By ERIK VERDUZCO, JEFF AMY and KIMBERLEE KRUESI
SWANNANOA, N.C. — Many residents of the Carolinas still lacked running water, cellphone service and electricity Wednesday as rescuers searched for people unaccounted for after Hurricane Helene caused catastrophic damage across the Southeast and killed at least 166 people.
President Joe Biden will survey the devastation in the two states as floodwaters receded and revealed more of the death and destruction left in Helene’s path.
More than 1.2 million customers still had no power Wednesday in the Carolinas and Georgia, where Helene tore far inland after initial landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Some residents cooked food on charcoal grills or hiked to high ground in the hopes of finding a signal to let loved ones know they are alive.
“We have to jump-start this recovery process,” Biden said Tuesday, estimating it will cost billions. “People are scared to death. This is urgent.”
While Biden is in the Carolinas, Vice President Kamala Harris will be in neighboring Georgia.
Cadaver dogs and search crews trudged through knee-deep muck and debris in the mountains of western North Carolina looking for more victims. At least 57 people were killed in Buncombe County alone, home to city of Asheville, a tourism haven known for its art galleries, breweries and outdoor activities.
In small Swannanoa, outside Asheville, receding floodwaters revealed cars stacked on top of others and mobile homes that had floated away. Sinkholes pockmarked roads caked with mud and debris.
Cliff Stewart survived 2 feet of water that poured into his home, topping the wheels on his wheelchair and sending his medicine bottles floating. Left without electricity and reliant on food drop-offs from friends, he has refused offers to help him leave.
“Where am I going to go?” the Marine Corps veteran said. “This is all I’ve got. I just don’t want to give it up, because what am I going to do? Be homeless? I’d rather die right here than live homeless.”
Across the border in east Tennessee, a caravan including Gov. Bill Lee surveying damage outside the town of Erwin drove by a crew pulling two bodies from the wreckage, a grim reminder that the rescue and recovery operations are still very much ongoing and the death toll is likely to rise.
In Augusta, Georgia, Sherry Brown converted power from her car’s alternator to keep her refrigerator running. She has been taking “bird baths” with water collected in coolers. In another part of the city, people waited in line more than three hours to get water from one of five centers set up to serve more than 200,000 people.
What is being done to help?
More than 150,000 households have registered for assistance with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and that number is expected to rise rapidly in the coming days, said Frank Matranga, an agency representative.
Nearly 2 million ready-to-eat meals and more than a million liters of water have been sent to the hardest-hit areas, he said.
The storm unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina, dumping more than 2 feet (61 centimeters) of rain in places.
The administration of Gov. Roy Cooper said Tuesday that more than two dozen water plants remained closed. Active-duty U.S. military units may be needed to assist the long-term recovery, he said, adding that Biden had given “the green light” to mobilizing military assets soon.
A section of one of the region’s main arteries, Interstate 40, reopened Tuesday after a mudslide was cleared, but a collapsed stretch near North Carolina’s border with Tennessee remained closed.
How some of the hardest-hit areas are coping
Residents and business owners wore masks and gloves while clearing debris Tuesday in Hot Springs, North Carolina, where almost every building along the main street was heavily damaged.
Sarah Calloway, who owns the deli and gourmet grocery Vaste Riviere Provisions, said the storm arrived frighteningly quickly. She helped fill sandbags the day the night before, but they turned out to be useless. The water rose so rapidly that even though she and others were in an apartment on an upper floor, she feared they would not be safe. They called to request a rescue from a swift water team.
“It was really challenging to watch how quickly it rose up and then just to watch whole buildings floating down the river. It was something I can’t even describe,” she said.
In the Black Mountain Mobile Home Park in Swannanoa, Carina Ramos and Ezekiel Bianchi were overwhelmed by the damage. The couple, their children and dog fled in the predawn darkness on Friday as the Swannanoa River’s rapidly rising waters began flooding the bottom end of the park.
By then, trees blocked the roads and the couple abandoned their three vehicles, all of which flooded.
“We left everything because we were panicking,” Ramos said.
Mobile service knocked out
The widespread damage and outages affecting communications infrastructure left many people without stable access to the internet and cell service.
“People are walking the streets of Canton with their phones up in the air trying to catch a cellphone signal like it’s a butterfly,” said Mayor Zeb Smathers, of Canton, North Carolina. “Every single aspect of this response has been extremely crippled by lack of cellphone communication. The one time we absolutely needed our cellphones to work they failed.”
Teams from Verizon worked to repair toppled cell towers and damaged cables and to provide alternative forms of connectivity, the company said in a statement.
AT&T said it launched “one of the largest mobilizations of our disaster recovery assets for emergency connectivity support.”
The efforts to restore service was made more challenging by the region’s terrain and spread-out population, said David Zumwalt, president and CEO of the Association for Broadband Without Boundaries.
Destruction from Florida to Virginia
Helene blew ashore in Florida late Thursday as a Category 4 hurricane and upended life throughout the Southeast, with deaths reported in six states: Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia, in addition to the Carolinas.
With at least 36 killed in South Carolina, Helene passed the 35 people who were killed in the state after Hurricane Hugo made landfall north of Charleston in 1989.
When Lee, the Tennessee governor, flew to the eastern part of the state to survey damage Tuesday, residents said the governor and his entourage were the first help they had seen since the storm hit.
“Where has everyone been?” one frustrated local asked. “We have been here alone.”
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Kruesi reported from Hampton, Tennessee. Contributing to this report were Associated Press journalists Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh; Jeffrey Collins in Augusta, Georgia; John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia; Rebecca Santana in New Orleans; Shawn Chen in New York; Colleen Long in Washington; and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio.
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