LAST UPDATE | 30 Sep
THE US HOMELAND security chief has said that up to 600 people could have lost their lives after Hurricane Helene caused destructive flooding across the southeast of the United States over the weekend.
“It looks like there could be as many as 600 lost lives,” Liz Sherwood-Randall told reporters. “We know there are 600 who are either lost or unaccounted for.”
As of this morning, the official death toll stood at at least 100 and the emergency response effort was fast becoming a political football in a region that could decide the presidential election.
Rescue operations sought to find survivors and deliver supplies across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee in areas where torrential rains brought have caused havoc.
Residents face power cuts, supply shortages, blocked roads and broken communication lines in often mountainous terrain.
Hurricane Helene is "not just a catastrophic storm," President Biden says, but a "history-making storm in the entire Southeast and Appalachia."
— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 30, 2024
"There's nothing like wondering, 'Is my husband, wife, son, daughter, mother, father alive?'" he says, noting that many are still… pic.twitter.com/BxsSyBpeqf
Republican candidate Donald Trump is due to visit Valdosta in Georgia, which has suffered heavily from the flooding. Georgia is also a key state in the tight election race that will come to a climax when voters go to the polls on 5 November.
Trump’s Democrat opponent Vice President Kamala Harris canceled campaign events to return to Washington for a briefing on the federal response, while President Joe Biden has promised to supply aid to those affected for “as long as it takes”.
Biden said: “We’re not leaving until the job is done.”
“We’ll continue to surge resources, including food, water, communications and life saving equipment,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “We’ll be there – as I said before, and I mean it – as long as it takes to finish this job.”
Biden, who has approved federal aid for several states in the wake of the disaster, plans to travel to hard-hit areas this week, “as soon as it will not disrupt emergency response operations,” the White House said yesterday, adding that Harris would do the same.
Biden also rejected criticism by Republican candidate Donald Trump that he and Harris should have been in Washington.
Harris, the Democratic candidate, was on a campaign trip in California while Biden was at his beach house in Delaware and did not return to the White House until Sunday afternoon.
Trump accused Biden at a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday of “sleeping” instead of dealing with the disaster and said Harris was at fundraisers with her “radical left lunatic donors.”
North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said today that hundreds of roads had been destroyed and many communities “wiped off the map.”
“This is an unprecedented storm,” he told reporters. “We’re working to surge supplies in. The emotional and physical toll here is indescribable.
“Rivers are still rising, so the danger is not over.”
He said the long-term rebuilding plan would need to confront a reality of more extreme weather, “but right now, we’re concentrating on saving lives and getting supplies to people who desperately need them.”
Scientists say climate change likely plays a role in the rapid intensification of hurricanes, because there is more energy in warmer oceans for them to feed on.
Nearly two million households and businesses remain without power, according to tracker poweroutage.us.
South Carolina had the most outages and governor Henry McMaster asked for patience as crews dealt with widespread snapped power poles.
“We want people to remain calm. Help is on the way, it is just going to take time,” McMaster told reporters outside the airport in Aiken County.
Helene slammed into Florida’s northern Gulf shore as a huge Category Four hurricane late on Thursday night with winds of 225 kilometers per hour.
Even as it weakened, the storm tore a path of destruction stretching inland more than 800 km.
Meanwhile, more than 90,000 residents in a county east of Atlanta, Georgia, have been told to remain sheltering in place and businesses were told to stay closed a day after a chemical plant fire sent a massive plume of dark smoke high into the sky.
Air quality surveys done by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the state Environmental Protection Division “revealed the harmful irritant chlorine” detected in the air from the fire at the BioLab plant in Conyers, Georgia, the Rockdale County government said.
The statement said: “For everyone sheltering in place, the best practice is to turn the air conditioning off and keep windows and doors shut.”
The fire was brought under control yesterday, officials said.
Sheriff’s office spokesperson Christine Nesbitt did not know the number of people evacuated, although it covered a large portion of the community of Conyers. Media reports said the number was 17,000.
The fire ignited when a sprinkler head malfunctioned early on Sunday morning.
The malfunction caused water to mix with a water-reactive chemical, producing a plume of chemicals.
There were employees inside the plant, but no injuries have been reported, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
With reporting from AFP and Press Association
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