President Joe Biden has deployed an additional 1,000 active-duty troops to bolster relief efforts in the southeastern United States affected by Hurricane Helen.
These soldiers will join the 6,000 National Guard troops and 4,800 federal relief workers already deployed across six states affected by the extreme weather event.
At least 175 people are believed to have died from Hurricane Helen, one of the deadliest storms to hit the United States in recent memory.
Hundreds of other people remain missing as search and rescue teams struggle to reach remote areas.
Relief supplies were delivered via airdrops and mules. The U.S. government has said it could take years to resolve the problem.
Biden visited the hard-hit states of North Carolina and South Carolina on Wednesday, while Vice President Kamala Harris headed to the nearby state of Georgia.
North Carolina and Georgia are both key swing states in November’s presidential election. Political issues arose after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump visited Georgia in person earlier this week.
In North Carolina, Biden flew through western parts of the state that were affected by the storm. He is scheduled to travel to hard-hit communities in Florida and Georgia, as well as other parts of North and South Carolina, on Thursday, White House press secretary Carine Jean-Pierre announced.
“The Biden-Harris Administration has remained focused on using every tool available to help people and communities begin their path toward recovery and rebuilding,” Jean-Pierre said.
Helen was downgraded to a tropical storm after pummeling the United States on Thursday as the strongest Category 4 hurricane on record, hitting Florida’s Big Bend and sweeping through nearby states.
The scale of the rain clouds was unusual and the storm lasted a relatively long time. Saturated ground from previous rains was also an aggravating factor.
CBS News, the BBC’s U.S. partner, reported 175 deaths in six states: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia.
The damage surpasses that of Hurricane Ian, which became one of the worst storms of the 21st century in September 2022, killing at least 156 people.
According to CBS, nearly half of the deaths from Helen occurred in North Carolina alone, where it rained for six months.
Mountainous areas of the state have been hit by heavy rains (where storms occur frequently), washing away homes and bridges.
An emergency official in Buncombe County, which includes the hard-hit city of Asheville, said the state had experienced “biblical destruction.”
A volunteer involved in the relief effort told the BBC on Tuesday that he knew someone who “lost everything” in Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and moved to Asheville only to be hit again nearly 20 years later.
“It looks like she’s completely disappeared again,” the volunteer said. “She has no water to drink, no gasoline. The food in the refrigerator has rotted.”
The extreme weather also forced the closure of a mine in Spruce Pine, a small town home to the world’s largest source of high-purity quartz.
Authorities in Tennessee are investigating the operator of a plastics plant where 11 workers were swept away by flooding Friday. Five employees were rescued. Two people were confirmed dead and four people are missing.
Impact Plastics told CBS in a statement that it had been monitoring weather conditions around its Erwin plant in northeast Tennessee and had laid off workers “when water began to cover the parking lot and adjacent service roads and the plant lost power.”
But in interviews with local outlets, employees said they were told to continue working at the plant until it was too late to safely leave.
Jacob Ingram, a mold operator at the plant, filmed himself and four others waiting for rescue as cars and debris drifted in the mud surrounding him.
“I was working in shock when the storm hit yesterday,” Ingram wrote on Facebook, adding that he and 11 others were trapped in the back of a semi-truck. “I’m glad I’m alive.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said rebuilding efforts could take years. Biden issued disaster declarations to several states, allowing survivors to apply for federal aid.
On Monday, Biden addressed reports that up to 600 people were missing. “God willing, they are alive,” he said. “But my cell phone connection is poor so there is no way to contact me again.”
More than 1 million people remained without power in some affected states Wednesday morning, according to monitoring site Poweroutage.us.
Initial analysis of the storm already suggests that human-induced climate change played a significant role in the wasted rainfall.
After Helen hit late Thursday, record flooding peaks were measured in at least seven locations in North Carolina and Tennessee.
In western North Carolina, records that had stood since the “Great Flood” of July 1916 were broken.
The Atlantic hurricane season continues until the end of November. Water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean are currently above average, meaning much more powerful storms are likely.
