At least 64 dead after helene's deadly march across the southeast

PERRY: Movement in the new cycle revealed that massive rains from powerful Hurricane Helene left people stranded, without shelter, and awaiting rescue. The cleanup began after a tempest that

killed at least 64 people, caused widespread destruction across the U.S. Southeast, and knocked out power to millions. “I’ve never seen so many people homeless as I do right now,” said

Janalea England of Steinhatchee, Florida, 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

who 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 (225 kph). From there, it quickly

moved through Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday that it “looked 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 due to landslides and

flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads. All these closures delayed the start of the East Tennessee State University football game against The Citadel, as the

Buccaneers' drive to Charleston, South Carolina, took 16 hours. 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 on Friday. The rescues continued into the following day in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where part of Asheville

was under water. “To say this caught us off guard would be an understatement,” said Quentin Miller, the county sheriff. Asheville resident Mario Moraga described it as “heartbreaking” to see

the damage in the Biltmore Village neighborhood, where neighbors have been going house to house to check on each other and offer support. “There’s no cell service here. There’s no

electricity,” he said. 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. The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, was expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley on

Saturday and Sunday, according to the National Hurricane Center. It unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina. One community, Spruce Pine, was doused with over 2 feet (0.6

meters) of rain from Tuesday through Saturday. In Atlanta, 11.12 inches (28.24 centimeters) of rain fell over 48 hours, the most the city has seen over two days since record keeping began in

1878. President Joe Biden said Saturday that Helene’s devastation has been “overwhelming” and pledged to send help. He also approved a disaster declaration for North Carolina, making

federal funding available for affected individuals. With at least 25 killed in South Carolina, Helene is the deadliest tropical cyclone for the state since Hurricane Hugo killed 35 people

when it came ashore just north of Charleston in 1989. Deaths have also been reported in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. Moody’s Analytics expects property damage to range

from $15 billion to $26 billion. AccuWeather’s preliminary estimate of the total damage and economic loss from Helene in the U.S. is between $95 billion and $110 billion. 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. 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, according

to Sheriff Bob Gualtieri. None of the victims were from Taylor County, where the storm made landfall. It came ashore near the mouth of the Aucilla River, about 20 miles (30 kilometers)

northwest of where Hurricane Idalia hit last year with nearly the same ferocity. Taylor County, located in Florida’s Big Bend, went years without taking a direct hit from a hurricane. But

after Idalia and two other storms in just 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. 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. Helene was the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1. The

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted an above-average season this year due to record-warm ocean temperatures. Payne reported from Perry, and Hollingsworth reported

from Kansas City, Missouri. Associated Press journalists Seth Borenstein in New York; Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee; Jeff Amy in Atlanta; Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut; and

Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed.