President Biden on Wednesday ordered the Pentagon to deploy up to 1,000 active-duty troops to assist with aid efforts after Hurricane Helene. The announcement came hours before the president will get an aerial view of the destruction wrought by the storm in visits to North and South Carolina.
The extent of the damage across the Southeast is still coming to light six days after Helene made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Across the mountains of southern Appalachia, many residents remain isolated by muddy debris and washed-out roads.
Broken water systems, downed power lines and poor cellphone service are complicating rescue and recovery efforts. The active-duty troops that Mr. Biden is deploying from Fort Liberty in Fayetteville, N.C., will join more than 6,000 National Guard members and 4,800 federal aid workers already spread out across devastated parts of the Southeast.
“It’s going to take a long haul to restore these communities,” the president told reporters on Tuesday.
Mr. Biden plans to visit the emergency operations center in Raleigh, the state’s capital, and fly over the damaged region to avoid disrupting emergency efforts. He will also meet with emergency workers in South Carolina and is planning visits to other states in the coming days. Vice President Kamala Harris will go to Georgia on Wednesday.
Though the storm did extensive damage in parts of Florida, many of the hardest-hit places were hundreds of miles from any coastline. Floods and landslides rendered roads useless, turned downtowns into ghost towns and reduced entire neighborhoods to piles of rubble.
At least 176 people in six states, from Florida to Tennessee, died because of the hurricane, officials have said. And it remains unclear how many people are missing.
Thousands of emergency workers have been racing to clear blocked roads and push through — or fly over — soggy debris to deliver food and water, including by helicopter and cargo plane.
In Asheville, a fast-growing city in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, water access remains a stubborn problem. The University of North Carolina Asheville has been without power, water and internet service since last week, and the school said on Tuesday that classes would not resume until the end of the month.
More than a million electricity customers from Florida to West Virginia were still without power on Wednesday morning, according to the tracking site PowerOutage.us.
While state officials across the Southeast are still focused on immediate needs, including search-and-rescue efforts and road repairs, they have also made clear that there will be no quick fix for the region. A full recovery, they say, will take a very long time.
“This disaster is unlike anything our state has ever experienced,” William Ray, North Carolina’s emergency management director, said at a Tuesday news conference.
In South Carolina, state officials have fielded hundreds of requests for food, water, fuel and chain saws, Kim Stenson, director of the state’s emergency management division, said on Tuesday. “Damage assessment is ongoing in many counties,” he said.
Mr. Biden said on Tuesday evening that he expected rebuilding efforts to cost billions of dollars. “It’s going to take a lot of work and a lot of determination,” he said.
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