Hurricane Helene left an enormous path of destruction across Florida and the entire southeastern U.S. on Friday, killing at least 40 people in four states, snapping trees like twigs, tearing apart homes and sending rescue crews on desperate missions to save people from floodwaters.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said dozens of people were still trapped in buildings damaged by the Category 4 hurricane. The storm had maximum sustained winds of 140 mph when it made landfall late Thursday in a sparsely populated region in Florida's rural Big Bend area, home to fishing villages and vacation hideaways where Florida’s Panhandle and peninsula meet.
But the damage extended hundreds of miles to the north, with flooding as far away as North Carolina, where a lake used in the movie “Dirty Dancing” overtopped a dam. Multiple hospitals in southern Georgia were without power, and one in Tennessee was closed.
Authorities were “having a hard time getting to places" so teams with chainsaws were "working to free up roads,” Kemp told a news conference.
All five who died in one Florida county were in neighborhoods where residents had been told to evacuate, said Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff in Pinellas County in the St. Petersburg area. He said people who stayed because they didn't believe the warnings wound up hiding in their attics to escape the rising water.
“We tried to launch boats, we tried to use high-water vehicles and we just met with too many obstacles,” Gualtieri said. He said the death toll could rise as emergency crews go door-to-door in the flooded areas.
Deaths also were reported in Georgia and the Carolinas.
Video on social media sites showed sheets of rain coming down and siding coming off buildings in Perry, Florida, near where the storm arrived. One news station showed a home that was overturned, and many communities established curfews.
“It’s really heartbreaking,” said Stephen Tucker, after the hurricane peeled off the brand-new roof of a church in Perry that had to be replaced after last year’s Hurricane Idalia.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the damage from Helene appeared to be greater than the combined damage of Idalia and Hurricane Debby in August. “It’s demoralizing,” he said.
Cities as far inland as Atlanta were drenched, with just car roofs poking out of the water in some neighborhoods.
As the hurricane’s eye passed near Valdosta, Georgia, a city of 55,000 near the Florida line, dozens of people huddled early Friday in a darkened hotel lobby. “We heard some rumbling,” said Fermin Herrera, 20, cradling his sleeping 2-month-old daughter in his arms.
Helene is the third storm to strike the city in just over a year. Tropical Storm Debby blacked out power to thousands in August, while Hurricane Idalia damaged an estimated 1,000 homes in Valdosta and surrounding Lowndes County a year ago. Now some downtown storefront windows were shattered and store awnings mangled.
Forecasters expected the system to continue weakening as it moves into Tennessee and Kentucky and drops heavy rain over the Appalachian Mountains, with the risk of mudslides and flash flooding.
In North Carolina, forecasters warned of flooding that could be worse than anything seen in the past century. Evacuations were underway in several areas of the state Friday, and around 300 roads were closed. The Connecticut Army National Guard sent a helicopter to help.
“It’s terrible. I don’t know if I will ever see anything like this again,” said Spencer Tate Andrews, of Asheville, North Carolina.
School districts and multiple universities canceled classes. Airports in Florida that closed were to reopen Friday, and inspectors were out examining bridges and causeways along the Gulf Coast to get them back open to traffic quickly, the state’s transportation secretary said.
