Rescuers continued to fan out across the North Carolina mountains on Tuesday morning, scouring the region for missing people and rushing supplies to the many communities that were still in dire need of food, water and power after Hurricane Helene.
As of Monday evening, more than 120 people across six states had died as a result of the storm, which made landfall late last week, and the toll was expected to rise. Almost a third of those killed were in the county surrounding Asheville, N.C.
Throughout southern Appalachia, many of the roads that had until recently served as lifelines for small mountainside towns were flooded, destroyed or blocked by debris. In some areas of the Carolinas, power was still scarce after flooding from the storm submerged electrical substations.
And in communities all across the South, cellphone service — at precisely the time when it couldn’t be needed more — was spotty or nonexistent.
The scope of the damage left state and federal politicians reaching for superlatives on Monday. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said that the storm was “unprecedented.” Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina described the destruction as “beyond belief.” Vice President Kamala Harris called the damage “heartbreaking,” and President Biden said the hurricane was “history-making.”
Mr. Biden promised long-term aid and said that he would visit North Carolina for a briefing and to survey the damage from the air on Wednesday. He also said that he planned to visit Florida and Georgia as soon as possible.
Helene made landfall in northwestern Florida on Thursday as a Category 4 storm, with winds of 140 miles per hour. It caused record-breaking storm surges in the Tampa Bay region of Florida, flash flooding in Atlanta and power outages as far north as Cincinnati.
Across the South, strong winds toppled trees. Tornadoes destroyed homes. Flash floods overwhelmed entire neighborhoods, and landslides destroyed public infrastructure, including for drinking water, which remains a key concern for emergency workers.
Water systems in the rapidly growing city of Asheville were badly damaged, and officials said that restoring the full system could take weeks. Officials were working to truck in drinkable water for the city’s 94,000 residents.
The Gilded Age-era Biltmore Estate in Asheville, one of the region’s best-known landmarks and tourist attractions, was closed indefinitely to assess property damage, its owners said on Monday.
Unreliable power and phone service was also posing major problems, making it hard for officials to know the extent of the damage in some hard-to-reach spots. More than 1.5 million electricity customers from Florida to West Virginia were still without power as of 4 a.m. Tuesday, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.
On Monday evening, Mr. Biden said that the recovery was “going to take a hell of a long time.” Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Mr. Biden’s homeland security adviser, added that 3,500 federal response personnel had been deployed, including more than 1,000 people from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
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