The search for victims of Hurricane Helene dragged into its second week on Friday (October 4), as exhausted rescue crews and volunteers continued to work long days — navigating past washed-out roads, downed power lines, and mudslides — to reach the isolated and the missing.
“We
know these are hard times, but please know we’re coming,” Sheriff Quentin
Miller of Buncombe County, North Carolina, said at a Thursday evening press
briefing. “We’re coming to get you. We’re coming to pick up our people.”
With
at least 215 killed, Helene is already the deadliest hurricane to hit the
mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005, and dozens or possibly hundreds of people
are still unaccounted for. Roughly half the victims were in North Carolina,
while dozens more were killed in South Carolina and Georgia.
In
Buncombe County alone, 72 people had been confirmed dead as of Thursday
evening, Miller said. Buncombe includes the tourist hub of Asheville, the
region’s most populous city. Still, the sheriff hopes that many of the
missing are alive.
“Your
safety and well-being are our highest priority. And we will not rest until you
are secure and cared for.”
Rescuers face difficult terrain
Now, more than a week since the storm roared onto Florida’s Gulf Coast, lack of
phone service and electricity continues to hinder efforts to contact the
missing. That means search crews must trudge through the mountains to learn
whether residents are safe.
Along
the Cane River in western North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the Pensacola
Volunteer Fire Department had to cut their way through trees at the top of a
valley on Thursday, nearly a week after a wall of water swept through.
Mark Harrison, the department's chief medical officer, said Pensacola, which is a few miles from Mount Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi River, lost an untold number of people.
“We’re
starting to do recovery,” he said. “We’ve got the most critical people out.”
Near
the Tennessee state line, crews were finally starting to reach side roads after
clearing the main roads, but that brought new challenges. The smaller
roads wind through switchbacks and cross small bridges that can be tricky to
navigate even in the best weather.
“Everything is fine, and then they come around a bend, and the road is gone, and it’s one big gully, or the bridge is gone,” said Charlie Wallin, a Watauga County commissioner. “We can only get so far.”
Wallin said there are new requests every day to check on someone who hasn’t been heard from yet. It is hard to tell when the search will end.
“You
hope you’re getting closer, but it’s still hard to know,” he said.
Power slowly coming back
Electricity
is being slowly restored, and the number of homes and businesses without power
dipped below 1 million on Thursday for the first time since last weekend,
according to poweroutage.us. Most outages are in the Carolinas and
Georgia, where Helene struck after coming into Florida on Sept. 26 as a
Category 4 hurricane.
President
Joe Biden flew over the devastation in North and South Carolina on Wednesday.
The administration announced a federal commitment to foot the bill for debris
removal and emergency protective measures for six months in North Carolina and
three months in Georgia. The money will address the impacts of landslides and flooding and cover the costs of first responders, search and rescue teams, shelters, and mass feeding.