Important Takeaways:
- Communities are stranded, over 200 people have died with more expected, and more than 700,000 are without power
- Rescue crews in parts of the south-eastern US were still searching on Friday for those missing as they entered the eighth day since Hurricane Helene roared ashore in Florida and became the deadliest mainland hurricane in the US since Katrina in 2005.
- The death toll could grow higher, having surpassed 200 on Thursday, while the sheer scale of the devastation from wind and floods has slowed efforts to find many people’s loved ones and also get supplies to stranded communities and restore power to more than 700,000 people.
- Officials have reported at least 215 deaths across six states as a result of Helene and warned that more will be found dead in the coming days and weeks
- In hardest-hit North Carolina, thousands of residents were issued boil water advisories and said that 27 water plants were closed and not producing water.
- On Friday, the number of power outages in the south-eastern region fell below a million for the first time since the storm. Still, more than 250,000 people in South Carolina had no power as of Friday morning, according to poweroutage.us, as well as over 230,000 people in North Carolina, just over 200,000 in Georgia, 13,000 in Virginia and 10,000 in Florida.
- Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, has warned that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) does not have enough funding to make it through the rest of this hurricane season, which typically runs until late November.
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