Nearly 100 People Are Still Missing in North Carolina After Hurricane Helene
The New York Times
Search and rescue teams are still looking for the missing, officials said, with 95 deaths already attributed to the storm’s wrath in the state.
About 100 people remain missing in North Carolina more than two weeks after Hurricane Helene ravaged the western stretch of the state, Gov. Roy Cooper said on Tuesday.
Mr. Cooper, speaking at a news conference, cautioned that the latest count, of 92 missing people, could change “as more reports come in and others are resolved.”
Search and rescue teams are still looking for the missing, and officials said that they had so far verified 95 storm-related deaths in North Carolina. The process of reporting and finding missing people was further complicated in the first days of recovery because of widespread communications outages.
Asheville and other communities in the western part of the state are still reeling from the devastation wrought by Helene, with thousands lacking access to power, running water and reliable roads.
The storm, which first made landfall along the Gulf Coast of Florida last month as a Category 4 storm, dumped heavy rains as it moved across the Southeast, killing at least 200 people across several states. It devastated the mountainous region between western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, where floodwaters washed away homes and roads and isolated entire communities for days.
Thousands of federal, state and National Guard workers have descended on the region to help with hurricane recovery, and Mr. Cooper said that some progress has been made. Rattling through the latest statistics, he said that there were just under 13,000 reported power outages, compared with one million in the immediate aftermath of the storm. About 580 roads remain closed, down from about 1,200.
