By Jacey Fortin
Rescuers fanned out across the North Carolina mountains Tuesday, scouring the region for missing people and rushing supplies to the many communities still in dire need of food, water and power after Hurricane Helene.
“The challenges are immense,” Gov. Roy Cooper said at a news conference Tuesday, adding that 92 search-and-rescue teams were working across the state.
More than 130 people across six states died as a result of the storm, and the toll was expected to rise. Almost a third of those killed were in the county surrounding Asheville, North Carolina, where an unknown number of people were still unaccounted for Tuesday.
The military has joined the relief and rescue efforts. Maj. Gen. Todd Hunt, the head of the North Carolina National Guard, said 800 soldiers were on duty as of Tuesday morning, pushing into more cutoff parts of the state. “By this afternoon,” he said, “we should have guardsmen in every affected county.”
Rescue efforts across southern Appalachia were complicated by the many roads that had, until recently, served as lifelines for small mountain towns. Hundreds of roads were flooded, destroyed or blocked by debris. In some parts of the Carolinas, power remained scarce after flooding from the storm submerged electrical substations, and cellphone service was spotty or nonexistent in many places.
The scope of the damage left state and federal politicians reaching for superlatives Monday. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said the storm was “unprecedented.” Cooper described the destruction in North Carolina as “beyond belief.” Vice President Kamala Harris called the damage “heartbreaking,” and President Joe Biden said the hurricane was “history-making.”
Biden has promised long-term aid, and the White House announced that he would visit North Carolina and South Carolina on Wednesday. He also said he planned to visit Florida and Georgia as soon as possible.
Helene made landfall in northwestern Florida on Thursday as a Category 4 storm, with winds of 140 mph. It caused record-breaking storm surges in the Tampa Bay region of Florida, flash flooding in Atlanta and power outages as far north as Cincinnati.
Across the South, strong winds toppled trees. Tornadoes destroyed homes. Flash floods overwhelmed entire neighborhoods, and landslides destroyed public infrastructure, including for drinking water, which remains a key concern for emergency workers.
Water systems in the rapidly growing city of Asheville were badly damaged, and officials said that restoring the full system could take weeks. Officials were working to truck in drinkable water for the city’s 94,000 residents.
“This crisis will likely be a sustained crisis, because of water system issues,” Cooper said Tuesday.
The Gilded Age-era Biltmore Estate in Asheville, one of the region’s best-known landmarks and tourist attractions, was closed indefinitely to assess property damage, its owners said Monday. But commercial air travel had resumed at the Asheville Regional Airport as of Tuesday morning, though there were still some cancellations.
For days, unreliable power and phone service have posed major problems, making it hard for officials to know the extent of the damage in some hard-to-reach spots. More than 1.5 million electricity customers from Florida to West Virginia were still without power Tuesday, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.
More than 2,000 people were staying in shelters in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee on Tuesday morning, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with nearly half of those in North Carolina.
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