The President of the United States, Joe Biden, will be in North Carolina this Wednesday, an area greatly affected by Hurricane Helene, where he will evaluate the damage left by the storm.
“We have to get this recovery process going,” Biden said Tuesday. “People are scared to death. This is urgent.”
Reuters reported that Biden could ask lawmakers to return to Washington for a special session of Congress to approve supplemental relief funds for affected areas.
“There were communities that were wiped off the map,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Tuesday.
Helene was one of the deadliest storms in the country, with more than 160 deaths in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia. Nearly half of the deaths occurred in North Carolina, according to officials.
Helene played Thursday night off the coast of Florida and then began her path of destruction through several states in the southeastern United States.
Emergency workers and rescue teams have been working around the clock clearing roads, supplying food, clearing debris and searching for trapped people.
Hundreds of people have been reported missing, authorities said.
“We’ve been going door to door, making sure we can check on people and see if they’re safe,” Avril Pinder, manager of Buncombe County in North Carolina, told the AP.
More than a million homes and businesses were without power in several states on Tuesday.
Residents of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains lined up for food and water Tuesday as they tried to find cell service for their cell phones.
Search teams and cadaver dogs have been deployed in western North Carolina to find victims.
An official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency said more than 150,000 households have registered for assistance and that number is expected to increase.
According to an AP report, a Navy veteran in a wheelchair stayed at home during and after the deluge. Cliff Stewart said the 60 centimeters of water that entered his house covered the wheels of his chair. The bottles containing his medications floated from room to room. Stewart has rejected offers to help him leave his house.
“What am I going to do? Be homeless? I’d rather die here than live homeless,” he said.
Mobile homes and cars stacked on top of each other were exposed as floodwaters receded in Swannanoa, North Carolina.
In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee on Tuesday inspected the destruction of a high school in the eastern part of the state, where residents told him he and his entourage were the first help they had seen since the storm, the AP reported.
“We’ve been here all alone,” one person said.
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