The remnants of Hurricane Helene dissipated Saturday but millions remain without power across the Southeast and officials warned that record-breaking river flooding is ongoing in parts of southern Appalachia.
The storm has been blamed for at least 52 deaths across five states, including 23 people in South Carolina and 11 in Florida. But the death toll is sure to rise as authorities continue to take stock of Helene's devastation. In hard-hit Buncombe County, North Carolina, where Asheville is located, authorities said they know people died but aren’t announcing anything because communication outages haven’t allowed them to reach relatives of the victims.
The hurricane roared ashore Thursday night as a Category 4 storm on Florida's Gulf Coast and then quickly moved Friday through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, uprooting trees, splintering homes and sending creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams.
Tropical Storm John made its second landfall along Mexico’s Pacific coast Friday, while in its wake authorities in the resort city of Acapulco called for help from anyone with a boat to deal with the flooding. It has since dissipated over Mexico.
Follow AP’s coverage of tropical weather at https://apnews.com/hub/hurricanes.
Here's the latest:
Biden says Helene's devastation is ‘overwhelming’
REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — President Joe Biden on Saturday called the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene “overwhelming” and said his administration was committed to helping the huge swath of the Southeast affected by the storm recover.
In a statement posted on X, Biden said he continues to be briefed by his team about the storm as it tracks north.
“My Administration has been with the people of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee since before Helene made landfall,” Biden said in the social media post. “And we’ll be on the ground with them helping them recover long after this storm has passed.”
Earlier Saturday, Biden approved a federal emergency declaration for Tennessee. Biden approved emergency declarations for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina before the storm made landfall.
The declarations authorize FEMA to provide assistance for emergency measures to save lives, protect property, public health and safety, and fund other emergency response measures.
More than 800,000 customers in Georgia still without power
ATLANTA — Utilities in Georgia continue to warn that it will take a significant amount of time to restore remaining electrical outages. Georgia Power Co. said Saturday morning that while it had restored power to more than 450,000 customers, more than 525,000 of its 2.6 million customers remained without electricity. Georgia Electric Membership Corp., which represents electric cooperatives, said it had restored more than 110,000 outages but nearly 320,000 remain.
“Unfortunately, treacherous conditions remain across the state with crews navigating extensive tree damage, persisting flooding conditions and many road closures,” said Georgia Power, the state’s only private electric utility, in a news release.
The electric cooperatives continued to warn of serious damage to high-voltage transmission lines and the substations that convert high-voltage power into the electricity that is delivered to customers.
“The damage to the supply side of the electrical grid from Helene is extensive, surpassing that of 2018’s Hurricane Michael in many areas, and will take longer to assess and repair.” Georgia EMC said.
Georgia Power said it will have to replace thousands of broken power poles and said it is still assessing damage in the hardest-hit areas in the eastern half of the state. The company said it hopes to be able to estimate when service will be restored by later Saturday.
Residents of Florida's Big Bend grapple with third hurricane since last summer
STEINHATCHEE, Fla. — Residents of rural Taylor County in Florida’s Big Bend went years without taking a direct hit from a hurricane. But after three storms in a little over a year, the area is beginning to feel like a hurricane superhighway.
“It’s wiped out a lot. 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.
The town of about 1,000 people an hour and a half southeast of Tallahassee sits at the mouth of the Steinhatchee River, flowing out into Deadman Bay and on into the Gulf. It’s a beloved slice of what locals call Old Florida, where generations of families have cherished memories of living along the river and scalloping in the bay.
A number of businesses in town had just reopened ahead of scallop season a few months ago, after sustaining damage from Hurricane Idalia in August 2023. Then a year later, Hurricane Debby washed ashore. Now, Helene came through like a buzzsaw, blowing apart what took decades to build, like a waterfront restaurant called Roy’s, where residents could watch the sun disappear over the salt marshes stretching into the horizon.
Now Roy’s, like many other buildings in town, is just a pile of debris.
“None has ever wiped out Roy’s,” Berg said. “It’s gone. And now to replace it, they have to go a minimum of probably 12, 15 feet in the air to rebuild it.”
The threat of a potential dam collapse in Tennesse eases
The threat of a potential dam collapse in eastern Tennesse, near the North Carolina border, was easing on Saturday morning.
Around midnight the Tennessee Valley Authority had issued an emergency warning that the Nolichucky Dam could breach at any time. An update later on Saturday said the Nolichucky River had crested at 8 feet (2.4 meters) over previous record elevations and was receding at about 1 foot (0.3 meters) per hour.
“Our Dam Safety teams are in the process of assessing the condition of the dam to determine next steps,” TVA posted on X.
All roads in western North Carolina are considered closed
Officials in Buncombe County, North Carolina, said in a Saturday news conference, that all roads in western North Carolina should be considered closed. Interstate 40 and I-26 were impassible in multiple locations. Other roads were washed out or blocked by fallen trees and debris.
More than 100,000 Duke Energy customers in the area were without power. In Asheville, there was no cellular service and no timeline for when it would be restored. Residents were also directed to boil their water. Meanwhile, nearby Woodfin had no running water.
“We have had some loss of life,” County Emergency Services Director Van Taylor Jones told reporters. However, he said they were not ready to report any specifics. Officials have been hindered in contacting next of kin by the communications outages.
Jones said the area experienced a cascade of emergencies that included heavy rain, high winds and mudslides.
Officials said they tried to prepare for the storm but its magnitude was beyond what they could have imagined.
“It’s not that we (were) not prepared, but this is going to another level,” Sheriff Quentin Miller said. “To say this caught us off-guard would be an understatement.”
Death toll rises to at least 52, including 11 in Florida
DEKLE BEACH, Fla. — Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Saturday that there have been at least 11 storm-related deaths in Florida.
The deaths included traffic fatalities and people caught up in storm surge, the governor said during a news conference.
“There were no fatalities in Taylor County, which is where the storm made landfall,” DeSantis said, adding that he credits the people of hard-hit Taylor County for heeding the warnings.
“If you had told me there was going to be 15 to 18 feet of storm surge, even with the best efforts, I would have assumed we would have had multiple fatalities.”
Residents lining up for food in hard-hit Florida town
PERRY, Fla. — The cars started lining up before the sun rose on Saturday at a free food distribution site in Perry, near where the storm made landfall. Dozens of vehicles wound through the parking lot and out onto U.S. Highway 27, filled with families who are running out of food in a county where, as of Saturday morning, 99% of customers didn’t have power.
Sierra Land said although her home seems to have dodged any major damage, with no electricity, she’s lost everything in her refrigerator.
“We’re making it one day at a time,” Land said.
Land said she arrived at the Convoy of Hope distribution site with her two sons, ages 5 and 10, and her grandmother between 6:30 and 7 a.m., more than three hours before volunteers were expected to begin handing out food, water and hygiene kits.
“There was no reason to sit at the house. Not when we needed to be in the line,” Land said. “The kids … they needed to get out and see something besides the four walls.”
If they can sort out how to keep themselves fed, they can focus on other concerns, like Land’s grandfather Franklin Ratliff, who has dementia and COPD and hasn’t been able to use his oxygen since Helene shredded the area’s power grid.
“With his dementia, his focal point is watching TV. And there’s no TV. So it’s been a lot of having to talk with him. Keep him in good spirits because he still doesn’t understand what happened,” Land said. “He kept trying to get up and go outside during the storm.”
Western North Carolina inundated by flooding
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Western North Carolina has been essentially cut off because of landslides and flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads. Video shows sections of Asheville underwater.
Francine Cavanaugh said she has been totally unable to reach her sister, son, or friends in the Asheville area.
“My sister checked in with me yesterday morning to find out how I was in Atlanta,” she said on Saturday. “The storm was just hitting her in Asheville, and she said it sounded really scary outside.”
Cavanaugh said her sister had no idea how bad the storm would be there. She told Cavanaugh she was going to head out to check on guests at a vacation cabin “and that’s the last I heard of her. I’ve been texting everyone that I know with no response. All phone calls go directly to voicemail.”
She saw video of a grocery store near the cabins that was completely flooded.
“I think that people are just completely stuck, wherever they are, with no cell service, no electricity.”
Locals grateful no one was killed in Tampa neighborhood that saw unprecedented storm surge
TAMPA, Fla. — Davis Islands, the Tampa neighborhood that star athletes like baseball’s Derek Jeter and football’s Tom Brady have called home, was cleaning up Saturday after Helene’s chest-high storm surge tore through its streets the day before.
The two islands sit just off the city’s downtown and are home to about 5,000 people. The neighborhood had never seen storm surge like it had Friday. No one died, but homes, businesses and apartments were flooded.
Authorities warned residents to evacuate, and many did, but some stayed behind.
”I don’t think anybody was expecting it,” Faith Pilafas told the Tampa Bay Times. “We’ve kind of gotten accustomed to lots of talk about big storms, and never actually like feeling the effects of it. So for all the people who didn’t leave the island, I feel like they were all just expecting it to be a normal storm, anticlimactic. And wow, were we surprised.”
A 24-year-old restaurant worker, she and her boyfriend watched from their second-floor apartment as the water rose to over 4 feet (1.2 meters). Her boyfriend used his kayak to help people get off the island.
“I mean, just every single business is, like, totally destroyed,” she told the newspaper. “But we don’t know anybody who is seriously injured, and so we’re just really grateful that didn’t happen.”
Debra Ogston returned to her Italian restaurant to find that its heavy coolers had been overturned. She said the job now will be to clean up and reopen.
“We’re resilient,” she told the newspaper. “We’re going to go for progress, not perfection. ... The damage here is annoying, and a little heartbreaking. But it’s stuff. Stuff can be replaced.”
Vice President Harris urges residents affected by Helene to heed local officials
DOUGLAS, Ariz. — Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday urged residents impacted by Hurricane Helene to pay heed to local authorities as the storm continues to wreak havoc on a significant swath of the southeast.
“The storm continues to be dangerous and deadly, and lives have been lost and the risk of flooding still remains high,” Harris said at the start of a campaign speech in Douglas, Arizona. “So, I continue to urge everyone to please continue to follow guidance from your local officials until we get past this moment.”
Dozens rescued by helicopter from a flooded Tennessee hospital
NASHVILLE — There have been hundreds of water rescues due to Helene, but perhaps none more dramatic than in rural Unicoi County in East Tennessee, where dozens of patients and staff were plucked by helicopter from the roof of a hospital that was surrounded by water from a flooded river.
Some 54 people were moved to the roof of the Unicoi County Hospital while water rapidly flooded the facility, according to Ballad Health.
Ballad Health said on social media that county officials had ordered an evacuation of the hospital Friday morning due to rising water in the Nolichucky River, including 11 patients.
After other helicopters failed to reach the hospital because of the storm’s winds, a Virginia State Police helicopter was able to land on the roof. Three National Guard helicopters with hoist capabilities were sent and Ballad Health assisted with its own helicopter, officials said. After about four hours, all of the staff and patients had been rescued.
▶ Read more about Friday's dramatic rescue
The Associated Press
