US southeast faces daunting task cleaning up from ‘Helene’
ATLANTA—Authorities across a wide swath of the southeastern United States faced the daunting task on Saturday of cleaning up from Hurricane “Helene,” one of the most powerful to hit the country, as the death toll continued to rise.
At least 43 deaths were reported by late on Friday, and officials feared still more bodies would be discovered across several states.
Helene, downgraded late on Friday to a posttropical cyclone, continued to produce heavy rains across several states, sparking life-threatening flooding that threatened to create dam failures that could inundate entire towns.
In Florida’s Pinellas County near Tampa, sheriff Bob Gualtieri said he had never seen destruction like that which Helene wrought.
“I would just describe it, having spent the last few hours out there, as a war zone,” Gualtieri told a press conference.
At least 3.5 million customers remained without power across five states, with authorities warning it could be several days before services were fully restored.
Big Bend
Before moving north through Georgia and into Tennessee and the Carolinas, Helene hit Florida’s Big Bend region as a powerful Category 4 hurricane on Thursday night, packing 225 kph winds.
It left behind a chaotic landscape of overturned boats in harbors, felled trees, submerged cars and flooded streets.
Police and firefighters carried out thousands of water rescues throughout the affected states on Friday.
More than 50 people were rescued from the roof of a hospital in Unicoi County, Tennessee, about 200 km northeast of Knoxville, state officials said, after floodwaters swamped the rural community.
