By Rich McKay and Andrew Hay
ATLANTA (Reuters) -Helene roared through Florida and Georgia under darkness on Friday as one of the most powerful storms to hit the U.S., killing at least four people, swamping neighborhoods and leaving more than 3 million homes and businesses without power.
The Category 4 storm hit Florida’s Big Bend region at 11:10 p.m. ET (0310 Friday GMT), leaving a chaotic landscape of overturned boats in harbors, felled trees, stranded cars and flooded streets.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis confirmed the death of a driver whose car was struck by debris and warned the death toll was likely to rise. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said on X that two people in Wheeler County had died after a tornado touched down during the storm, and an ABC News affiliate reported that a firefighter was killed when a tree fell on his vehicle in Blackshear, Georgia.
More than four million homes and businesses in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and other U.S. Southeast states were without power, according to the tracking website Poweroutage.us. Police and firefighters carried out hundreds of water rescues throughout the states, including as far north as Atlanta, where an apartment complex had to be evacuated due to flooding.
Helene, which whipped Florida with 140 mph (225 kph) winds when it came ashore, weakened to a tropical storm as it moved into Georgia early on Friday. The still-powerful storm was packing sustained maximum winds of 70 mph (113 kph) as of 5 a.m. and was forecast to continue shuffling northward toward the Tennessee Valley.
Life-threatening storm surges, winds and heavy rains continued, the NHC said. The National Weather Service issued flash flood warnings for several counties in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina on Friday morning.
“This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW!” the service said.
The extent of the damage in Florida was starting to emerge after daybreak.
In coastal Steinhatchee, a storm surge – the wall of seawater pushed ashore by winds – of eight to 10 feet (2.4-3 meters) moved mobile homes, the NWS said on X.
The city of Tampa posted on X that emergency personnel had completed 78 water rescues of residents and that many roads were impassable because of flood waters. The Pasco County sheriff’s office rescued more than 65 people overnight.
The U.S. Coast Guard said one of its helicopter crews saved a man and his dog from the ocean on Thursday after his sailboat became disabled off Sanibel Island.
Officials had pleaded with residents in Helene’s path to heed evacuation orders, describing the the storm surge was “unsurvivable,” as NHC director Michaen Brennan warned.
In Taylor County, the Sheriff’s Department wrote on social media that residents who decided not to evacuate should write their names and dates of birth on their arms in permanent ink “so that you can be identified and family notified.”
Some residents were staying stubbornly put.
“We’re under orders, but I’m going to stay right here at the house,” state ferry boat operator Ken Wood, 58, told Reuters before the storm from coastal Dunedin in Florida, where he planned to ride out the storm with his 16-year-old cat Andy.
Helene was unusually large for a Gulf hurricane, forecasters said, though a storm’s size is not the same as its strength, which is based on maximum sustained wind speeds.
A few hours before landfall, Helene’s tropical-storm winds extended outward 310 miles, according to the National Hurricane Center. By comparison, Idalia, another major hurricane that struck Florida’s Big Bend region last year, had tropical-storm winds extending 160 miles about eight hours before it made landfall.
Airports in Tampa, Tallahassee and St. Petersburg suspended operations on Thursday and remained closed early on Friday. Hundreds of flights into and out of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta were delayed or cancelled, according to the tracking website FlightAware.com.
Reinsurance broker Gallagher Re said preliminary private insurance losses could reach $3 billion to $6 billion, with additional losses to federal insurance programs approaching a potential $1 billion.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta, Brendan O’Brien in Chicago, Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico, Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado, Swati Verma and Rahul Paswan in Bangalore; Writing by Joseph Ax, Brad Brooks and Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Toby Chopra, Timothy Heritage and Chizu Nomiyama)
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