Desperate residents of the storm-battered mountains of western North Carolina lined up for water and food, hunted for cellphone signals and slogged buckets from creeks to flush toilets days after Hurricane Helene’s remnants deluged the region. Emergency workers toiled around the clock to clear roads, restore power and phone service, and reach people stranded by the storm, which has a death toll of more than 150 people across the Southeast.
President Joe Biden is set to survey the devastation Wednesday.
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Kirk became a hurricane in the eastern Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday. The storm could strengthen into a major hurricane by Thursday, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The storm was about 1,070 miles (1,720 kilometers) west of the Cabo Verde Island with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph (120 kph).
There were no coastal watches or warnings in effect, and the storm system was not yet deemed a threat to land.
The University of North Carolina at Asheville will remain closed until Oct. 14 and will not restart classes until Oct. 28 at the earliest in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the school’s chancellor said in a social media post Tuesday.
While the public university in western North Carolina’s largest city received minimal structural damage from the historic flooding and winds, it’s lacked electricity, running water and internet service since last Friday, Chancellor Kimberly van Noort’s post said.
The liberal arts and sciences school has about 3,000 students. About 1,300 students were on campus when the storm hit. All of them were relocated within 72 hours, the post said.
Classes at two other UNC campuses in the region struck by the storm — Appalachian State University in Boone and Western Carolina University — are canceled through Friday.
There, he’ll visit the emergency operations center. Also on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Augusta, Georgia, and then head to North Carolina in the “coming days,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas also said close to 6,000 Army Corps of Engineers staffers have been deployed. He estimated the recovery would be a “multibillion dollar undertaking.” He said FEMA had already approved $1.7 million in individual assistance.
Active-duty U.S. military units may be needed in the long-term post-Helene recovery in western North Carolina, particularly as local water systems remain offline, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said.
Cooper said Tuesday at a media briefing that during a meeting with President Joe Biden on Monday the president “gave the green light” to use U.S. military assets in the near future.
More than two dozen water plants remained closed as of Tuesday and not producing water. That includes Asheville, where city officials have said restoring full-system service could potentially take weeks as repairs needed for treatment facilities and pipes are extensive.
“We know that this crisis will likely be a sustained crisis because of water system issues,” Cooper said. “So we know that this is going to have to be a continuing operation. So I want to make sure we get every single resource that we possibly can into North Carolina for what may be a long haul to make sure that we’re continuing to get water and supplies all across western North Carolina.”
The North Carolina National Guard already has a large presence in the region in the storm’s aftermath, with 800 members activated. More than 20 guard aircraft have been used to ferry supplies and perform other duties.
“In fact, communication has been difficult in a number of areas if not impossible,” Mayorkas said Tuesday while talking about the federal response to Hurricane Helene.
He said a great deal of infrastructure as been demolished and the government is working with private communications companies and the FCC to rebuild communications towers. He said they have deployed 50 Starlink satellite systems to help rebuild infrastructure.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said Tuesday that the remnants of Hurricane Helene killed 36 people in the state, which pushes the storm’s overall death toll to 152.
McMaster announced three more deaths during a news conference in West Columbia, South Carolina.
The storm carved a path of death and destruction through the Southeast after coming ashore Thursday in Florida. Nearly half of the deaths were in North Carolina, while dozens of others were in South Carolina and Georgia.
More than 587,000 customers remained without power Tuesday afternoon in South Carolina, the most of any state, according to poweroutage.us. That was down from more than 720,000 homes and businesses on Monday afternoon.
Officials said parts of the power grid have to be rebuilt due to the toppling of dozens of transmission lines and the snapping of thousands of power poles.
“We can’t remove trees and debris off the power lines until we get the power lines turned off,” McMaster said. “That’s the thing that is hindering, but we are working hard to work through that.”
With rescue efforts completed in the state of Florida in the wake of Hurricane Helene, Gov. Ron DeSantis has deployed emergency resources to North Carolina and Tennessee, where officials are still searching for victims amid the mud and debris.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, DeSantis said members of the Florida National Guard, Florida State Guard and teams from the state’s departments of transportation and emergency management are either on site in hard-hit mountain communities or enroute there.
“Just yesterday, a joint Florida State Guard and Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission team rescued a mother and her 1-year-old infant,” DeSantis said.
In the past 24 hours, DeSantis said the state National Guard has delivered more than 20,000 pounds (9,070 kilograms) of food into areas of critical need in North Carolina and bridge building teams are on their way.
At one of the stops Tuesday in Hampton, Tennessee, Gov. Lee pulled into a residential neighborhood overlooking the demolished high school.
Several residents in the area greeted the cars, saying Lee and others were the first help they had seen since the storm first hit the area. A handful of folks got heated, asking Carter County Mayor Patty Woodby “where has everyone been? We have been here alone.” At times Woodby got emotional as she attempted to respond to each complaint, saying she had been trying to get everywhere but communications were still down and still unable to be everywhere at once.
Lee and other lawmakers stopped by destroyed homes, stepping inside to see owners removing wet and ruined flooring. Many hugged and thanked the governor and others for visiting. Orange tape marked many of the homes to note that everyone had been accounted for and not among the many missing.
The paved roads in the neighborhood were in shambles as mud seemed to cake just about everything from cars, clothing and faces. Yet the sounds of Bobcats and other heavy equipment were present as cleanup efforts continued.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and other government officials told residents displaced by Hurricane Helene and those worried about loved ones that a massive effort continued Tuesday to bring stability to the mountains — and to their lives.
“No matter where you are in western North Carolina, if you need help, we are working around the clock to reach you,” Cooper said at a media briefing in Raleigh.
The state Division of Emergency Management confirmed 38 storm-related deaths in North Carolina from Helene, with the number expected to rise.
“The devastation brought by Helene is beyond belief. Communities were wiped off the map,” Cooper said. He planned to return the damaged areas later Tuesday.
More than 1,100 people were staying in close to 30 shelters in the region, with over 400 roads still closed and hundreds of rescues completed, officials said. First responders and others were working to locate people whose loved ones or friends had not heard from or needed welfare checks.
The National Guard ferried close to 200,000 pounds (90,700 kilograms) of food and other necessities out of the Asheville Regional Airport on Monday, North Carolina guard Major General Todd Hunt said.
Officials called on people affected by Hurricane Helene to register for assistance with the Federal Emergency Management Agency as they cautioned that it would be a long, recovery from the storm.
A representative from FEMA, Frank Matranga, said more than 150,000 households had already registered for assistance with the agency and they expect “these numbers to rapidly increase over the coming days.”
Matranga listed some of the federal help that’s deployed including 1,250 urban search and rescue personnel; 1.9 million ready-to-eat meals; more than a million liters of water; 95,000 tarps; and 150 ambulances. He said those supplies will increase in the coming days as affected states continue to tell the agency what they need.
“This is, without a doubt, a widespread and extraordinarily devastating disaster,” said Matranga. “We’re here to support the response across all of the affected states and do that with empathy and sensitivity. We’re committed to being there every step of the way, and it’s going to be a long way.”
In Augusta, Georgia, a line wrapped around a massive shopping center, past the shuttered Waffle House and at least a half mile down the road to get water Tuesday.
At 11 a.m. it still hadn’t moved. Kristie Nelson arrived with her daughter three hours earlier. It was a muggy morning for October but they had their windows down and the car turned off because gas is a precious commodity too.
“It’s been rough,” said Nelson, who still hasn’t gotten a firm date from the power company for her electricity to be restored. “I’m just dying for a hot shower.”
Augusta and Richmond County have five centers for water set up for it’s more than 200,000 people. The city hasn’t provided specifics on the durations of outages for both water and power.
All around the city, trees are snapped in half and power poles are leaning. Traffic lights are out — and some are just gone from the winds that hit in the dark early Friday morning from Hurricane Helene.
Some 1.4 million people across the three states remain without electricity around noon Tuesday, according to power outage.us.
“It’s miserable here,” said David Reese who was probably looking at spending his entire day in a line for water, then for gas. “But I’m still feeling blessed. I’ve heard it’s a lot worse other places.”
“We’ve been going door to door, making sure that we can put eyes on people and see if they’re safe,” Buncombe County Manager Avril Pinder said.
Pinder said she couldn’t specify a number of county residents who remain “unaccounted for” since the storm.
“We know that there are places that are still hard to access,” Pinder said. “There’s still trees down or power lines down or water is still moving rather rapidly. So we’re being strategic in trying to get out to those neighbors now. We have helicopter support, and we’ve been trying to fly into areas that we cannot go by foot or by boat or by car.”
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.″