19-year-old Trump supporter watching for the motorcade. Public reaction to the storm could change the way people vote, he said. “Depending on the concern showed from the federal government. If the federal government doesn’t seem to show concern to a large section of the country … it should at least sway some results, depending on how caring politicians seem to the plight of especially North Carolina.”
Gabriel wants to see leaders with a chain saw in their hands cutting down trees. “Not just shaking the hands of people putting up some power lines.”
Jordan Johnson, a Richmond county commissioner, said: “It’s hard to really focus on politics in this very moment, because folks are trying to find power and folks are trying to find food.” But the contrast between the two candidates is stark, he added.
“If you look at where Kamala Harris went, she went to a very hard struck part of town in south Augusta. She went to a shelter. She spoke to people, she gave food. Donald Trump is going to one of the most affluent parts of the [Augusta area]. I don’t know what impact their business will have. I’m not really interested in the campaign aspect. He has no purpose here in Augusta other than as a campaign stop. Kamala Harris came as vice-president of the United States announcing that help and aid is on the way. I mean, it tells you a lot about the two candidates are and what their missions are. He’s here to get votes, and she’s here to help.”
