PENSACOLA, North Carolina, USA (AP) — The search for victims of Hurricane Helene entered its second week on Friday, as exhausted rescue teams and volunteers continued to work long days navigating devastated roads, fallen power lines, and landslides to reach isolated and missing individuals.
"We know these are difficult times, but please know that we are coming," said Quentin Miller, chief of police for Buncombe County, North Carolina, during a press conference on Thursday night. "We are on our way to find you. We are going to pick up our people."
With at least 215 fatalities, Helene is now the deadliest hurricane to hit the continental United States since Katrina in 2005, and dozens, or possibly hundreds, of people are still missing. Nearly half of the victims were in North Carolina, and dozens more lost their lives in South Carolina and Georgia.
In Buncombe County alone, there were 72 confirmed deaths as of Thursday night, Miller pointed out. The tourist city of Asheville, the most populous in the region, is located there. Despite this, the police chief remains hopeful that many of the missing individuals are alive.
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Rescuers face difficult terrains
More than a week after the storm hit the Gulf Coast of Mexico in Florida, the lack of phone signal and electricity continues to hinder efforts to contact the missing. This means that rescuers must slowly make their way through the mountains to find out if residents are safe.
Along the Cane River in the western Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, members of the Pensacola Volunteer Fire Department made their way through the trees at the top of a valley, almost a week after a wall of water swept through it.
Pensacola - which is a few kilometers (miles) from Mount Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi River - lost a large number of people, said Mark Harrison, chief medical officer of the department.
"We are starting to recover," he stated. "We have helped the people who were in a more critical situation."
Near the state border with Tennessee, teams were finally starting to reach the secondary roads after clearing the main ones, but this posed new challenges for them. The smaller roads wind with sharp curves and cross small bridges that can be difficult to navigate even in ideal weather.
"Everything is going well and then they come around a curve and the road has disappeared and there is a big ravine, or the bridge is no longer there," said Charlie Wallin, commissioner of Watauga County. "We can only go so far."
"Every day there are new requests to find out about someone from whom there has been no news yet," Wallin stated. "It is difficult to know when the search will end."
"You hope to be able to get closer and closer, but it's complicated to know," he added.
Electricity is slowly coming back
Electricity is gradually being restored and the number of homes and businesses without service has dropped below one million for the first time since last weekend, according to the website poweroutage.us. Most of the outages were recorded in the Carolinas and Georgia, the states hit by Helene after making landfall in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane on September 26th.
On Wednesday, the President of the United States, Joe Biden, flew over the devastation caused by the meteor in the Carolinas. His government committed to funding the cost of debris removal and emergency protective measures for six months in North Carolina, and for three months in Georgia. The funds will be used to address the impact of landslides and floods, and to finance rescuers, search and rescue teams, shelters, and food.
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The Associated Press journalists Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina; Darlene Superville in Keaton Beach, Florida; John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio; Michael Kunzelman in College Park, Maryland; Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa; and Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City, Utah, contributed to this report.