Helene has reportedly killed at least 20 people and inflicted more than 4m power outages across the south-eastern US after crashing ashore in north-western Florida late on Thursday as a potent category 4 hurricane, according to officials.
The storm – which registered maximum sustained winds of 140mph (225km/h) – had weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia early on Friday, when residents whose communities experienced Helene’s peak effects more directly were only just beginning to fathom the recovery process ahead.
At least 11 were killed in Georgia, including a first responder, said the state’s governor, Brian Kemp. Seven were killed in Florida, with five of those deaths occurring in Pinellas county, which includes the Tampa Bay area. And others were killed in North Carolina and South Carolina, with officials attributing several of the deaths linked to the storm to falling trees.
Meanwhile, as of early Friday, about 1.1m households and businesses in Florida were without power, though some had started regaining electricity later. South Carolina was reporting 1.2m power outages, Georgia had more than 1m and North Carolina had about 867,000, according to poweroutage.us. Large swaths of Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia were also out.
Helene made landfall at about 11.10pm in Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend area, home to fishing villages and vacation hideaways where the state’s Panhandle and peninsula meet.
Nonetheless, social media site users watched in horror as video showed sheets of rain lashing Perry, Florida, near Helene’s landfall. Winds tore siding from buildings in almost complete darkness. One local news station recorded a home as it flipped over.
Forecasters had asked residents to prepare for what they called a “nightmare” 20ft (6-meter) storm surge, essentially a wide, potentially deadly wall of water pushed inland by the approaching storm.
Drone video from the storm chaser Aaron Rigsby showed residences that collapsed and were damaged amid storm surge in the Florida community of Steinhatchee. Florida’s Tampa Bay was among the areas that were badly inundated by storm surge.
The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, urged residents to prepare themselves for the likelihood that Helene’s death toll would rise as communities complete damage assessments in the storm’s aftermath. But he also said the state’s rescue crews had ultimately kept that number down as low as possible by performing “thousands of missions” overnight.
“Those missions saved a lot of lives,” DeSantis said.
First responders were out on boats on Friday in Perry. Officials in Citrus county, Florida, about 120 miles south, warned people who were trapped in homes or other buildings to resist treading through floodwaters without rescuers’ help, saying there could be dangers such as live electric wires, sewage and sharp objects lurking underneath.
Kemp admonished Georgians that it was “a very dangerous environment” in the wake of Helene. “One of our finest has lost his life trying to save others,” Kemp said.
In Valdosta, Georgia, a city of 55,000 near the state’s border with Florida, Rhonda Bell and her husband spent a sleepless night in the downstairs bedroom of their century-old home. She told the Associated Press that an oak tree smashed through the roof of an upstairs bedroom and collapsed on to the living room below.
“I just felt the whole house shake,” said Bell, whose neighbors had roof shingles torn away and fence panels knocked down. “Thank God we’re both alive to tell about it.”
Beyond Florida and Georgia, up to 10in (25cm) of rain fell in the North Carolina mountains. Forecasters were predicting up to 14in more before the end of the deluge, an amount that could cause flooding that is more severe than anything seen in the past century.
“This is one of the worst storms in modern history for parts of … North Carolina,” the state’s governor, Roy Cooper, said. “Our hearts are heavy.”
Areas 100 miles (160km) north of the Florida-Georgia line expected hurricane conditions. Georgia opened its parks to evacuees and their pets, including horses. Officials imposed overnight curfews in many cities and counties in south Georgia. Atlanta was under a rare flash flood emergency warning.
One county in Georgia, Thomas, extended such a curfew until noon Friday, a signal that conditions were “still very hazardous there”, the local sheriff’s office said in a social media post.
Another sheriff’s office, in Florida’s Taylor county, asked residents who chose not to evacuate ahead of Helene to write their names, birthdays and other identifying information on their limbs in permanent marker. “So that you can be identified and [your] family notified,” the agency wrote in what was grim advice ahead of the storm.
“I’m going to stay right here at the house,” the state ferry boat operator Ken Wood, 58, told Reuters from coastal Dunedin in Florida, where he planned to ride out the storm with his 16-year-old cat Andy.
School districts and multiple universities across the affected region canceled classes. Airports in Tampa, Tallahassee and Clearwater were closed Thursday, while cancellations of flights and other matters were widespread elsewhere in Florida and beyond.
Helene on Wednesday had swamped parts of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. It was the ninth major hurricane – category 3 or higher – to make landfall along the US’s Gulf coast since 2017. Experts attribute such a high rate of powerful, destructive storms to the climate crisis, which is spurred in part by the burning of fossil fuels.
“It’s as if something has changed,” the Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza said in a widely shared X post.
As for this Atlantic hurricane season, which began 1 June and does not officially end until 30 November, Helene was the eighth named storm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicted this Atlantic hurricane season would be above average because of record high ocean temperatures.
