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      France Struggles to Dry Out From Flash Flooding

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      Central and southern France was recovering on Friday from flooding that lashed the areas on Thursday, after heavy rainfall and swollen rivers unleashed torrents of brackish water that cut off roads, swept away cars and swamped buildings.The French authorities have not linked any deaths or injuries directly to the floods, which were slowly receding on Friday as towns mopped mud and water out of homes, hauled away overturned cars and cleared out tangles of tree branches and debris. But the sudden downpours — the worst in more than four decades in some areas — caught the country by surprise.Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFirefighters wade through floodwaters on Thursday in Givors, a town in the Rhône department. More than 3,000 firefighters have been deployed to help, the government said on Friday.@CasaLova via Associated PressSome of the heaviest downpours were in the Ardèche department, which was battered by more than two feet of rain in 48 hours. Flash flooding swamped several towns, including Saint-Marcel-lès-Annonay, southwest of Lyon, where raging waters lifted a car away.BFMTV via ReutersRushing floodwaters also trapped vehicles in Labégude, another town in the Ardèche area, where Thursday’s rainfall “was the most intense ever recorded over two days since the beginning of the 20th century,” according to the national weather forecaster.Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Annonay, the largest town in the Ardèche, witnesses told local media that a “mini tsunami” surged through the town within minutes. Schools were evacuated and remained closed on Friday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At North Carolina Churches After Helene, a Time to Grieve and a Time to Hope

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      Worshipers gathered on Sunday, many for the first time since the storm decimated their communities, “to cry and pray and process.” As people headed toward First Baptist Church Swannanoa on Sunday, it was impossible to forget what had happened to their small mountain community in western North Carolina. Scattered across the landscape were broken pieces of life before the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled through: chunks of asphalt, shredded trees, fragments of home foundations. Nearby, a search-and-rescue team clambered over debris. Yet the 11 a.m. hourlong service offered a respite — a chance to worship, to step away from the grief and to soak in shared encouragement and resilience. The church had invited congregants from another nearby church, whose building was destroyed, and encouraged those who had lost their Bibles in the storm to take one from the church. Melody Dowdy, 46, who is married to the senior pastor of First Baptist, hugged congregants and held back tears. “We’ve tried to create a haven of hope,” she said. More than a week after the storm ravaged much of western North Carolina, many storm survivors trickled back to houses of faith — worshiping in parking lots and parks, next to mud-filled sanctuaries, and in churches with pews and Bibles but, in some cases, without power or water.“There is just so much desperation. Lives have been obliterated,” said Winston Parrish, senior pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Asheville, where dozens of emergency workers from across the country are staying. “We needed this moment on Sunday to cry and pray and process.”In a region steeped in religion, churches right now are more than just a place of worship. Faith leaders of many denominations have transformed their buildings and parking lots into command centers and shelters for emergency workers, and into distribution points for those in need. There, groups hand out water and food and organize deliveries of supplies to stranded communities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hurricane Helene Aftermath: 6 Issues Across the Southeast

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      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.The remains of a home in Swannanoa, N.C.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesIn 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Arts District, Decades in the Making, in Ruins After Helene

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      The hurricane damaged an estimated 80 percent of the buildings in the River Arts District of Asheville, N.C., and upended the lives of artists who had recast the city as a cultural force.The French Broad River provided a scenic backdrop as an industrial neighborhood in Asheville transformed over the past 40 years into the River Arts District, a vibrant creative hub for art studios and galleries.More than 300 artists called the district home and its riverside vitality helped cement Asheville’s reputation as a cultural outpost, one worth settling near or venturing to as old warehouses and mills were converted into centers for both creative expression and economic growth.“There is nothing like the River Arts District in the United States and maybe even the world,” said Jeffrey Burroughs, president of River Arts District Artists, a support group. “It’s spaces where artists are in control of their businesses, their lives.”But much of the district was washed out by the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene. Buildings were swept away. Some galleries no longer exist. Creative works — some birthed decades ago — have been damaged and destroyed. Mud reigns.“It’s heartbreaking,” said Judi Jetson, founder and chair of Local Cloth, a nonprofit network of fiber artists, educators and enthusiasts. “We have three or four inches of mud inside the building and on most of our items. We’re trying to rescue whatever we can and people will take it home and wash them. The problem is a lot of us don’t have water, even at home, and nobody has electricity.”Jannette Montenegro tries to salvage items from the Cotton Mill Studios in the River Arts District.Andrew Nelles/The Tennessean, via USA Today NetworkWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      North Carolina Officials Begin Post-Helene Election Planning

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      Four days after historic floods battered western North Carolina, the difficulties facing county officials who are trying to stage a presidential election in the area have begun to take shape.A preliminary check of election offices in North Carolina’s flooded west showed that offices in 14 counties were closed, with officials unsure when they would open, the State Board of Elections said late Monday. One office in Haywood County, just west of hard-hit Asheville, could not be reached.While the region is largely rural, it holds a healthy share of the state’s nearly 7.7 million registered voters. Some 570,000 registered voters live in the 11 counties where less than half of the electrical power had been restored as of Monday afternoon. They include 145,000 Democrats and 185,000 Republicans.One of the hardest hit counties, Buncombe, is home to Asheville, the region’s Democratic stronghold. In most counties, however, Republicans or unaffiliated voters are dominant.Election officials face a panoply of problems. The remnants of Hurricane Helene struck the region shortly after absentee ballots were put in the mail, and the U.S. Postal Service has suspended mail service to virtually all of western North Carolina.Those ballots would have been dispatched earlier, but they had to be reprinted after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quit the presidential race and sued to have his name removed from ballots.County officials also are likely to encounter trouble finding accessible sites for early voting, which begins Oct. 17. Finding voters who were displaced will be yet another headache. So will be registering voters, as the deadline for registering is Oct. 11.Michael C. Bitzer, an elections expert at Catawba College, said that “counties have been preparing for early voting sites that may no longer exist.”“They had reserved polling places that may have been swept away in the floodwaters,” he said. “They have voters who requested an absentee ballot and cannot receive that ballot, let alone the poll workers and the major disruption to their lives.”In 2018, after Hurricane Florence ravaged 28 counties along the North Carolina coast, the state extended the voter registration deadline and spent $400,000 for a campaign to locate displaced voters and educate other residents about voting options.Officials don’t have such plans yet, said Gerry Cohen, a veteran analyst of state government and a member of the election board in Wake County, which includes the state capital, Raleigh.“There are a lot of unknowns on what to do,” he said. “We’re a couple of days away from finding out what’s going on.” More

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      Helene Has Killed More Than 90 People. Here Are Some of Their Stories.

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      Days after the Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Florida’s gulf coast, some victims’ portraits were coming into focus. A woman in her 70s who repaired nuclear cooling towers and rode motorcycles. A Florida resident who helped her community recover from Hurricane Ian two years ago. A man who had just moved to South Carolina to work as an electrical lineman.All three were among the more than 90 people killed by Helene, a roaring Category 4 hurricane that has devastated much of the Southeast since coming ashore last week. The victims came from at least six states — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Many people drowned, and others were killed by falling trees, car crashes under heavy rains and a tornado produced by the storm. A lot of the victims were still unidentified.The toll is almost certain to rise as rescuers reach communities in the Appalachian Mountains, where devastating flooding and mudslides have decimated whole towns.But on Sunday, three days after the giant storm made landfall in the Big Bend region, some victims’ stories were coming into focus.In Florida, most of the 11 victims there drowned in Pinellas County, which is in the Tampa Bay region and the most densely populated county in the state. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Least 66 Die as Persistent Monsoon Rains Inundate Nepal

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      Disasters in the small Himalayan nation have become more frequent as the effects of climate change increase.At least 66 people have died and 69 were missing in Nepal after incessant monsoon rains unleashed flooding and landslides across the small Himalayan nation, which has been increasingly pummeled by the effects of climate change.Rescue operations were underway for thousands of people, Nepali officials said on Saturday. At least 60 have been injured, and the death toll was expected to rise, the officials said.More than half of the dead were from the Kathmandu Valley, which includes Kathmandu, the capital. Highways into the city were closed.Binod Ghimire, a senior superintendent of police, said that more than 5,000 police personnel equipped with helicopters, rafts, ropes and vehicles had been deployed for rescue operations.Rescuers have evacuated more than 3,000 people, but flooding victims complained of delays. A video circulating on social media showed people who were swept away by the floods after waiting on the roof of a hut for hours.Many parts of the country were without power. “Several districts are disconnected from communication, so we are struggling to compile loss of lives and properties,” said Dan Bahadur Karki, a spokesman for the Nepal Police.The authorities asked people to stay indoors if possible. The rainfall was expected to stop by Sunday.The flood disaster occurred just as Nepalis were preparing to celebrate the Hindu festival of Dashain, which is scheduled to begin on Thursday. Hindu devotees travel for days to far-flung villages to obtain the blessings of their elders.Nepal, with a population of about 30 million, is the fourth-most-vulnerable country to climate change, according to UNICEF. In recent years, the frequency of disasters — including the bursting of glacial lakes as temperatures rise — has increased, claiming more lives.Local news media, citing the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, recently reported that 225 people have died and 49 have gone missing in disasters related to the monsoon season, which runs from June to September. More

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      ‘I’m in Trouble Now’: North Carolinians Face Dangerous Floods From Helene

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      As the Swannanoa River swelled and overflowed from heavy rains brought by Helene, residents of Asheville, N.C., described moments of fear and anxiety amid dangerous flooding in their region.On Friday morning, Janetta Barfield, a 58-year-old nurse at a hospital in Asheville, managed to drive across a high bridge over the river after working a night shift. But then she was met with deep water on the other side of the bridge.She tried to drive through the road that had turned into a lake after seeing another car pass. “If he could do it, I could too,” she remembered thinking at the time.Instead, “I almost drowned,” she said in an interview on Friday — her S.U.V. stalled out, and water quickly seeped into her car and rose to her chest.“I’m in trouble now,” Mrs. Barfield thought to herself in the moment.As she sat in her car, a police officer “got me and pulled me across the water,” she said.After Mrs. Barfield was rescued, she walked down to the river’s edge three times to look for her car and saw box trucks, propane tanks and islands of trash floating in the water. But her S.U.V. was nowhere in sight.Across North Carolina, about 800,000 customers were without power Friday night, with the outages concentrated in western parts of the state. The Asheville Police Department put in place an overnight curfew until 7:30 a.m. on Saturday. The police did not immediately respond to requests for updates on damages and possible injuries or deaths.Asheville, a city of about 94,600, became something of a black hole for cell service on Friday. In the afternoon, about 50 people gathered by Buncombe County Public Library’s main branch in the city’s downtown to use its Wi-Fi.Miranda Escalante, a 38-year-old bartender, was there, trying to reach her family. She knew her sister in nearby Waynesville was safe, but couldn’t get in touch with her father in the community of Swannanoa, which also suffered from powerful floods.Not knowing how her father was faring was “very scary,” Ms. Escalante said. More