SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Days after Hurricane Helene swept through Florida and up through the southeastern United States, we are getting a clear picture of the damage. Dozens of people have died across the region, and that death toll is expected to rise. In North Carolina, Governor Roy Cooper warned today it could take weeks to regain communication with the hardest-hit communities in the western mountainous parts of the state.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROY COOPER: Many people are cut off because roads are impassable. They don't have power or communications.
DETROW: NPR's Liz Baker is covering this from Charlotte. Hey, Liz.
LIZ BAKER, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DETROW: So it really seems like the mountains of Western North Carolina are emerging as one of the hardest-hit areas. Do we know yet how hard?
BAKER: Not really. The death toll in Buncombe County alone - that's where the city of Asheville is - is now at least 30 and expected to go higher. That's not even a great way to know how many people are missing. The county registrar has a Google Doc that people can fill out if they're worried about their friends and family. And this is because communication has been hit really, really hard. Cell service is slowly starting to come back in some places like Asheville but will take much longer in rural mountain areas. And officials say that it's making operations very difficult. The National Guard has been flying around in helicopters and sort of, like, swooping down when they see people in need of rescue.
DETROW: Do we have a sense, given all of this, just how difficult this has been for rescue workers?
BAKER: Really hard. This is widespread, catastrophic damage, but it's really hard to get a sense of the devastation because it's nearly impossible to get to some of these places. The roads are washed out. Landslides have blocked many areas, and there's no power. But I did reach Jeremy Trantham. He's a fire captain for Spring Creek and Hot Springs, two communities up in the mountains north of Asheville, and here's what he had to say.
JEREMY TRANTHAM: We're doing a lot of well checks today just to see if people are OK or what they need, where they need it, food, water, medication, things like that.
BAKER: So he says he's doing wellness checks. But since so many people live on the other side of access bridges that got washed out, each one of those requires a swiftwater rescue team to wade across these really high creeks just to go door to door and figure out if everyone is OK. I spoke to one of those stranded people. Her name is Emily McGinty (ph). She's stuck in her friend's house in Spring Creek.
EMILY MCGINTY: We are all now, like, thirdhand seeing photos of our own neighboring communities from other people's Facebook reports. Images of these little towns completely underwater started making this seem like capital-C catastrophe level than just bad storm.
BAKER: So Scott, even people who are nearby, don't even know the extent of the damage. The governor said restoring communications is a top priority right now, and they're working to get temporary cell towers into the area. But that is also going to be very difficult because the roads are damaged. So pretty much everything, including temporary cell towers, need to be airlifted in.
DETROW: Yeah. So so many people in the meanwhile are waiting, waiting to see how bad this is, waiting to communicate, waiting to get a (ph) full sense of things. How are people doing? What are they doing?
BAKER: Well, for some people, power is coming back. In North Carolina, there were a million customers without power this morning, and now it's around half a million. So there is some progress there. I'm told even in Asheville, which is the bigger city in this region, many people are riding bikes and walking. That's to conserve fuel but also because the roads are wrecked. Our colleague Laura Hackett at Blue Ridge Public Radio went to a grocery store in Asheville this morning where people had been lined up for two hours before...
DETROW: Wow.
BAKER: ...The store even opened. And the main concern there seems to be water. Here's Bill Keys (ph). He came from a more rural area looking for bottled water.
BILL KEYS: The city advised that you better get it while you can because they're going to take the water system down. The water system has been heavily damaged. It's not like patching a leak here and there. There's parts that have been washed away.
BAKER: So it could be many weeks before the system is up and running there. You know, depending on where you were in these mountains, Scott, the storm dumped as much as 29 inches of rain.
DETROW: Wow.
BAKER: Yeah. And people have started referring to this as the region's version of Hurricane Katrina.
DETROW: Yeah. NPR's Liz Baker in Charlotte, N.C. - Liz, thanks so much.
BAKER: Thanks, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
