Dozens dead, millions without power after Helene hits south-eastern United States

PERRY, Florida: Massive rains from powerful Hurricane Helene left people stranded, without shelter and awaiting rescue on Saturday, as the clean-up began from a tempest that killed at least 64 people, caused widespread destruction across south-eastern US states and left millions without power.

“I’ve never seen so many people homeless as what I have right now,” said Janalea England, of Steinhatchee, Florida, a small river town along the state’s rural Big Bend, as she turned her commercial fish market into a storm donation site for friends and neighbours, many of whom couldn’t get insurance on their homes.

Discarded items from homes that filled with floodwater from Hurricane Helene in St Petersburg, Florida.Credit: AP

Helene blew ashore in the Big Bend region as a category 4 hurricane late on Thursday with wind gusts of up to 225km/h.

From there, it quickly moved through Georgia, where Governor Brian Kemp said on Saturday it “looks like a bomb went off” after viewing splintered homes and debris-covered highways from the air. Weakened, Helene then soaked the Carolinas and Tennessee with torrential rains, sending creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams.

Western North Carolina was isolated because of landslides and flooding that closed the Interstate 40 and other roads. The closures delayed the start of the East Tennessee State University Buccaneers’ football game against The Citadel College in Charleston, South Carolina, because the drive took 16 hours.

Ashlie Salliotte hugs Janet Sams at Sams’ flood-damaged home along River Road in Newport, Tennessee.Credit: AP

There were hundreds of water rescues, none more dramatic than in rural Unicoi County in east Tennessee, where a helicopter plucked dozens of patients and staff from a hospital rooftop on Friday. Rescues continued into the following day in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where part of Asheville was under water.

“To say this caught us off guard would be an understatement,” said Quentin Miller, the county sheriff.

Asheville resident Mario Moraga said it was “heartbreaking” to see the damage in the Biltmore Village area, and neighbours were going house to house to check on each other and give support.

“There’s no cell service here. There’s no electricity,” he said.

Acknowledging there had been deaths in the county, Emergency Services director Van Taylor Jones said he wasn’t ready to report specifics, partially because downed mobile phone towers had hindered efforts to contact next of kin.

A tree rests on an abandoned car on the Interstate 20 in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Credit: AP

Relatives put out desperate pleas for help on Facebook. Among those waiting for news was Francine Cavanaugh, whose sister told her she was going to check on guests at a vacation cabin as the storm began hitting Asheville. Cavanaugh, who lives in Atlanta, hasn’t been able to reach her.

“I think that people are just completely stuck,” she said.

The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, was expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley over the weekend, the National Hurricane Center said.

‘Catastrophic’ flooding

It unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina, where Governor Roy Cooper described it as “catastrophic” as search and rescue teams from 19 states and the federal government came to help. One community, Spruce Pine, was doused with more than 600 millimetres of rain in five days.

And in Atlanta, more than 280 millimetres fell over 48 hours, the most rain the city has seen over two days since record keeping began in 1878.

President Joe Biden said on Saturday that Helene’s devastation had been “overwhelming” and pledged to send help. He also approved a disaster declaration for North Carolina, making federal funding available for affected individuals.

Having killed at least 25 in South Carolina, Helene is the deadliest tropical cyclone for the state since Hurricane Hugo killed 35 people when it came ashore just north of Charleston in 1989. Deaths also have been reported in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

Moody’s Analytics said it expected $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage. AccuWeather’s preliminary estimate of the total damage and economic loss from Helene in the United States is $U95 billion ($137.5 billion) to $US110 billion.

Climate change has exacerbated conditions that allow such storms to thrive, rapidly intensifying in warming waters and turning into powerful cyclones sometimes in a matter of hours.

Evacuations and overtopped dams

Evacuations began before the storm hit and continued as lakes overtopped dams, including one in North Carolina that forms a lake featured in the movie Dirty Dancing. Helicopters were used to rescue some people from flooded homes.

And in Newport, Tennessee, Jonah Wark waited so long to evacuate by car that a boat came to his rescue. “Definitely a scary moment,” Wark said.

After touring the damage by helicopter, a stunned congresswoman Diana Harshbarger said: “Who would have thought a hurricane would do this much damage in East Tennessee?”

Among the 11 confirmed deaths in Florida were nine people who drowned in their homes in a mandatory evacuation area on the Gulf Coast in Pinellas County, where St Petersburg is located, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.

None of the victims were from Taylor County, which is where the storm made landfall. It came ashore near the mouth of the Aucilla River, about 30 kilometres north-west of where Hurricane Idalia hit last year with nearly the same ferocity.

“If you had told me there was going to be storm surge [of four to five metres], even with the best efforts, I would have assumed we would have had multiple fatalities,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said on Saturday.

Taylor County in Big Bend went years without taking a direct hit from a hurricane. But after Idalia and two other storms in a little over a year, the area is beginning to feel like a hurricane superhighway.

“It’s bringing everybody to reality about what this is now with disasters,” said John Berg, 76, a resident of Steinhatchee, a small fishing town and weekend getaway.

Timmy Futch, of Horseshoe Beach, stayed put for the hurricane before driving to high ground when the water reached his house. Many homes in the town, which his grandfather helped found, were reduced to piles of timber.

“We watched our town get tore to pieces,” Futch said.

The aftermath

About 100 kilometres to the north, cars lined up before dawn on Saturday at a free food distribution site in Perry, Florida, amid widespread power outages.

“We’re making it one day at a time,” said Sierra Land, who lost everything in her fridge, as she arrived at the site with her five- and 10-year-old sons and her grandmother.

Thousands of utility crew workers descended upon Florida in advance of the hurricane, and by Saturday power was restored to more than 1.9 million homes and businesses. But hundreds of thousands remained without electricity there and in Georgia.

Chris Stallings, director of the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency, said crews were focused on opening routes to hospitals and making sure supplies could be delivered to damaged communities.

Helene was the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began on June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted an above-average season this year because of record warm ocean temperatures.

AP

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Payne reported from Perry, and Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Missouri. Associated Press journalists Seth Borenstein in New York; Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee; Jeff Amy in Atlanta; Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut; and Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed.