Helene leaves "unimaginable" destruction in 6 states as death toll tops 100

Hurricane Helene has left officials in five Southeastern states grappling to respond to the widespread destruction it caused after hitting Florida as a Category 4 storm last week, with the death toll now entering the triple digits.

Officials confirmed 35 deaths in the flood-hit Buncombe County and raised the death count in Georgia from 17 to 25 Monday, bringing the number of storm-related deaths across six states to at least 120, per AP.

Buncombe County in western North Carolina is home to the city of Asheville, where residents saw historic water level rises.

Officials also confirmed storm-related deaths in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, as search and rescue teams continued to respond to the fallout from the hurricane that struck Florida late Thursday before moving into Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee.

Widespread outages still affected hundreds of thousands of people in multiple states Monday morning, including North and South Carolina and Georgia.

Underscoring the widespread threats the former Hurricane Helene posed, the Biden-Harris administration approved emergency requests for federal assistance from Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Alabama ahead of the storm's landfall.

FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told CBS News Sunday that the five states affected by the storm "are going to have very complicated recoveries, but we will continue to bring those resources in to help them, technical assistance as they're trying to identify the best ways to rebuild."

Pamlico County Emergency Management in a Saturday Facebook post described the damage from Helene's remnants in Chimney Rock, some 41 miles southeast of Asheville, as "unimaginable."

President Biden told Criswell when she briefed him on the ongoing impacts in the storm-affected states that he plans to travel this week to affected communities "as soon as it will not disrupt emergency response operations," per a Sunday evening White House pool report.

Vice President Kamala Harris also intends to visit impacted communities once this is possible, according to a report from poolers traveling with the Democratic presidential nominee.

Over 764,000 customers were without power in South Carolina and another 583,000 others in Georgia were without electricity on Monday morning, per poweroutage.us.

Nearly 460,000 in N.C., more than 136,000 in Florida and almost 106,000 in Virginia also had no power, according to the utility tracker.

The U.S. Postal Service warned in an online alert that Hurricane Helene's effects "may impact the processing, transportation, and delivery of mail and packages" in Fla., Ga., S.C., N.C., Alabama, Tenn., Kentucky, and Va.

The USPS on Sunday announced that retail and delivery operations for facilities in several N.C. cities had been "temporarily suspended due to Hurricane Helene impacts."

Hurricanes are increasingly likely to become more intense, and studies show human-caused climate change is a major driver of this.

The extreme intensification rate was due in large part to hot ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, along with ocean heat content values. Research shows climate change is boosting global ocean temperatures.

Climate change is also causing hurricanes to deliver more rainfall than they did just a few decades ago.
Criswell noted on CBS that in the past, "when we would look at damage from hurricanes, it was primarily wind damage, with some water damage."

Now, "we're seeing so much more water damage, and I think that is a result of the warm waters, which is a result of climate change." (Source: Axios)