69传媒

PERRY, Fla. 鈥� Massive rains from powerful left people stranded, without shelter and awaiting rescue Saturday, as the cleanup began from a tempest that killed at least 64 people, caused widespread destruction across the U.S. Southeast and left millions without power.

"I've never seen so many people homeless as what I have right now," said Janalea England, of Steinhatchee, Florida, a small river town along the state's rural Big Bend, as she turned her commercial fish market into a storm donation site for friends and neighbors, many of whom couldn't get insurance on their homes.

Helene in Florida's Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday with winds of 140 mph.

From there, it quickly moved through Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday that it "looks like a bomb went off" after viewing splintered homes and debris-covered highways from the air.

Weakened, Helene then soaked the Carolinas and Tennessee with torrential rains, sending creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams.

was isolated because of landslides and flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads.

There were hundreds of water rescues, none more dramatic than in rural Unicoi 69传媒 in East Tennessee, where were plucked by helicopter from a hospital rooftop Friday. The rescues continued into Saturday in Buncombe 69传媒, North Carolina, where part of Asheville was underwater.

"To say this caught us off guard would be an understatement," said Quentin Miller, the county sheriff.

Water flooded Janetta Barfield's car there as a creek overflowed, reaching her lap, before a police officer rescued her.

"It happened so fast to me and scared the life out of me because nothing like that ever happened," said Barfield, a traveling nurse.

While there have been deaths in the county, Emergency Services Director Van Taylor Jones said he wasn't ready to report specifics, partially because downed cell towers hindered efforts to contact next of kin.

Relatives put out desperate pleas for help on Facebook. Among those waiting for news was Francine Cavanaugh, whose sister told her she was going to check on guests at a vacation cabin as the storm began hitting Asheville. Cavanaugh, who lives in Atlanta, hasn't been able to reach her since then.

"I think that people are just completely stuck," she said.

The storm, downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, was expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley on Saturday and Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said.

鈥楥atastrophic鈥� flooding

It unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina, where Gov. Roy Cooper described it as "catastrophic" as search and rescue teams from 19 states and the federal government came to help. One community, Spruce Pine, was doused with over 2 feet of rain from Tuesday through Saturday.

In Atlanta, 11.12 inches of rain fell over 48 hours, the most the city has seen over two days since record keeping began in 1878.

President Joe Biden said Saturday that Helene's devastation has been "overwhelming" and pledged to send help.

Helene is the deadliest tropical cyclone for South Carolina since Hurricane Hugo killed 35 people when it came ashore just north of Charleston in 1989. Deaths also were reported in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

Moody's Analytics said it expects $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage. AccuWeather's preliminary estimate of the total damage and economic loss from Helene in the U.S. is between $95 billion and $110 billion.

Climate change exacerbated conditions that allow such storms to thrive, rapidly intensifying in warming waters and turning into powerful cyclones sometimes in a matter of hours.

Evacuations and overtopped dams

Evacuations began before the storm hit and continued as lakes , including one in North Carolina that forms a lake featured in the movie "Dirty Dancing." Helicopters were used to rescue some people from flooded homes.

Elin Fisher and her husband, who teach whitewater standup paddleboarding on the Nolichucky River in Tennessee, had to move their camper three times to stay ahead of rising waters.

And in Newport, Tennessee, Jonah Wark waited so long to evacuate that a boat had to come to the rescue. "Definitely a scary moment," Wark said.

Among the 11 confirmed deaths in Florida were nine people who drowned in their homes in a mandatory evacuation area on the Gulf Coast in Pinellas 69传媒, where St. Petersburg is located, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.

None of the victims were from Taylor 69传媒, which is where the . It came ashore near the mouth of the Aucilla River, about 20 miles northwest of where last year at nearly the same ferocity.

"If you had told me there was going to be 15 feet to 18 feet of storm surge, even with the best efforts, I would have assumed we would have had multiple fatalities," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday.

Taylor 69传媒 is in Florida's Big Bend, where salt marshes and pine flatwoods stretch into the horizon, and where the condo developments and strip malls that have carved up much of the state's coastlines are largely absent.

The county went years without taking a direct hit from a hurricane. But after Idalia and two other storms in a little over a year, the area is beginning to feel like a hurricane superhighway.

"It's bringing everybody to reality about what this is now with disasters," said John Berg, 76, a resident of Steinhatchee, a small fishing town and weekend getaway.

Timmy Futch, of the Big Bend community of Horseshoe Beach, stayed put for the hurricane, only driving to high ground when the water reached his house.

"We watched our town get tore to pieces is what we done," he said, noting that his grandfather helped found the town, where many homes have been reduced to piles of lumber.

The aftermath

About 60 miles to the north, cars lined up before sunrise Saturday at a free food distribution site in Perry, Florida, amid widespread power outages.

"We're making it one day at a time," said Sierra Land, who lost everything in her fridge, as she arrived at the site with her 5- and 10-year-old sons and her grandmother.

Thousands of utility crew workers descended upon Florida in advance of the hurricane, and by Saturday power was restored to more than 1.9 million homes and businesses. But hundreds of thousands remain without electricity there and in Georgia.

Chris Stallings, director of the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency, said crews were focused on opening routes to hospitals and making sure supplies can be delivered to damaged communities.

Helene was the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted an above-average season this year because of .

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Payne reported from Perry, and Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Missouri. Associated Press journalists Seth Borenstein in New York; Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee; Jeff Amy in Atlanta; Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut; and Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed.