The search for victims of Hurricane Helene entered its second week on Friday, while exhausted rescue teams and volunteers continued to work for long days, negotiating devastated roads, downed power lines and landslides, to reach those isolated and missing.
“We know these are difficult times, but please know that we are coming,” Buncombe County, North Carolina, Sheriff Quentin Miller said at a news conference Thursday night. “We are coming for you.” “We’re going to pick up our people.”
With at least 215 deaths, Helene is already the deadliest hurricane to hit the US mainland since Katrina in 2005, and dozens, or possibly hundreds, of people remain unaccounted for. Nearly half of the victims were in North Carolina, and dozens more lost their lives in South Carolina and Georgia.
In Buncombe County alone, there were 72 confirmed deaths as of Thursday night, Miller said. There is the tourist city of Asheville, the most populated in the region. Despite this, the police chief remains hopeful that many of the missing are alive.
Your message to them?
“Your safety and well-being are our highest priority. And we will not rest until they are safe and have been taken care of.”
Rescuers face difficult terrain
More than a week after the storm entered Florida’s Gulf of Mexico coast, the lack of telephone signal and electricity continues to hinder efforts to contact the missing. This means that rescuers must advance slowly through the mountains to know if residents are safe.
Along the Cane River in the western Blue Range of North Carolina, members of the Pensacola Volunteer Fire Department picked their way through trees high in a valley, nearly a week after a wall of water would destroy it.
Pensacola — which is a few miles from Mount Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi River — lost large numbers of people, said Mark Harrison, the department’s chief medical officer.
“We are beginning to recover,” he said. “We have taken out people who were in a more critical situation.”
Near the state line with Tennessee, crews were finally beginning to reach the secondary roads after clearing the main ones, but that presented new challenges. Smaller roads wind around sharp curves and cross small bridges that can be difficult to navigate even in ideal weather.
“Everything is going well and then they come around a curve and the road is gone and there’s a big ravine, or the bridge is gone,” said Watauga County Commissioner Charlie Wallin. “We can only go so far.”
Every day there are new requests to hear from someone who has not yet been heard from, Wallin said. It’s hard to know when the search will end.
“You hope to be able to get closer, but it’s difficult to know,” he added.
The electricity returns little by little
Power is slowly being restored and the number of homes and businesses without service fell below one million for the first time since last weekend, according to the website poweroutage.us. Most of the outages were reported in the Carolinas and Georgia, the states hit by Helene after it made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane on September 26.
US President Joe Biden flew over the devastation caused by the meteor in the Carolinas on Wednesday. His administration pledged to cover the cost of debris removal and emergency protective measures for six months in North Carolina, and for three in Georgia.
The funds will be used to address the impact of landslides and flooding, and to fund first responders, search and rescue teams, shelter and food.
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