In North Carolina, Helene turned neighborhoods into lakes, picked up cars like toys

WSOC, CNN

By Dalia Faheid, CNN

(CNN) — Communities in the Southeast are grappling with widespread devastation after Helene made landfall as the strongest hurricane on record to slam into Florida’s Big Bend region Thursday and tore through multiple states, killing at least 62 people, knocking out power to millions and trapping families in floodwaters. In hard-hit North Carolina, days of unrelenting flooding have turned roads into waterways, left many without basic necessities and strained state resources. Here’s the latest:

• Over 60 dead across 5 states: Deaths have been reported in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. At least 10 people are dead in North Carolina, a release from Gov. Roy Cooper’s office said Saturday evening. At least 23 are dead in South Carolina, including two firefighters in Saluda County, authorities said. In Georgia, at least 17 people have died, two of them killed by a tornado in Alamo, according to a spokesperson for Gov. Brian Kemp. In Florida, at least 11 people have died, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday, including several people who drowned in Pinellas County. And in Craig County, Virginia, one person died in a storm-related tree fall and building collapse, Gov. Glenn Youngkin said Friday.

• Dozens unaccounted amid communications outage: More than 200 people have been rescued from floodwaters in North Carolina after Helene wrought “biblical devastation,” Gov. Roy Cooper said Saturday. Still, over 60 people were unaccounted for in Buncombe County – which includes the hard-hit city of Asheville – and over 150 search and rescue operations were underway. “This is looking to be Buncombe County’s own Hurricane Katrina,” county manager Avril Pinder said, adding the county’s emergency services were overwhelmed. Crews are conducting welfare checks as communication continues to be disrupted, with no cell phone service in the region for at least “several days,” according to officials. Emergency call volumes are also exceedingly high, with the county receiving over 5,500 911 calls and conducting more than 130 swift water rescues since Thursday. East of Buncombe County, over 20 air rescues have been conducted in McDowell County since early Saturday morning. The emergency center is also being inundated with calls, many of which involve patients “entrapped with severe trauma, running out of oxygen or essential medical supplies.” But emergency response efforts are hampered by massive landslides, downed trees, power lines and severely flooded roads.

• Nearly 400 roads closed in North Carolina: In the aftermath of Helene, about 390 roads and dozens of highways remained closed in western North Carolina as of Sunday morning, according to the state’s transportation department. In Buncombe County, officials urged people to stay off roads to allow emergency vehicles through and to be aware of “the ground moving” as the county deals with landslides. County officials have requested additional resources from the state and federal government. Access to clean drinking water is another problem throughout the state. Seven water plants in Avery, Burke, Haywood, Jackson, Rutherford, Watauga and Yancey counties are closed, impacting nearly 70,000 households. A total of 17 water plants have reported having no power. There are 50 boil water advisories in effect across western communities.

• Millions without power in Southeast: The remnants of Helene continued to knock out power for several states across the eastern US on Saturday, with about 2.5 million customers left in the dark in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Virginia, according to PowerOutage.us.

• ‘It looks like a bomb went off’ in Georgia: Helene “spared no one,” Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday. Among the 17 people who died in Georgia was a mother and her 1-month-old twin boys, a 7-year-old boy and 4-year-old girl, and a 58-year-old man, according to Kemp. “It looks like a tornado went off, it looks like a bomb went off,” Kemp said.

• South Carolina ‘devastated’ by Helene: The National Weather Service Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, said Saturday it is “devastated by the horrific flooding and widespread wind damage that was caused by Hurricane Helene.” The agency called it “the worst event in our office’s history,” in a Facebook post Saturday evening.

• ‘Complete obliteration’ along Florida coast: Days after Helene slammed Florida on Thursday night as a Category 4 hurricane, countless residents are displaced, boil water notices are in place in multiple counties and power is out for over 243,000 customers. “You see some just complete obliteration for homes,” DeSantis said Saturday, noting Helene impacted some of the same communities affected by hurricanes Idalia and Debby. “That’s been an awful lot thrown at one community in just a 14, 15 month time period,” he said. Cleanup and recovery has started across the state, including in directly hit Taylor County, where crews have cleared 90% of larger roads, the sheriff’s office said Saturday.

• Additional rain expected: Helene became a post-tropical cyclone on Friday, but rainfall is expected to continue this weekend across parts of the southern Appalachian region. Additional totals of half an inch are expected for areas of western North Carolina, including Asheville, and eastern Tennessee, including Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. Up to 2 inches is possible for portions of Virginia and West Virginia through Monday. “Additional rainfall is not expected to exacerbate ongoing flooding but may lead to excessive runoff due to saturated soils,” the weather service said Sunday morning.

‘We all really need help here’

Since Helene started swamping the region, it’s turned neighborhoods into lakes, lifted cars like toys, snapped trees like twigs and left businesses underwater. Piles of thick mud and floating debris blocked streets as torrential rains collapsed roadways and washed out bridges. It’s left hundreds of people in North Carolina stranded in homes, hospitals or transportation systems, awaiting rescue.

“The priority is getting people out,” North Carolina Gov. Cooper told CNN affiliate Spectrum News. “And getting supplies in.”

But officials face a major hurdle: there’s a barrier: “Everything is flooded. It is very difficult for them to see exactly what the problems are,” Cooper said.

As floodwaters inundated Asheville, North Carolina, Friday, residents in an apartment complex watched as units were submerged in water.

Stevie Hollander, a 26-year-old who lives on the second floor with his sister and her fiancé, told CNN, “the water almost reached us but thankfully went down.” Most of the residents in the first-floor units left before the water rushed in, but some relocated to units on higher floors to stay with other residents, Hollander said.

“We all really need help here. We need water, power of sorts, food, gas. Anything.” he said, “We just don’t really know what to do.”

Floodwaters left Hollander and his family stranded in the apartment. They attempted to drive north Saturday, but road closures made it impossible and they had to return to the apartment. The family only has four water bottles left and little nonperishable food, Hollander said.

In Black Mountain, North Carolina, Sofia Grace Kunst contended with another problem – a landslide.

Kunst, who was there on a weeklong trip, was playing the card game Uno with six of her friends in a small room within a dining hall. She remembers the exact time mud and debris shattered a window and poured into the room on Friday: 9:10 a.m. Someone yelled, “Landslide! Everybody run,” so they all did.

“I see this giant wave of like mud and trees and rocks just coming towards us,” Kunst told CNN, estimating it was five or six feet high.

From there, everything happened very quickly.

She ran into the main room of the dining hall, only to see the wall completely cave in. They fled to the porch of the dining hall, where many of her peers were crying, and Kunst sat in shock, she said.

At that point, she realized she was barefoot, and still had her Uno cards in hand.

The group didn’t know where to go next because of water flowing on every side of them, but they ultimately decided to trek through muddy water to get to a parking lot on higher ground. After being stranded there for a while, they were able to get to a shelter,

“That’s when it hit most people. There were a lot of tears. For me, it really didn’t hit me emotionally, but my body started reacting. I started shaking like crazy. I felt like I had to, like, scream or let off energy,” Kunst said.

Deluge ‘wiped out’ North Carolina businesses before tourist season

In the community of Asheville, small businesses were left in shambles just before October, its biggest tourist season of the year.

As the day broke Saturday, business owner Patrick McNamara was able to take a first look at the destruction left in Helene’s wake. McNamara has run a small milk distribution business in Asheville for 12 years.

“The floodwaters were four feet above the dock,” McNamara said, “So the entire building has been wiped out.”

His business machinery was strewn across the warehouse, milk spoiled and inches of mud pilled all over the floor. McNamara estimates he’ll have to get rid of thousands of gallons of milk.

McNamara, concerned about access to resources, said he may have to consider relocating the business to another facility.

As he begins a lengthy cleanup process, McNamara is confident the community will be able to patch itself together and have a successful tourist season despite the devastation.

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CNN’s Isabel Rosales, Taylor Galgano, Sara Smart, Conor Powell, Caroll Alvarado, Caroline Jaime, Emma Tucker, Artemis Moshtaghian, Paradise Afshar and Raja Razek contributed to this report.