Devastating storm destroyed entire communities with winds and flooding as the south-east begins to recover
As the south-east US continues recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene’s devastation, the storm’s death toll keeps climbing, with at least 90 killed across several states.
More than 1 million Americans are also still without power in the Carolinas and Georgia.
Helene made landfall last Thursday night in Florida’s Big Bend region as a category 4 hurricane. And even though it weakened to a tropical storm before moving through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, the storm’s winds, rainfall, storm surge and flooding destroyed entire communities in its path.
As of Monday morning, the Associated Press was reporting that at least 90 people had been killed across several states as a result of the storm. Thirty of those deaths were being reported from the city of Asheville, in western North Carolina, which was left isolated on Saturday by damaged roads and a lack of power and phone service amid a deluge inflicted by Helene.
Officials in Buncombe county – which includes Asheville – also said over the weekend that they had received about 600 missing persons reports through an online form. Rescue missions remained ongoing there on Monday.
On Sunday, North Carolina’s department of public safety said that supplies such as food, water and other needs were arriving in Asheville. The state’s national guard was airlifting supplies into counties across western North Carolina, too, officials said.
“This is an unprecedented tragedy that requires an unprecedented response,” Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s governor, said.
Over the weekend, more than 500 national guard soldiers helped conduct more than 100 rescue operations in western North Carolina, officials there said. At least 119 North Carolina residents and their pets were rescued.
Cooper has said that the death toll in North Carolina toll may rise as rescuers and other emergency workers reach other isolated and devastated areas.
