Hurricane Helene passed the grim milestone of 200 fatalities on Thursday to become the deadliest hurricane on U.S. soil since Katrina devastated New Orleans nearly two decades ago, which left 1,392 people dead.
That chilling casualty count is far from done growing, officials warn, with there still being hundreds of people unaccounted for in the mountain towns of western North Carolina.
The official death toll as of Thursday afternoon was 202. Nearly half of the fatalities came from North Carolina, where some small towns were almost entirely washed away by fast-moving flood waters.
“There’s several missing people—a dozen or more that know, that we saw swept away—that we haven’t located,” Rowan County Sheriff Travis Allen told MSNBC on Thursday. “So I think as the days go on, this number is going to get drastically worse.”
Rivers flooded throughout western North Carolina, damaging or destroying any nearby structures and rendering many roads unusable.
Marco Bello/Reuters
Katrina killed 1,400 people when it inundated New Orleans on Aug. 25, 2005, causing $125 billion in damage. Helene’s devastation has been forecasted to cost tens of billions of dollars, with some estimates, such as AccuWeather’s, predicting the total cost could be as high as $160 billion.
Helene destroyed key infrastructure in western North Carolina, including its major highways, which has hindered relief and recovery efforts. Much of Asheville and its surrounding communities remain without power six days after Helene’s winds and rains first arrived on Friday afternoon.
Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer appeared to fight back tears when Joe Biden visited western North Carolina on Wednesday.
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Joe Biden visited the region yesterday and announced he was deploying a thousand soldiers to join the North Carolina National Guard to deliver supplies, food, and water to isolated communities. Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer appeared to fight back tears as she met with Biden.
Some who live in the region’s isolated mountain communities are only just making contact with rescuers. The NASCAR legend Greg Biffle shared footage on Wednesday that showed him making contact with a stranded family after a man desperately used a mirror to reflect sunlight in the direction of his helicopter.
Biffle, who lives just north of Charlotte himself, said he delivered the stranded family a “chainsaw, EpiPens, insulin, chicken food, formula, gas, two stroke oil, and sandwiches.”
Helene made landfall in Florida’s rural big bend region on Friday before quickly moving northeast through Georgia, South Carolina, and into the mountains of North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. The storm’s speed meant it wasn’t as broken up as usual as it moved inland, allowing it to induce catastrophic floods that many locals believed wasn’t possible.
Many roads and highways in North Carolina were destroyed by Hurricane Helene, crippling recovery efforts.
Travis Long/Reuters
Helene’s death toll by state as of Tuesday afternoon was 98 in North Carolina; 39 in South Carolina; 33 in Georgia; 19 in Florida; 11 in Tennessee; and two in Virginia.
As the dead are counted, heartbreaking anecdotes about people’s final moments alive have emerged. That included news that the bodies of a South Carolina couple in their 70s, Marcia Jerry Savage, were found hugging each other in bed under a tree that’d fatally crushed them.
