The death toll from Hurricane Helene rose to at least 33 people in the southeastern United States on Friday, officials said, as torrential flooding inundated communities and emergency responders launched a massive rescue operation.
Roads, homes and businesses were left under water after a severe storm struck Tallahassee, the Florida state capital, overnight and moved north, knocking out power to millions of customers.
And while Helene, a Category 4 hurricane, weakened to a tropical storm and eventually a tropical depression, it has continued to wreak havoc in several states, bringing heavy winds and rains that the National Hurricane Center described as “life-threatening.” Described as a “deadly situation”.
The Miami-based NHC reported that the storm was “still causing historic and devastating flooding” and warned of flash flooding in Georgia’s largest city, Atlanta, as well as South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.
Up to 12 inches (30 cm) of rain was estimated in the Appalachian Mountains, with isolated locations receiving up to 20 inches.
At least 14 people have died in South Carolina, including two firefighters, officials said. Aiken County Coroner Darryl Ables said four deaths were related to “trees falling off the roofs of homes.”
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp reported 11 people dead in his state, including an emergency responder, and he warned that the city of Valdosta had identified 115 heavily damaged structures, with many people trapped inside.
The death toll in Florida remained seven. Governor Ron DeSantis said the damage caused by Helen exceeded that caused by Hurricanes Idalia and Debbie, which struck the same Big Bend area southeast of Tallahassee in the past 13 months.
“This is a real blow to those communities,” DeSantis told Fox News.
In Perry, where Helene made landfall with winds of up to 140 miles (225 kilometers) per hour, homes lost power and a gas station was demolished.
“I’m a Floridian, so I’m used to it, but at one point it was really scary,” said Larry Bailey, 32, who stayed up all night with his two nephews and sister in their tiny wooden home. Had taken shelter in.
“It’s like, is my house going to blow up or not?”
Four hundred miles north in the city of Irvine, Tennessee, a dramatic rescue operation was underway as floodwaters left a hospital dangerously isolated and more than 50 patients and staff trapped under roofs, according to local television footage. But they were stranded.
– ‘It looks bad’ –
September has been an unusually wet month so far across the world due to Hurricane Yagi in Asia, Hurricane Boris in Europe and severe flooding in the Sahel.
Scientists link some extreme weather events to human-caused global warming.
“Helen traveled over exceptionally warm ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico,” Andra Garner, a climate scientist at Rowan University in New Jersey, told AFP.
“It’s likely that those additional warm ocean waters played a role in Helen’s rapid intensification.”
“Storm waves are getting worse because as we warm the planet, our sea levels are rising,” Garner said.
Curtis Drafton, a search and rescue volunteer in Steinhatchee, Florida, expressed similar concerns while dealing with the aftermath of the storm.
“We have to start thinking: Is this the new normal? Is this going to happen every year?” the 48-year-old told AFP.
“We talk a lot about once-in-a-lifetime storms, but last year we had a similar storm.
“We had a 9-foot (2.7 m) storm surge here, two feet above my head and a little more than that. This dock here broke,” Drafton said.
Some residents in Atlanta resorted to pumping water out of ground-floor windows with buckets, while near Tampa in Florida, boats were left stranded in gardens.
According to the tracking site PowerOutage.us, five million homes and businesses were without power across a large swath of the country: Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia.
In the impact area, residents were warned of an “impossible” storm.
President Joe Biden and state officials had urged people to heed official evacuation warnings before Helene made landfall, though some people chose to remain in their homes to escape the storm.
“It looks bad,” Biden told reporters Friday.
DeSantis said, “Hundreds of search and rescue operations were conducted by state personnel,” while Dean Criswell, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said, “We have conducted over 600 rescues,” many of which are still ongoing.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
