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Helene death toll may rise; ‘catastrophic damage’ slows power restoration: Updates

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Helene death toll may rise; ‘catastrophic damage’ slows power restoration: Updates

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ASHEVILLE, N.C. ‒ Rescue crews across western North Carolina searched Friday for scores of missing people following Helene’s historic deluge that ravaged the Southeast, killing more than 200 people, swallowing whole towns and leaving thousands without power or drinkable water.

The storm washed out hundreds of roads and damaged bridges across the southern Appalachians, leaving residents in already isolated communities stranded amid widespread power outages and communication blackouts. Federal, state and local authorities across the region pushed further into the mountain suburbs, including those surrounding Asheville, clearing roads as food, water and other aid was airdropped to residents in need.

Citizen-led volunteer groups in the mountains of western North Carolina have supplemented officials’ disaster relief operations, delivering aid to stranded communities on-foot and by helicopter and mule trains.

At 226 confirmed fatalities as of Friday, Helene is the fourth-deadliest hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. mainland since 1950. The deadliest is Katrina, which killed 1,392 people in 2005, followed by Audrey in 1957 at a death toll of 416. Third on the list is Hurricane Camille in 1969, a Category 5 storm that made landfall along the Mississippi Coast and claimed 256 lives.

The Asheville Police Department said Friday that 270 of 300 people reported missing have been found alive and well. Police are working on 75 active missing persons cases in the city, with assistance from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

Helene’s death toll surpassed the milestone of 200 on Thursday, according to a USA TODAY analysis. At least seventy-two fatalities were reported in Buncombe County alone, which encompasses Asheville and many surrounding neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, residents throughout the Southeast were grappling with the storm’s immense damage.

Dena Banks, 41, lingered near the steps of her home in Barnardsville, North Carolina, and tried to imagine what it might look like to rebuild.

“We lost everything,” Banks said, standing beside her mud-caked belongings that were scattered across the porch and grassless yard. “The house has got to be knocked down because it was waist deep.”

Flyovers and satellite images: North Carolina, Florida before and after Hurricane Helene

Developments:

∎ North Carolina officials updated the state’s death toll to 115. South Carolina reported 46 deaths. Thirty-three fatalities have been reported in Georgia, 19 in Florida, 11 in Tennessee and 2 in Virginia.

∎ Federal climate records are safe from Helene’s aftermath, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, headquartered in Asheville, N.C., has confirmed that all of its staff has been accounted for, and its data holdings – including its paper and film records – are safe.

∎ More than 720,000 homes and businesses across the Southeast remained without power Friday evening, mostly in Georgia and the Carolinas. Outages from Helene peaked at more than 4.5 million reports last week, according to the USA TODAY outage tracker.

∎ Despite the destruction wrought by Helene in parts of Western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is open with limited closures.

∎ Dolly Parton’s vast charity has arrived to aid Americans impacted by Hurricane Helene. On Friday, the Sevierville, Tennessee, native announced a partnership with Walmart to assist with relief efforts after the storm. Parton announced a $1 million donation to the Mountain Ways Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing immediate assistance to Hurricane Helene flood victims.

One overlooked impact of Helene’s destruction in Western North Carolina stings more than others – literally.

Because of the high winds and catastrophic flooding brought by Helene to the region, hundreds of thousands of yellow jackets find themselves in the same predicament as many of western North Carolina’s human residents. The insects’ homes have been destroyed.

Matt Bertone, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, explained that yellow jackets are social insects that nest in the ground. If they don’t have a home, they’re going to be agitated and aimlessly flying around.

“So, basically, if their nest is destroyed, then they have nowhere to go back to,” Bertone said. “If they’ve escaped, if they haven’t drowned, they’re gonna be out and about, not knowing what to do.”

In addition to the yellow jackets, Bertone said there’s a good chance for an increase in mosquitoes due to the standing water left in Helene’s wake.

“The water is where they breed, and anytime you have lots of standing water you’re gonna have breeding sites for mosquitoes, so there certainly are more puddles and water just in containers and places that have been flooded,” he said.

– Iris Seaton, Asheville Citizen Times

Helene damage estimates heading north of $30 billion

Staggering estimates of economic losses are emerging amid Helene’s wake across the Southeast.

Early wind and storm surge losses are estimated between $30.5 billion and $47.5 billion, stated CoreLogic, a California-based provider of financial and consumer analytics.

That includes wind loss, insured and uninsured storm surge, and inland flood loss for residential and commercial properties across 16 states, the company said Friday. Insured losses are estimated at between $10.5 billion to $17.5 billion.

Damage to homes without flood insurance is to be expected during infrequent intense flood events, said Jon Schneyer, CoreLogic’s director of catastrophe response. Much of Helene’s damage was outside designated special flood hazard areas, so it’s going to be “challenging to realize the full extent of impact to uninsured homeowners.”

In hard-hit Buncombe County, North Carolina, where there were 140,000 housing units before the storm, only 941 flood insurance policies were active in August, said Swiss Re, a global provider of insurance and reinsurance.

Very little of the flood damage caused by Hurricane Helene in the South will be covered by insurance, said Monica Ningen, CEO of U.S. Property & Casualty Reinsurance at Swiss Re. That will “make the task of rebuilding the communities impacted all the more difficult.”

While the number of people and housing units in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina has increased by 10–15% over the past 10 years, Swiss Re said, the number of national flood insurance policies has decreased.

– Dinah Voyles, Pulver, USA TODAY

Forecasters continue to monitor several tropical systems in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

In the Gulf, a developing storm promises to bring heavy, potentially flooding rain to Florida starting Sunday and lasting into much of next week. Meteorologists still aren’t sure yet if the system will become a named tropical storm, or even potentially a low-end hurricane.

Out in the Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Kirk and Tropical Storm Leslie continue to spin far from land.

Large swells from Kirk could bring life-threatening surf to the East Coast of the U.S. by Sunday, the hurricane center said, also potentially threatening oceanfront homes in North Carolina.

The National Weather Service in Newport/Morehead City, North Carolina, said “next week, long period swell from distant Hurricane Kirk could bring a threat for an elevated rip current risk, high surf, and ocean overwash to vulnerable areas and where dune structures have been compromised across oceanside portions of the Outer Banks.”

Another system, Tropical Storm Leslie, is expected to reach hurricane strength by Saturday, but is no threat to any land areas as of Friday morning, the hurricane center said.

– Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

Standing on her porch, Tammy Hensley spoke on the phone with an accountant, trying to navigate the tangle of federal aid available to her and her neighbors after Helene tore through the region, bringing devastation to the small, Buncombe County community of Barnardsville.

“We’re making it, but it’s hard,” she said.

Hensley, 58, has lived in Barnardsville her entire life, and never had she imagined the water could get so high. Her 1970s one-story brick house was destroyed. Some mobile homes had jumped their foundations. Stray porches splintered across her front yard. She said everything inside was coated in layers of mud.

“None of these trailers are livable,” she said. Of the property’s 14 trailers, all residents had gotten out safely, but two were still living there, despite the wreckage. There’s “nowhere else to go,” Hensley said.

‘Just trying to survive:’ Barnardsville residents look toward rebuilding after Helene

– Sarah Honosky, Asheville Citizen Times

Baby Phoenix made an unforgettable debut. It was 1:51 a.m. Sept. 27 and Helene was starting to tear across western North Carolina as Jewelia Crowe, 28, gave birth to her son.

Ten weeks premature, Phoenix weighed just 2 pounds 10 ounces. Crowe told the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA TODAY Network, he cried until he settled into her arms.

Just two minutes later, he was taken away and rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit. Almost immediately, according to Crowe and her fiancé Samuel Dillard, a transformer exploded outside, and a nurse let out what Dillard called “a God-awful scream.”

“You could see the whole NICU light up,” he said.

But Phoenix was safe. The generators inside Asheville’s Mission Hospital had kicked in. The power stayed on, and despite the unfolding disaster and the pressure it put on the hospital and its staff in the days that followed, Phoenix has thrived.

Read the full story here: Baby storms into the world as Helene rips Western North Carolina

Beacon Village was built in the 1920s for workers employed by the now-defunct Beacon Blanket Company, once one of the largest blanket manufacturers in the world.

Before Helene, 77 bungalows still dotted town east of Asheville. After the storm, only 11 are habitable.

On Thursday, homes and cars were caked with mud as people cleared pathways to their homes to salvage what was left.

Derek Hughes, a longtime resident, said his neighbors used canoes and kayaks to rescue people. In one home, a hole could be seen in the roof where rescuers punched through to save people stuck in the attic. “Water was coming in both directions,” Hughes said. “It hit us like a freight train and then it was gone.”

Joi McPherson, who was clearing mud-covered belongings from her home on Thursday, said the residents were not able to get any evacuation warnings because they didn’t have cell service. By the time they received some warning, it was too late. 

“It started at 7 (a.m. Friday) and by 11 we were afraid we were gonna die,” she said.

– Kelly Puente, USA TODAY NETWORK

Parts of western North Carolina ravaged by Helene will need to wait longer for power restoration as the widespread damage has hampered crews working in the mountainous region, officials said.

Duke Energy crews have repaired 1.2 million outages in North Carolina since the storm struck the state late last week, said Bill Norton, a spokesperson for the utility company. As of Thursday, 170,000 homes and businesses in the North Carolina mountain region remain without power, including 78,000 in Buncombe County.

About 105,000 customers without power live in areas where Helene inflicted “catastrophic damage,” Norton said, adding that it will take more time to get power restored in communities where grid infrastructure was washed away and roads collapsed.

Norton added that heavy damage to transmission infrastructure is causing restoration delays. A substation that serves the leafy Asheville enclave of Biltmore Village, for example, was almost completely submerged in floodwater. “That substation alone is going to take 3-4 months to repair,” he said. In the meantime, the company brought in a 200,000-pound mobile substation from Garner, North Carolina, to power homes and businesses in the area.

“This has been a storm like we have never seen in our history,” Norton said.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Saturday will travel to North Carolina to areas damaged by Helene and receive an on-the-ground briefing about the recovery efforts.

Harris – who visited Augusta, Georgia, earlier in the week – is expected to provide updates on federal actions being taken to support emergency response and recovery efforts in North Carolina and other southeastern states.

President Joe Biden visited North and South Carolina on Wednesday and toured sites impacted by the storm in Florida and Georgia on Thursday.

Former President Donald Trump on Monday visited the Georgia city of Valdosta.

North Carolina and Georgia are both key battleground states in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Helping Helene survivors: Here’s how to donate

Dr. Matt Riester and his wife were about to head out of town to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary when Helene’s record-setting rains began to wallop Asheville.

Flood waters were raging and Riester’s house went dark. The medical director of the emergency department at Asheville’s Mission Hospital scrapped his plans and rushed to work, maneuvering past uprooted trees and downed power lines.

When he walked into the hospital, it was a hectic sight. Patients poured in through the emergency room entrance, some with make-shift bandages and slings. One person had caution tape wrapped around an injury as a tourniquet. The hospital, which treats 275 patients on a typical day, attended to 600 and many of them were very ill, the doctor said.

For days, the hospital has remained filled with patients as staff and volunteers work dayslong shifts, taking to mats and air mattresses for a few hours of sleep.

“A lot of the emergency room staff, nurses, the doctors, respiratory therapists and techs, everybody, we’re all in the same boat,” Riester said. “We all have families. We all have houses. Many people had damage to their houses and a lot of people who were here when it initially hit, they didn’t leave the hospital for days.

More: Hospital director describes frenzy as Helene victims poured into ER

– Beth Warren and Jacob Biba, Asheville Citizen Times

Five days after Tropical Storm Helene ravaged Western North Carolina, Anthony Vanoy sat along Buck Creek in rural McDowell County and watched as a search and rescue team combed through a towering pile of debris searching for his friend, Julie le Roux.

Before the search and rescue team arrived, Vanoy and a friend spent hours searching for le Roux themselves. Found among the debris, Vanoy said, was one of le Roux’s paintings – it was of flowers.

On the morning of Sept. 27, a “wall of water and rocks and tree debris” barreled through a neighbor’s home where le Roux and her fiancé John Norwood were sheltering. The couple was swept downstream, where Norwood was found pinned among debris, nearly a four-minute walk from his home.

“I crawled around screaming, looking for her, and I just couldn’t find her,” Norwood told ABC News earlier this week. As of Wednesday, le Roux still hadn’t been found.

Vanoy and Norwood are among hundreds of people searching for loved ones in the aftermath of Helene. Earlier in the week, officials said they’ve received some 600 missing person reports – a number that’s since come down as rescue teams push further into isolated communities and communications are restored.

Read the full story here: A ‘wall of water’ tore a couple apart. Their friend is aiding in the search.

– Jacob Biba, Asheville Citizen Times

As Helene gathered strength in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, officials with the National Weather Service and authorities in western North Carolina tracked the storm’s path and intensity.

The situation looked so dire that by Wednesday, Sept. 26, officials in Buncombe County declared a local state of emergency for low-lying areas. While urgent warnings were posted on the county’s Facebook page, no evacuations were ordered. Meanwhile, the nearby National Weather Service office held daily conferences with local officials, warning of the flood danger posed by the storm.

On Sept. 26, Buncombe County officials held a virtual news conference, warning residents of the forecast of “catastrophic” and “historic” flooding and suggested, for the first time, that residents in flood-prone areas should evacuate. “We cannot stress enough the seriousness of this situation,” County manager Avril Pinder said. “If you live in a flood prone area … you should take action now – right now.”

On the morning of Friday, Sept. 27, as reports of flooding were becoming widespread, Buncombe County issued a mandatory evacuation order that beeped into phones via the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, FEMA’s system for local emergencies.

But at that point, it was too late to get out, said Clay Chaney, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Forecast Office in Greer, South Carolina. “By the time you get a flash flood emergency, it’s way too late to evacuate,” he said. “At that point, your only option is to go to higher ground.”

Read the full story here: Inside the race to alert residents of Helene’s wrath

– Rick Jervis, Chris Kenning and Daniel Dassow, USA TODAY

Contributing: Joey Garrison, USA TODAY; Marcus K. Dowling and Devarrick Turner, The Nashville Tennessean; Reuters

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