Georgia forestry director says post-Helene recovery will take years; warns of fuel, market and planting bottlenecks

Director Sabo, director of the Georgia Forestry Commission, told the Natural Resources & Environment committee that recovery from Storm Helene will be long-term and complex, requiring years of cleanup, salvage work and replanting while communities remain at elevated fire risk.

"We really are an emergency response organization," Director Sabo said, describing the commission’s workforce and structure. He said the agency has 524 employees, about 400 of whom serve as emergency responders, and that last year the commission conducted "one of our best years ever" for prescribed fire with "a little over a million and a half acres." He said staff deployed to assist other states after major incidents but did not provide a clear, auditable figure for the total number of personnel deployed to other states in the transcript record.

Sabo told members the commission used 2,800 field plots immediately after the storm to map damage across nearly 8.9 million acres, and that teams cleared…