Dozens dead and millions without power after Helene’s deadly march across southeastern U.S.

PERRY, Fla. — Massive rains from powerful Hurricane Helene left people stranded, without shelter, and awaiting rescue Saturday, as the cleanup began from a tempest that killed at least 56 people, caused widespread destruction across the U.S. Southeast, and left millions without power.

“I’ve never seen so many people homeless as what I have right now,” said Janalea England of Steinhatchee, Fla., a small river town along the state’s rural Big Bend, as she turned her commercial fish market into a storm donation site for friends and neighbors, many of whom couldn’t get insurance on their homes.

Helene blew ashore in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday with winds of 140 mph.

From there, it quickly moved through Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday it “looks like a bomb went off” after viewing splintered homes and debris-covered highways from the air. Weakened, Helene then soaked the Carolinas and Tennessee with torrential rains, sending creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams.

Western North Carolina was isolated because of landslides and flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads.

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 plucked by helicopter from a hospital rooftop Friday. And the rescues continued into the following day in Buncombe County, N.C., where part of Asheville was under water.

“To say this caught us off guard would be an understatement,” said Quentin Miller, the county sheriff.

Water flooded Janetta Barfield’s car there as a creek overflowed, reaching her lap, before a police officer rescued her.

“It happened so fast to me and scared the life out of me because nothing like that ever happened,” said Barfield, a traveling nurse.

While there have been deaths in the county, Emergency Services Director Van Taylor Jones said he wasn’t ready to report specifics, partially because downed cell towers hindered efforts to contact next of kin.

Relatives put out desperate pleas for help on Facebook. Among those waiting for news was Francine Cavanaugh, whose sister told her she was going to check on guests at a vacation cabin as the storm began hitting Asheville. Cavanaugh, who lives in Atlanta, had not been able to reach her since then.

“I think that people are just completely stuck,” she said.

The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, was expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley through Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said.

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 came to help. One community, Spruce Pine, was doused with over 2 feet of rain from Tuesday through Saturday.

And in Atlanta, 11.12 inches of rain fell over 48 hours, the most the city has seen over two days since recordkeeping began in 1878.

President Joe Biden said Saturday that Helene’s devastation has been “overwhelming” and pledged to send help.

Helene is the deadliest tropical cyclone for the Carolinas since Hurricane Hugo killed 35 people when it came ashore just north of Charleston, S.C., in 1989. Deaths also have been reported in Florida, Georgia, and Virginia.

Moody’s Analytics said it expects $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage. AccuWeather’s preliminary estimate of the total damage and economic loss from Helene in the U.S. is between $95 billion and $110 billion.

Climate change has exacerbated conditions that allow such storms to thrive, rapidly intensifying in warming waters and turning into powerful cyclones sometimes in a matter of hours.

Evacuations began before the storm hit and continued as lakes overtopped dams, including one in North Carolina that forms a lake featured in the movie Dirty Dancing. Helicopters were used to rescue some people from flooded homes.

Elin Fisher and her husband, who teach whitewater standup paddleboarding on the Nolichucky River in Tennessee, had to move their camper three times to stay ahead of rising waters.

Among the 11 confirmed deaths in Florida were nine people who drowned in their homes in a mandatory-evacuation area on the Gulf Coast in Pinellas County, where St. Petersburg is located, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.

None of the victims were from Taylor County, which is where the storm made landfall. It came ashore near the mouth of the Aucilla River, about 20 miles northwest of where Hurricane Idalia hit last year at nearly the same ferocity.

Taylor County is in Florida’s Big Bend, where salt marshes and pine flatwoods stretch into the horizon, and where the condo developments and strip malls that have carved up much of the state’s coastlines are largely absent.

The county went years without taking a direct hit from a hurricane. But after Idalia and two other storms in a little over a year, the area is beginning to feel like a hurricane superhighway.

“It’s bringing everybody to reality about what this is now with disasters,” said John Berg, 76, a resident of Steinhatchee, a small fishing town and weekend getaway.

Timmy Futch, of the Big Bend community of Horseshoe Beach, stayed put for the hurricane, driving to high ground only when the water reached his house.

“We watched our town get tore to pieces is what we done,” he said.

Thousands of utility crew workers descended upon Florida in advance of the hurricane, and by Saturday power was restored to more than 1.9 million homes and businesses. But hundreds of thousands remained without electricity there and in Georgia.

Chris Stallings, director of the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency, said crews were focused on opening routes to hospitals and making sure supplies can be delivered to damaged communities.