Authorities across a wide swath of the southeastern United States face the daunting task of cleaning up from Hurricane Helene, one of the most powerful storms to hit the country, as the death toll continued to rise.
At least 43 deaths were reported by late on Friday, and officials feared more bodies will be discovered across several states.
Helene, downgraded late on Friday to a post-tropical cyclone, continued to produce heavy rains across several states, leading to 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 news conference.
At least 3.5 million customers remained without power across the southern states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, with authorities warning it could be several days before services were fully restored.
Scientists say climate change contributes to fuelling stronger, more destructive hurricanes.
Police and firefighters carried out thousands of water rescues throughout the affected states on Friday.
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, bringing 225km/h (140mph) winds. It left behind a chaotic landscape of overturned boats in harbours, felled trees, submerged cars and flooded streets.
Florida state authorities provided buses to evacuate people from the Big Bend area, home to about 832,000 people, and took them to shelters in the state capital, Tallahassee.
In a social media post on X, the city of Tampa, Florida, said that emergency workers conducted 78 water rescues, and the US coastguard said it rescued nine people from stormy waters.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp said that dozens of people remained trapped in buildings and that workers were “having a hard time getting to places” due to destruction and debris that have clogged roads.
More than 50 people were rescued from the roof of a hospital in Unicoi County, Tennessee, about 200km (120 miles) northeast of Knoxville, state officials said, after floodwaters swamped the rural community.
Rising waters from the Nolichucky River prevented ambulances and emergency vehicles from evacuating patients and others there, the Unicoi County Emergency Management Agency said on social media. Emergency crews in boats and helicopters were conducting rescues.
Elsewhere in Tennessee, Rob Mathis, the mayor of Cocke County, ordered the evacuation of downtown Newport because of a potential failure at the nearby Walters dam.
In western North Carolina, Rutherford County emergency officials warned residents near the Lake Lure Dam that it might fail, although they said late on Friday that failure did not appear imminent.
In nearby Buncombe County, landslides forced interstates 40 and 26 to close, the county said on X.
States of emergency were also declared in Virginia and Alabama, as the NHC warned that much of the southeast could experience power outages, toppled trees and intense flooding.
In the southern Appalachian mountains, the National Weather Service has warned the region could be hit with landslides and flooding not seen in more than a century.
“This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era,” it said.
Only three Gulf hurricanes since 1988 – Irma in 2017, Wilma in 2005, and Opal in 1995 – have been bigger than Helene’s predicted size, according to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach, The Associated Press news agency reported.
