CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) – The United States Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service has approved South Carolina’s Helene relief request to simplify a process for residents of 28 counties.
The Department of Social Services has been cleared to issue automatic replacement benefits to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients in counties where at least half of all households experienced a power outage of four or more hours because of the storm.
This is because many of these households experienced major food loss when refrigerated and frozen goods were unable to be kept at appropriate temperatures during those outages, some of which took days to fix.
Recipients in these counties will receive replacement benefits, 55% of their total benefits for September, on their Electronic Benefits Transfer cards by Tuesday. The department emphasized that calling or visiting nearby DSS officers will not make the process of that automatic benefit transfer go any faster.
The counties that were approved for immediate relief are:
Abbeville
Aiken
Allendale
Anderson
Bamberg
Barnwell Calhoun
Cherokee
Chester
Colleton
Edgefield
Fairfield Greenville
Greenwood
Hampton
Jasper
Laurens
Lexington
McCormick
Newberry
Oconee
Orangeburg
Pickens
Richland
Saluda
Spartanburg
Union
York
The department says automatic replacements were not approved for Marion County because the number of total household power outages as reported by the local electricity providers were not at or above 50%.
While Marion and other counties were not approved for automatic replacement of benefits through the mass federal waiver, DSS did say that SNAP recipients in other counties are still able to apply for individual replacement of their benefits.
Recipients living in the following counties have until Saturday, Oct. 26 to report food loss caused by Helene:
Beaufort
Berkeley
Charleston
Chesterfield
Clarendon
Darlington
Dillon
Dorchester
Florence
Georgetown Horry
Kershaw
Lancaster
Lee
Marion
Marlboro
Sumter
Williamsburg
Those wishing to apply can click here to download DSS Form 1634B, an Affidavit of Loss Due To A Household Misfortune, from the department’s website.
After downloading and completing the application, recipients must provide with it some form of verification to prove that their homes were in an affected area.
Verification can be submitted in any one of the following forms:
Newspaper Article
Letter from the Red Cross or a Food Bank
Website Printout Showing Outage or Loss (Examples: News website or power company notification of account outage)
Letter from a Landlord
Letter from an Insurance Company
Letter from the Electric Company
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28 SC counties to receive auto-replaced SNAP benefits for Helene-caused loss
