Authorities across a wide swath of the southeastern US yesterday faced the daunting task 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 post-tropical cyclone, continued to produce heavy rains across several states, sparking life-threatening flooding that threatened to create dam failures that could inundate entire towns.
Photo: Reuters
In Pinellas County, Florida, 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 five states, with authorities warning it could be several days before services were fully restored.
Scientists say climate change contributes to fueling stronger, more destructive hurricanes.
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 225kph 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 200km northeast of Knoxville, state officials said.
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.
Elsewhere in Tennessee, Cocke County Mayor Rob Mathis 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.
The extent of the damage in Florida began emerging after daybreak on Friday.
In coastal Steinhatchee, a storm surge — a wall of seawater pushed ashore by winds — of 2.4m to 3m moved mobile homes, the US National Weather Service said on X.
In Treasure Island, a barrier island community in Pinellas County, boats were grounded in front yards.
The city of Tampa posted on X that emergency personnel had completed 78 water rescues of residents and that many roads were impassable because of flooding. The Pasco County sheriff’s office rescued more than 65 people.
Officials had pleaded with residents in Helene’s path to heed evacuation orders, with US National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan describing the storm surge as “unsurvivable.”
Gualtieri said the conditions prevented first responders from answering several emergency calls.
On Friday, county authorities found at least five people dead.
Two others in Florida died, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s office reported 15 storm-related fatalities in that state, while North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said there had been two deaths there.
At least 19 people died during the storm across South Carolina, the Charleston-based Post and Courier newspaper reported, citing local officials.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS