Crews search for survivors of Helene flooding; death toll passes 180

Cadaver dogs and search crews trudged through knee-deep muck and debris on Tuesday looking in the mountains of western North Carolina for victims of Hurricane Helene, days after the storm carved a deadly and destructive path through the Southeast.

With Helene’s death toll passing 180 on Wednesday, searchers fanned out across the region, using helicopters to get past washed-out bridges and hiking through wilderness to reach isolated homes.

Many who lived through what was one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history were left without electricity or any way to reach out for help. Some cooked food on charcoal grills or hiked to high ground in the hopes of finding a signal to call loved ones.

“Communities were wiped off the map,” North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, said at a news conference Tuesday.

The devastation was especially bad in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where at least 50 people died in and around Asheville, a tourism haven known for its art galleries, breweries and outdoor activities.

Just outside the city, in the small community of Swannanoa, receding floodwaters revealed cars stacked on top of others and trailer homes that had floated away during the storm. Roads were caked with mud and debris and pockmarked by sinkholes.

Exhausted emergency crews worked around the clock to clear roads, restore power and phone service, and reach those still stranded by the storm, which killed at least 152 people in six states. Nearly half of the deaths were in North Carolina, while dozens of others were in South Carolina and Georgia.

Nearly 2 million ready-to-eat meals and more than a million liters of water have been sent to the hardest-hit areas.

The storm unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina. Rainfall estimates in some areas have topped more than 2 feet since Wednesday, and several main routes into Asheville were damaged or blocked by mudslides.

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.

The widespread damage and outages affecting key communications infrastructure left many people without stable access to the internet and cellular service, the Federal Communications Commission said.

Teams from Verizon were working to repair downed cell towers, damaged fiber cables and provide alternative forms of connectivity across the region, the company said in a statement.

AT&T, meanwhile, 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.

Western North Carolina suffered relatively more devastation because that’s where the remnants of Helene encountered the higher elevations and cooler air of the Appalachian Mountains, causing even more rain to fall.

Asheville and many surrounding mountain towns were built in valleys, leaving them especially vulnerable to devastating rain and flooding. Plus, the ground already was saturated before Helene arrived, said Christiaan Patterson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.