On Monday, Mayor Patrick Fitzsimmons found himself at the epicentre of a disaster zone.
His town of Weaverville, North Carolina, had no electricity and no power. Only one grocery store was operational, utility poles had gone down, the town’s water plant had flooded and people had been without safe drinking water for four days, he told the BBC.
In the larger Buncombe County, where Weaverville is located, at least 35 people are dead and 600 are unaccounted for, a local CBS News affiliate reported., external
Mr Fitzsimmons said the county set up a website where people can inquire about missing persons. Officials have so far received 11,000 requests.
Across the US south-east, millions of residents were thrown into chaos by storm Helene. It slammed into Florida as a category 4 hurricane on Thursday before barrelling across the states of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee, leaving flooding, power loss and death in its wake.
In the days since, the true scale of the destruction is coming into sharper relief as residents begin to return home to survey the damage.
At least 116 people have died nationwide, officials have said.
One of those people was Madison Shaw’s mother.
“Her last words to me were… ‘I love you, be safe. I’ll see you later,’” the resident of Anderson, South Carolina told CBS News. “And I said, ‘I love you. I’ll see you later as well.’”
“I can’t even describe it,” Ms Shaw told CBS News. “My mom was my best friend.”
A White House spokeswoman said on Monday that two million people are currently without power. President Joe Biden called the storm “history-making.”
Some of the most dire reports are coming from North Carolina, where the state’s governor Roy Cooper said that communities had been “wiped off the map” and that dozens of rescue teams had been deployed.
Buncombe County and the western corner of North Carolina endured some of the worst of Helene’s wrath.
The county includes Asheville, a city located in the Blue Ridge Mountains famed for its arts and music scene. Helene inundated the city with flood waters, drove people from their homes and left residents scrambling for basic resources. Trucks and trees smashed into buildings while downed power and telephone lines hung dangerously over the streets.
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