Helene’s death toll rises across the Southeast as rescue crews battle flooding and outages

# Helene’s death toll rises across the Southeast as rescue crews battle flooding and outages

Hurricane Helene’s death toll in the United States has climbed to at least 64, according to AP, as crews and residents across the Southeast continued to deal with flooding, outages and severe damage.

The AP report says the storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday before moving through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee. The scale of the destruction was immediate: homes were torn apart, trees were snapped and communities were left without power. The updated toll included 21 deaths in South Carolina and 18 in Georgia.

The storm’s impacts varied by state but shared the same pattern of disruption. In Tennessee, Unicoi County Hospital tried to evacuate 11 patients and 43 others after the Nolichucky River flooded the area. In North Carolina, Duke Energy opened floodgates on the Cowans Ford Dam to ease pressure on nearby lakes after heavy rain from the storm. In Florida, state officials said the damage in some areas was worse than from two previous hurricanes.

The report also captures the human scale of the event in the photographs and eyewitness descriptions attached to it. Residents returned to flood-damaged homes, cleaned debris and salvaged family photos while roads, bridges and public buildings were left damaged or destroyed. The AP account says some communities could take months or even years to recover.

Helene had already become one of the deadliest storms to hit the Southeast in recent memory by the time of the report. Its track made it a multistate emergency rather than a single coastal disaster, and the broad damage footprint complicated rescue work. Flooding, road damage and storm surge all arrived in different places at once.

For state and local officials, the immediate challenge was still locating victims, restoring basic services and getting aid into isolated areas. For residents, the priorities were far more basic: safety, electricity, shelter and trying to assess what had survived the storm.

The AP report makes clear that the official death count was still evolving as rescue work continued, which means the final toll could yet change. Even so, the figures already show the scale of the catastrophe and how quickly a major hurricane can overwhelm multiple states at once.

The storm’s legacy will be measured not only in fatalities but in the long recovery still ahead for towns across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.