Massive rains from powerful Hurricane Helena left people stranded, homeless and waiting for rescue on Saturday as cleanup began from a storm that killed at least 64 people, caused widespread destruction in the US Southeast and left millions without power.
“I’ve never seen as many homeless people as I have right now,” said Janalea England of Steinhatchee, Fla., a small river town along the state’s Big Bend backcountry, as she turned her commercial fish market into a storm donation site for friends and neighbors, many of whom were unable to obtain insurance on their homes.
Helena made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday with winds of 145 mph.
From there, it quickly moved through Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday that it “looked like a bomb went off” after seeing broken houses and debris-strewn highways from the air. Then weakened, Helena drenched the Carolinas and Tennessee with torrential rains, sending streams and rivers over their banks and straining dams.
Western North Carolina was cut off by landslides and flooding that closed Interstate 40 and other roads. All of these closures delayed the start of East Tennessee State University’s football game against The Citadel because the Buccaneers’ trip to Charleston, South Carolina, took 16 hours.
There have been hundreds of water rescues, none more dramatic than in rural Unicoi County in East Tennessee, where dozens of patients and staff were helicoptered off the roof of a hospital on Friday. Rescues continued the next day in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where part of Asheville was under water.
“To say it caught us off guard would be an understatement,” said Quentin Miller, county sheriff.
Asheville resident Mario Moraga said it was “heartbreaking” to see the damage in the Biltmore Village neighborhood and neighbors went door-to-door to check on each other and offer support.
“There is no cell service here. There is no electricity,” he said.
Although there have been deaths in the county, Emergency Services Director Van Taylor Jones said he was not ready to report details, in part because downed cell towers hampered efforts to contact next of kin.
Loved ones make desperate pleas for help on Facebook. Among those waiting for news was Francine Cavanaugh, whose sister said she was on her way to check on guests at a vacation cabin when the storm began pounding Asheville. Cavanaugh, who lives in Atlanta, has not been able to reach her since.
“I think people are just completely blocked,” she said.
The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, is expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley Saturday and Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said.
“Catastrophic” floods
It unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina, where Gov. Roy Cooper described it as “catastrophic” as search and rescue teams from 19 states and the federal government rushed to help. One community, Spruce Pine, was inundated with more than 2 feet (0.6 meters) of rain Tuesday through Saturday.
And in Atlanta, 11.12 inches (28.24 centimeters) of rain fell in 48 hours, the most for the city in two days since records began in 1878.
President Joe Biden said Saturday that Helen’s devastation was “immense” and pledged to send aid.
Helena was South Carolina’s deadliest tropical cyclone since Hurricane Hugo killed 35 people when it came ashore north of Charleston in 1989. Deaths were also reported in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.
Moody’s Analytics said it expects $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage. AccuWeather’s preliminary estimate of total damage and economic losses from Helene in the US is between $95 billion and $110 billion.
Climate change has worsened the conditions that allow such storms to thrive, rapidly intensifying in warming waters and becoming powerful cyclones, sometimes in a matter of hours.
Evacuations and transferred dams
Evacuations began before the storm hit and continued as lakes overflowed dams, including one in North Carolina that formed a lake featured in the movie Dirty Dancing. Helicopters were used to rescue people from flooded homes.
And in Newport, Tennessee, Jonah Work waited so long to evacuate that a boat had to come to the rescue. “Definitely a scary moment,” Work said.
After a helicopter tour of the damage, stunned U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger said, “Who would have thought a hurricane would cause so much damage in East Tennessee?”
Among the 11 confirmed deaths in Florida were nine people who drowned in their homes in a mandatory evacuation zone on the Gulf Coast in Pinellas County, where St. Petersburg is located, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.
None of the victims were from Taylor County, where the storm made landfall. It came ashore near the mouth of the Aucilla River, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) northwest of where Hurricane Idalia struck last year with nearly the same ferocity.
“If you had told me there was going to be a 15-foot to 18-foot wave, even with the best efforts, I would have assumed we would have had multiple casualties,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday.
Taylor County is in Florida’s Big Bend, it’s been years without a direct hit from a hurricane. But after Idalia and two other storms in just over a year, the area is starting to feel like a hurricane superhighway.
“It makes everybody realize what it’s like now with the disasters,” said John Berg, 76, a resident of Steinhatchee, a small fishing town and weekend getaway.
Timmy Futch of Horseshoe Beach stayed put for the hurricane before driving to higher ground when the water reached his house. many homes in the town that his grandfather had helped to found had been turned into piles of lumber.
“We watched our city get torn apart,” Futch said.
The consequence
About 60 miles (100 kilometers) to the north, cars lined up before sunrise Saturday at a free food drive in Perry, Florida, amid widespread power outages.
“We’re taking it one day at a time,” said Sierra Land, who lost everything in her refrigerator when she arrived at the scene with her 5- and 10-year-old sons and her grandmother.
Thousands of utility workers descended on Florida ahead of the hurricane, and by Saturday power had been restored to more than 1.9 million homes and businesses. But hundreds of thousands remain without electricity there and in Georgia.
Chris Stallings, director of the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency, said crews are focused on opening routes to hospitals and making sure supplies can get to affected communities.
Helene was the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an above average season this year due to record high ocean temperatures.
