By Jonathan Allen and Andrew Hay
(Reuters) -North Carolina was a “post-apocalyptic” landscape on Monday in the wake of Helene, with hundreds of people still cut off from communications and unaccounted for amid flooded roads and a lack of basic services.
Officials reported more than 100 deaths across a half-dozen states due the powerful storm that was a major hurricane when it slammed into Florida’s Big Bend region late on Thursday before cutting a destructive path through Georgia and into the Carolinas.
As many as 600 people remained unaccounted for, U.S. Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall said at the White House. Flooded roads and toppled cellphone towers isolated devastated communities.
Officials said the death toll was likely to rise even as they clung to hope that emergency responders would find most of those unaccounted for as they reached more locations and emergency mobile telecommunications assets came online.
Throughout North Carolina, some 300 roads were closed, more than 7,000 people registered for U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance, and the National Guard was flying 1,000 tons of food and water to remote areas by plane and helicopter, officials told the news briefing.
Helene struck Florida’s Gulf Coast on Thursday night as a major Category 4 hurricane, triggering days of driving rain throughout the South and destroying homes that had stood for decades.
The U.S. government, states and localities were engaged in a massive recovery effort. People were stranded without running water and 1.8 million homes and businesses remained without power on Monday, according to the website Poweroutage.us.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said on Monday at least 25 people in his state had died, including a firefighter responding to emergency calls during the storm and a mother and her 1-month-old twins who were killed by a falling tree. South Carolina reported at least 29 dead. CNN put the national death toll at 128, citing state and local officials.
In North Carolina’s mountainous Buncombe County, which includes the tourist destination of Asheville, 35 people have died, the county sheriff said at a news briefing. The county was set to begin distributing food and water later on Monday. Some supplies had to be airlifted to the region because most major routes were blocked by mudslides and flooding.
“They’re running out of gas for ATVs that are helping the rescue, they’re also running out of gas for the chainsaws,” said Colleen Burns, 58, whose house is near Burnsville, in neighboring Yancey County. “We desperately need gas.”
‘WAR OF THE WORLDS’
In Yancey, the storm snapped century-old trees around the home of Taylor Shelton, 44. It took her husband two days with a chainsaw to cut a passage through the felled trees in their driveway and the nearby road so they could drive themselves and their three children out of the darkened house.
With no phone service, they relied on a neighbor who works as an emergency medical technician and had a radio to help them determine which back roads out of the mountains were passable.
“It looks like ‘War of the Worlds.’ Very, very big trees are down everywhere. We saw houses that are just washed away,” Shelton said in a phone interview.
Lake Lure, around 20 miles (30 km) southeast of Asheville, was covered with floating debris from homes and businesses washed away by mountain streams that surround the lake, a video posted on X by Charlotte City Councilman Tariq Bokhari showed.
“It’s hard to describe, never seen anything like this, post-apocalyptic,” Bokhari wrote. “It’s so overwhelming. You don’t even know how to fathom what recovery looks like, let alone where to start.”
North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper took an aerial tour of the damage and said “significant resources” would be needed in the short and long term.
“The devastation was beyond belief, and even when you prepare for something like this, this is something that’s never happened before in western North Carolina. Search and rescue teams are continuing to work,” Cooper told a news briefing.
Some 1,200 FEMA personnel were on the ground in addition to state and local responders, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was planning major debris removal.
In Buncombe County, officials said they are conducting checks of 150 “priority” households that include older residents or those with medical problems.
BIDEN TO VISIT
The National Guard and emergency workers from 19 states have been deployed to help, along with FEMA personnel.
President Joe Biden, attributing the storm’s devastation to climate change, said he would visit North Carolina on Wednesday and Georgia and Florida soon after. He may also ask Congress to return to Washington for a special session to pass supplemental aid funding.
“There’s nothing like wondering, ‘is my husband, wife, son, daughter, mother, father alive?'” Biden said at the White House. “Many more will remain without electricity, water, food and communications, and whose homes and businesses are washed away in an instant. I want them to know we’re not leaving until the job is done.”
Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris cut short a campaign trip in Nevada on Monday to take part in briefings in Washington on the hurricane response and will visit the region when doing so won’t impede response efforts, a White House official said.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump traveled to Valdosta, Georgia, on Monday to visit a furniture store that was heavily damaged in the storm.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York and Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien; Writing by Joseph Ax and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Frank McGurty, Mark Porter and Bill Berkrot)
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