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 killed at least 133 people across the Southeast, a toll expected to rise.
President Joe Biden was set to survey the devastation Wednesday.
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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.″