Missing People, Power Outages, Ruined Roads: Issues Across the Southeast After Helene

The worst fallout from the hurricane is in western North Carolina, but at least five other states are grappling with their own intractable problems.

More than a week after Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm, state officials across the Southeast are scrambling to repair damaged electrical lines, roads and bridges affecting tens of thousands across the path of destruction.

Helene wreaked havoc from Florida to the Appalachian states after making landfall on the Gulf Coast on Sept. 26. The worst fallout is still in western North Carolina, where, in addition to the mass wreckage of destroyed buildings, teams are searching for dozens of missing people, some areas have no potable water, cellphone communication remains spotty, more than 170,000 customers still don’t have power, and hundreds of roads are closed.

But at least five other states are grappling with their own intractable problems from impassable highways to ruined farmland.

President Biden, who surveyed the storm’s toll this week, said Helene most likely caused billions of dollars in damage, and he asked Congress on Friday to quickly replenish disaster relief funds to help.

Here are some of the biggest current issues in the Southeast:

In North Carolina, an untold number of people are still missing.

In the western part of the state, many families’ greatest concern is their unaccounted loved ones. But looking for them in mountain-ringed towns and rugged ravines has been a daunting task for search teams, and the effort has been hampered by poor cell service and widespread power losses.

It is unclear exactly how many are still missing. The Asheville police said it had located 270 unaccounted people by Friday evening. But 75 additional cases of missing people remain active, and the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security were called in to help. Other problems, including delayed aid to non-English speaking communities, also continue to challenge recovery efforts.

Beyond that, however, simply getting access to basic needs is still a struggle for thousands. Residents in Asheville have been forced to travel elsewhere, if possible, for water so they can wash their clothes, take showers and flush their toilets.

Many people in western North Carolina still have not been able to get consistent cellphone reception, if they get any at all. In Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, 40 percent of its 347 cellular towers were not working on Friday, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

Transportation officials say that repairing the roads — particularly around the North Carolina-Tennessee border — may take months. That has many residents worried about the impact on the local economy.

Tens of thousands of homes in Florida were destroyed.

Helene was the third storm in 13 months to ravage the Big Bend region along the Gulf Coast of Florida, wrecking beachside towns and displacing many residents.

The state’s biggest challenge has been cleaning up tens of thousands of damaged homes so it can start the rebuilding process. In Taylor County, where Helene made landfall, the storm caused about $50 million in damages and destroyed or rendered uninhabitable at least 250 homes on the coastline, said John Louk, the director of emergency management for the county.

Hundreds of miles south, nearly 17,000 homes in Pinellas County are ruined or have major damages. The densely populated Tampa Bay region saw record-breaking storm surge.

Many families still have no long-term shelter plans, though Gov. Ron DeSantis has announced that people who are still recovering and rebuilding may apply for a travel trailer.

Georgia’s crucial farming industry is in shambles.

Agricultural officials are still assessing the scale of losses after Helene decimated crops and farm buildings in eastern Georgia, exacting what officials called “catastrophic” damage in the state’s oldest and largest industry. An $83 billion sector, agriculture employs more than 320,000 people in Georgia.

No part of this vital industry was spared by Helene, Gov. Brian Kemp said at a Friday news conference.

A third of the cotton crop and up to 30 percent of the peanut crop were wrecked. More than 220 poultry houses were demolished, and hundreds more suffered damages. At least 48,000 acres of pecans were ruined.

It is a rough start to the fall harvest for local farmers, who also had to rebound after Hurricane Michael in 2018 inflicted $2 billion in agricultural losses. State officials are racing to secure emergency relief before farm operators — who have already been reeling from inflation and low commodity prices — begin to collapse.

Some South Carolinians may not have power for weeks.

Service crews in South Carolina are making swift progress on fixing electric outages across the state, bringing down the number of customers without power to under 158,000 as of Saturday afternoon from more than 3 million shortly after Helene arrived. But the problems are rampant for homes and businesses near the state’s western edges.

In Aiken County, which sits on the border with Georgia and has some 170,000 residents, a third of the power remained out on Friday afternoon, Gov. Henry McMaster said at a news conference. Nearby in Edgefield County, more than half of all outages still needed repairs.

Helene toppled power lines above ground. But a local utility company said on social media that engineers were discovering the damage lies far beyond “what meets the eye.” Many underground cables are flooded beyond repair, and power transformers are crushed from debris.

Eastern Tennessee faces painful questions over deaths at a factory.

After at least 13 people in Tennessee died in the storm, state investigators are probing complaints out of a factory where some lost their lives. At Impact Plastics in Erwin, it is believed that about 11 employees, some of them immigrants, were swept away by floodwaters. At least three workers were found lifeless, and three others remain missing, immigrant advocates said.

But some surviving workers say the company had told the employees not to leave and were not given evacuation instructions, according to the advocates.

The company has denied fault. Gerald O’Connor, the founder and president, said in a video statement that employees were instructed to leave the plant at least 45 minutes before the “gigantic force of the flood” arrived. “There was time to escape,” Mr. O’Connor said.

Tennessee authorities are now investigating the circumstances behind the deaths, a potentially long and painful process as the state reels from other problems. More than 900 homes, for example, were damaged in six counties, state officials said.

Major highways in Virginia are critically damaged.

Helene was Virginia’s most significant disaster since Hurricane Irene in 2011, when 2.5 million people across the commonwealth experienced power failures, officials said. Helene knocked out power for 310,000 people, but by Friday afternoon, more than 95 percent of all power outages had been restored.

But the state’s road network remains “a real challenge,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin said.

In southwest Virginia, three bridges were washed away and two main highways are still obstructed and shut down. One of the closed highways is Route 58, a main thoroughfare that skims the state’s borders with North Carolina and Tennessee and contains a 1.5-mile stretch that is “absolutely impassable,” according to the governor.

State leaders are rushing to create a plan to reopen the highways, along with another 52 roads in the region whose closures have left many rural communities isolated.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Emily Cochrane and Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting.