ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Many residents of the Carolinas who still lacked running water, cellphone service and electricity Wednesday made do for the moment and questioned how long their patience would last nearly a week after Hurricane Helene devastated the Southeast. The storm and its aftermath have killed at least 178 people.
In remote mountain areas, helicopters hoisted the stranded to safety while search crews waded through floodwaters and moved toppled trees so they could look door to door for survivors.
More than 1.1 million customers still had no power Wednesday in the Carolinas and Georgia, where Helene tore far inland after barreling over Florida’s Gulf Coast six days ago.
“We have no water; we have no power; but I think it’s also been humbling,” Anna Ramsey said as she and her two children carried water in plastic bags from a distribution site in Asheville, North Carolina. “It’s been humbling … what we need to do for ourselves.”
Fallen trees left her family stranded for several days. They’ve bailed water from a creek in their backyard to flush toilets and cooked on a propane grill.
“Friday will probably be our breaking point,” she said.
Government cargo planes have been bringing food and water to the hardest-hit areas, and the Pentagon said Wednesday that the secretary of defense has authorized mobilizing 1,000 active-duty soldiers to help with supplies.
It may be weeks, though, before water is fully restored in Asheville, which supplies almost all of Buncombe County’s 275,000 residents. Thousands of feet of pipe from one reservoir were washed out and will have to be rebuilt, and a second intake is not working, said water system spokesperson Clay Chandler.
“There are portions of our distribution system that are going to have to be completely rebuilt,” Chandler said.
The administration of North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Tuesday that more than two dozen water plants remained closed.
As crews reached remote areas, more destruction came into view. Homes teetered on hillsides and riverbanks that had been washed away.
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.
Biden and Harris will get a firsthand look
President Joe Biden will survey the devastation in the Carolinas on Wednesday after saying a day earlier that estimating the recovery will cost billions. “People are scared to death. This is urgent,” he said.
While Biden is in the Carolinas, Vice President Kamala Harris will be in neighboring Georgia.
How some of the hardest-hit areas are coping
Residents and business owners wore masks and gloves while clearing debris 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 on an upper floor, 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, the damage overwhelmed Carina Ramos and Ezekiel Bianchi. The couple, their children and dog fled in the predawn darkness Friday as the rapidly rising Swannanoa River 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 37 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.
In east Tennessee, a caravan including Gov. Bill Lee surveying damage on Tuesday 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.