AP – Hurricane Helene caused dozens of deaths and billions of dollars of destruction across a wide swath of the southeastern United States as it raced through, and more than three million customers went into the weekend without any power and for some a continued threat of floods.
Helene blew ashore in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday packing winds of 225 kilometres per hour and then quickly moved through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, uprooting trees, splintering homes and sending creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams.
Western North Carolina was essentially cut off because or landslides and flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads. There were 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 the roof of a hospital that was surrounded by water from a flooded river.
The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, is expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley over the weekend, the National Hurricane Centre said. Several flood and flash flood warnings remained in effect in parts of the southern and central Appalachians, while high wind warnings also covered parts of Tennessee and Ohio.
Among the at least 44 people killed in the storm were three firefighters, a woman and her one-month-old twins, and an 89-year-old woman whose house was struck by a falling tree. According to an Associated Press tally, the deaths occurred in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.
In North Carolina, a lake featured in the movie Dirty Dancing overtopped a dam and surrounding neighbourhoods were evacuated, although there were no immediate concerns it would fail. People also were evacuated from Newport, Tennessee, a city of about 7,000 people, amid concerns about a dam near there, although officials later said the structure had not failed.
Tornadoes hit some areas, including one in Nash County, North Carolina, that critically injured four people. Atlanta received a record 28.24 centimetres of rain in 48 hours, the most the city has seen in a two-day period since record keeping began in 1878, Georgia’s Office of the State Climatologist said on the social platform X. Some neighbourhoods were so badly flooded that only car roofs could be seen poking above the water.
Moody’s Analytics said it expects USD15 billion to USD26 billion in property damage.
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.
