A week has passed since Hurricane Helene bulldozed through the southeastern U.S., leaving behind death, chaos and devastation.
"Helene was a large and devastating tropical cyclone that caused widespread destruction and fatalities across the Southeastern United States in late September 2024. It was the strongest hurricane on record to strike the Big Bend region of Florida, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane since Maria in 2017, and the deadliest to strike the mainland US since Katrina in 2005" (Wikipedia)
"For days before Helene made landfall in Florida, the National Weather Service in North Carolina warned of an historic combination of heavy rain, life-threatening flooding and catastrophic landslides along the mountains. (CNN)
More than 200 deaths have been recorded, but the actual count is probably closer to 2000.
"A week after the storm, the smell of death overpowers the cool mountain air over the isolated, twisting roads of devastated rural western North Carolina. ...
'You're driving past cities and you can smell the dead bodies,' said Jazmine Rodgers, 32, a consultant for nonprofits who has been volunteering to help neighbors in the hard-hit city of Asheville.
Asheville sits at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which meant the city turned into a 'catch basin' for rain gushing down 4,000 feet of elevation,...
"Now Asheville is getting so much attention even though there are smaller communities outside of Asheville that also need attention," Rodgers said.... the actual landscape of western North Carolina, there's many small towns, there's larger towns, but if you live on the side of a mountain you might have one way in and one way out,"...We're talking about entire mountainsides completely gone. We can't really account for how many people are missing because there's little hollers (or valleys) all over western North Carolina, little pockets of communities, little trailer parks. And if you don't have family in those areas, you probably never heard of them."
"In the resort town of Maggie Valley, North Carolina, about 35 miles west of Asheville, Joseph Franklin McElroy said Wednesday his 6-year-old twins were coping with the disaster by treating it as a "grand adventure" unaware their favorite teacher - like a second mom - had drowned during the storm...
McElroy lamented what he called the poor communication between local authorities and residents.
.... "There's a lot of people still missing their loved ones, not knowing whether they've been rescued. There is a sort of a psychological trauma that's going on here where people don't know and it's real."
(CNN)
