Helene has reportedly killed at least six people and inflicted about 3.5m power outages across the south-eastern US after crashing ashore in north-western Florida late on Thursday as a potent category 4 hurricane, according to officials.
The storm – which registered maximum sustained winds of 140mph – had weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia early on Friday, when residents whose communities experienced Helene’s peak effects more directly were only just beginning to fathom the recovery process ahead.
Among the dead was a person in Florida after a sign fell on their car. Two more people reportedly were killed in south Georgia in a possible tornado spurred up by Helene on its approach. Another person died in Charlotte, North Carolina, after a tree fell on a home as the storm roared through that area.
Also in Claremont, North Carolina, earlier on Thursday, a four-year-old girl was killed when two cars crashed in intense rain conditions preceding Helene’s arrival.
Meanwhile, as of early Friday, about 1.2m households and businesses in Florida were without power. Georgia and South Carolina were each reporting about 975,000 power outages – and North Carolina had about 330,000.
Helene made landfall at about 11.10pm in Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend area, home to fishing villages and vacation hideaways where the state’s Panhandle and peninsula meet.
Nonetheless, social media site users watched in horror as video showed sheets of rain lashing Perry, Florida, near Helene’s landfall. Winds tore siding from buildings in almost complete darkness. One local news station recorded a home as it flipped over.
Forecasters had asked residents to prepare for what they called a “nightmare” 20ft storm surge, essentially a wide wall of water pushed inland by the approaching storm. Areas that were badly inundated by storm surge could not be fully assessed for property damage or human casualties until it began to subside and day broke.
“When Floridians wake up tomorrow morning, we’re going to be waking up to a state where very likely there’s been additional loss of life and certainly there’s going to be loss of property,” the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said late on Thursday at a news conference.
At a hotel in Valdosta, Georgia, a city of 55,000 near the state’s border with Florida, 20-year-old Fermin Herrera took shelter with his wife and their two-month-old daughter because they feared a tree might topple on to their home. He told the Associated Press about the sights and sounds that convinced him to flee his home for a structure that he considered more sturdy.
“We heard some rumbling,” said Herrera, cradling the sleeping baby in a downstairs hallway. “We didn’t see anything at first. After a while the intensity picked up. It looked like a gutter that was banging against our window. So we made a decision to leave.”
Nearby, dozens of people huddled in the darkened lobby after midnight on Friday as whistling winds swirled outside. There was no electricity, emergency lights illuminated the halls, along with flashlights and cellphones. Light fixtures dripped water in the lobby dining area, and the ground outside was lined with roof debris.
Beyond Florida and Georgia, up to 10in of rain fell in the North Carolina mountains. Forecasters were predicting up to 14in more before the end of the deluge, an amount that could cause flooding that is more severe than anything seen in the past century.
Areas 100 miles (160km) north of the Florida-Georgia line expected hurricane conditions. Georgia opened its parks to evacuees and their pets, including horses. Officials imposed overnight curfews in many cities and counties in south Georgia. Atlanta was under a rare flash flood emergency warning.
One county in Georgia, Thomas, extended such a curfew until noon Friday, a signal that conditions were “still very hazardous there”, the local sheriff’s office said in a social media post.
Another sheriff’s office, in Florida’s Taylor county, asked residents who chose not to evacuate ahead of Helene to write their names, birthdays and other identifying information on their limbs in permanent marker. “So that you can be identified and [your] family notified,” the agency wrote in what was grim advice ahead of the storm.
“I’m going to stay right here at the house,” the state ferry boat operator Ken Wood, 58, told Reuters from coastal Dunedin in Florida, where he planned to ride out the storm with his 16-year-old cat Andy.
School districts and multiple universities across the affected region canceled classes. Airports in Tampa, Tallahassee and Clearwater were closed on Thursday, while cancellations of flights and other matters were widespread elsewhere in Florida and beyond.
Helene on Wednesday had swamped parts of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. It was the ninth major hurricane – category 3 or higher – to make landfall along the US’s Gulf coast since 2017. Experts attribute such a high rate of powerful, destructive storms to the climate crisis, which is spurred in part by the burning of fossil fuels.
As for this Atlantic hurricane season, which began 1 June and does not officially end until 30 November, Helene was the eighth named storm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicted this Atlantic hurricane season would be above average because of record high ocean temperatures.
