President Biden will get an aerial view Wednesday of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene across the mountains of western North Carolina, where many residents are isolated by muddy debris and washed-out roads.
Six days after Helene made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast, the extent of the damage across the Southeast is still coming to light. Broken water systems, downed power lines and poor cellphone service are complicating rescue and recovery efforts.
“There’s so much, so much, that has to be done, beyond what we’re even thinking about now,” Mr. Biden said in a call this week to the mayor of Asheville, N.C. She shared a portion of the call on social media ahead of the president’s trip.
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 said he planned visits to other states, as well.
“It’s going to take a long haul to restore these communities,” the president told reporters on Tuesday. A White House statement said the federal government had sent more than 7.1 million meals, 150 generators and more than 200,000 tarps to the region.
Though the storm did extensive damage in parts of Florida, many of the hardest-hit places were in the mountains of southern Appalachia, 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.
More than 130 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.
Hundreds of National Guard members and other 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 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.
A dozen Senators from states affected by Helene said in a letter on Tuesday to Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, that Congress may need to reconvene in October to enact legislation for disaster relief.
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