Hurricane Helene (2024)

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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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      Kamala Harris Visits North Carolina to Check on Hurricane Response

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      Vice President Kamala Harris met with North Carolina and federal emergency officials on Saturday in Charlotte as she continued to help oversee the disaster response in the Southeast after Hurricane Helene.Ms. Harris participated in a storm response briefing at a North Carolina Air National Guard base at Charlotte’s airport, where she was joined by Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Mayor Esther Manheimer of Asheville, N.C., which was particularly hard-hit.The vice president praised local officials and residents for their response to the storm.“I’ve been seeing and hearing the stories from here in North Carolina about strangers who are helping each other out, giving people assistance in every way that they need, including shelter, food, and friendship and fellowship,” she said.Ms. Harris’s trip to Charlotte was her second trip this week to assess the storm’s toll in the Southeast, and it served as a reminder that in addition to running for president she continued to have duties to fulfill as the vice president.In addition to reviewing the official storm response, Ms. Harris visited a volunteer center, where she briefly joined them making packages of donated necessities — including things like canned food, formula, diapers and flashlights — for North Carolinians stranded by the storm.While the deadly storm and the conflict in the Middle East have at times diverted Ms. Harris from the campaign trail as she turns to her official duties, her aides and allies have said they believe having voters see Ms. Harris act as the vice president could make her appear presidential and empathetic to voters in a key battleground 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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      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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      The Troubling Quiet of North Carolina’s Cell Service Outages

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      Service has been restored in some areas after Hurricane Helene, but many people are still unable to communicate by phone, which has hampered relief efforts, worried loved ones and complicated daily life.John Tressler stood next to what was left of his storm-battered deli, part of which had collapsed in the torrents of a raging river, and waited to meet a relief crew bringing a much-needed supply of food into Swannanoa, N.C.He passed the time chatting with another business owner, and kept waiting. And waiting. He could use his phone to check the time, but, without cell service, it was of little use otherwise.The problem, Mr. Tressler soon realized, was that he had changed the meeting spot at the last minute. And that text had never gone through.More than a week after the remnants of Hurricane Helene unleashed catastrophic flooding in Swannanoa and much of western North Carolina, cell service remains spotty — or, in many cases, nonexistent.Not being able to text or call has complicated relief efforts, made previously straightforward daily tasks difficult and even kept people in the dark about whether or not their loved ones perished in the storm.The outage adds to the burden the region is now facing as the death toll from the storm has risen above 225 — more than half in North Carolina — and many population centers are facing a near future with no power or clean water. The loss of cell service has made solving those problems even harder. Officials have described not being able to reach family members of the people who died, delaying the identification of their bodies.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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      A Deluge of Rain Poured Out of the Heavens. But There’s Still No Drinking Water.

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      City officials have refused to provide estimates of when the devastated water system in Asheville, N.C., will be back in operation.Since their home lost running water around 2 p.m. on Sept. 27 from Hurricane Helene, Etiska Jackson and her husband, Jayme, have been driving back and forth between their home in Asheville, N.C., and her brother’s in Madison County, about 25 miles north. There, they wash their clothes, take showers and fetch water from a well to flush their toilet.“I feel like I’m camping in my house,” Ms. Jackson, 61, who works as a receptionist at the Charles George VA Medical Center in Asheville, said from the front yard of her bungalow on Friday afternoon.For Ms. Jackson, the most troubling part of not having running water is not knowing when it may return. “They can’t even give us a time frame,” she said. About a foot of water poured out of the dark, gray sky when the remnants of Helene inundated Asheville and much of western North Carolina. More than a week later, not a drop comes out of most people’s faucets. For many of them, it could be weeks before that changes.Bottled water was the only potable water that residents of the city of 94,000 had as of Friday. A treatment plant capable of serving a part of the city that accounts for about 20 percent of its needs was back at full capacity on Friday and city workers were sampling water in pipes to see if it was safe to drink, said Ben Woody, the assistant city manager. Residents have been told to boil any water that does come to them, before drinking it.During the day, you can see Asheville’s water crisis on street corners and at parks throughout the city.Christian Monterrosa for The New York TimesAt Pack Square Park, just outside the Buncombe County Courthouse, the limit was two gallons per person, or five per family.Christian Monterrosa for The New York TimesWe 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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      In North Carolina Town Hall, Trump Makes a Series of Promises to Appeal to Veterans

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      At the end of his town hall in North Carolina on Friday, former President Donald J. Trump was asked by a former Air Force pilot whether he would create a panel to keep “woke generals” out of the Defense Department.Mr. Trump not only agreed, but also went a step further. “I’m going to put you on that task force,” he said, to cheers from the crowd.The remark was the last in a series of promises the former president made as he answered preselected questions from voters in Fayetteville, N.C., an area with a large military population. It’s a dynamic that happens often at Mr. Trump’s events, in which he makes direct commitments on small and large issues to appeal to and energize his specific audience.He promised that his proposed missile defense system, an American clone of Israel’s Iron Dome, would be made in North Carolina. He pledged to raise military pay. And before taking a question, he promised to restore the name of nearby Fort Liberty, the largest U.S. military base, back to Fort Bragg, which honored a Confederate general from a slave-owning family. The name was changed in June 2023 as part of the U.S. military’s examination of its history with race.Attendees cheered as Mr. Trump arrived for the town hall at Crown Arena in Fayetteville, N.C.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesSitting onstage at the Crown Arena in front of several thousand people, many of whom said they were active-duty military service members or veterans, Mr. Trump took eight questions from audience members. Like the event’s moderator, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida and a veteran, the participants teed him up to offer lines from his stump speech. Many of the questions echoed his exaggerated and false claims about immigration, approved of his vow to conduct massive deportations of undocumented immigrants and acknowledged his fear-inspiring predictions of global war.All Mr. Trump had to do, largely, was agree. He repeated his false claims that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and made familiar attacks against the media.Mr. Trump earlier in the day toured parts of Georgia hit by Hurricane Helene, and he claimed that reporters were doing little to cover the storm and the Biden administration’s response.Ms. Luna, a proud and combative ally of Mr. Trump, took the ball and ran with it, and claimed that the administration’s response was intentional. “I do believe that they’ve intentionally, this is my opinion, not helped out those residents, because it’s red communities that are impacted,” she said. More

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      A Storm, a Strike and War Abroad Pose Challenges for Harris

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      Scenes of striking workers, hurricane devastation in the Southeast and missiles over Israel represent a rare moment of turbulence for Kamala Harris.Vice President Kamala Harris has cast herself as a candidate of the future, but she has been yanked back by the problems of the present as the Middle East lurches toward a wider war, a longshoremen’s strike threatens to undermine the country’s economy and Americans across the Southeast struggle to recover from a deadly hurricane.The confluence of domestic and global traumas combined to knock Ms. Harris off a message that has been carefully calibrated since she took over for President Biden to showcase her as the avatar of “a new way forward,” as her slogan puts it.The rare moment of turbulence for Ms. Harris interrupts what has been mostly smooth sailing in her two months as the Democratic presidential nominee. It also captures a conundrum of the vice presidency, a prestigious if mostly ceremonial posting. So far, Ms. Harris has been able to take advantage of the trappings of the position — Air Force Two was parked behind her for one rally in Michigan — without being trapped by it.Ms. Harris, long a risk-averse politician, has tried to both claim Mr. Biden’s accomplishments as her own while defining herself as the future and the 81-year-old president as the past. She barely mentions the president’s name in her campaign speeches and makes a middle-class pitch that aims to correct for the inflation and high prices voters blame on Mr. Biden’s economic stewardship. This week’s events thrust Ms. Harris’s balancing act — of being both the No. 2 to Mr. Biden and atop the ticket in her own right — back into the spotlight.The scenes of striking workers, hurricane devastation in the Southeast and missiles over Israel are unwelcome complications to her case to keep Democrats in power. And they were the backdrop of the vice-presidential debate between Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate, and Senator JD Vance, former President Donald J. Trump’s No. 2, on Tuesday night, when the senator argued that Republicans would usher in an era of stability.The overlapping developments just as the calendar turned to October were a reminder that while Ms. Harris has framed her candidacy as a fresh start for the nation, she very much is part of the administration still in charge.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 Deaths Will Continue for Years, Study Suggests

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      Research on hundreds of tropical storms finds that mortality keeps rising for more than a decade afterward, for reasons you might not expect.Over the past week, the official death toll from Hurricane Helene has surpassed 100 as the vortex creeping inland from Florida submerged homes and swept away cars. But the full weight of lost lives will be realized only years from now — and it could number in the thousands.A paper published in the journal Nature on Wednesday lays out the hidden toll of tropical storms in the continental United States. Looking at 501 events from 1930 to 2015, researchers found that the average tropical storm resulted in an additional 7,000 to 11,000 deaths over the 15 years that followed.Overall during the study period, tropical storms killed more people than automobile crashes, infectious diseases and combat for U.S. soldiers. It’s such a big number — especially compared with the 24 direct deaths caused by hurricanes on average, according to federal statistics — that the authors spent years checking the math to make sure they were right.“The scale of these results is dramatically different from what we expected,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of global environmental policy at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University, who conducted the study with Rachel Young, the Ciriacy-Wantrup postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.The pair used a technique that has also provided a more complete understanding of “excess deaths” caused by Covid-19 and heat waves. It works by looking at typical mortality patterns and isolating anomalies that could have been caused only by the variable under study — in this case, a sizable storm.Previously, researchers examined deaths and hospitalizations after hurricanes over much shorter periods. One study published in Nature found elevated hospitalizations among older Medicaid patients in the week after a storm. Another, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, associated higher death rates with U.S. counties hit by cyclones. A study in The Lancet found that across 14 countries, cyclones led to a 6 percent bump in mortality in the ensuing two weeks.Deaths from tropical storms in the U.S. have been spiking Fatalities connected to storms that struck as many as 15 years ago – measured as the number of deaths above what would otherwise be expected – are rising faster as storms increase in frequency.

      Source: Solomon Hsiang and Rachel YoungBy The New York TimesWe 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