MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Hurricane Helene leaves at least 45 dead in southern US

The excessive flooding pushed relief teams to their limits

At least 45 people were killed Friday as Category 4 Hurricane Helene made landfall in the states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia causing also power outages and floodings. Among the fatalities were three firefighters, a woman and her one-month-old twins, plus an 89-year-old woman whose home was struck by a falling tree.

With maximum sustained winds reaching 225 km/h late Thursday in the sparsely populated Big Bend region in rural Florida, the storm also left more than 3.5 million homes and businesses without power before moving north through Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. Helene was the third hurricane to hit Big Bend in the last 13 months after Idalia last year and Debby last month. “We have a lot of damage throughout the state, water mostly on the west coast and the peninsula,” Governor Ron DeSantis said.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) reported “historic and catastrophic flooding” and warned of sudden high waters in Atlanta, Georgia's largest city, as well as in South Carolina and North Carolina.

Due to the bad weather, several airports were closed. Nearly 1,300 flights were canceled Thursday and 1,000 others as of Friday afternoon.

The excessive flooding pushed relief teams to their limits, with hundreds of rescue operations. Among the most notorious was one in the Tennessee state town of Erwin, where over 50 patients trapped on the roof of a hospital were airlifted by helicopter to safety, according to local TV footage. Unicoi County Hospital was “engulfed by extremely dangerous and rapidly moving water,” Ballad Health said on social media.

More than 3.8 million customers in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia were without power late Friday night, according to utility tracker Find Energy. The website PowerOutage.us reported some 1.2 million homes without power in South Carolina as of late Friday afternoon, as well as 915,000 in Georgia and 700,000 in Florida.

In Georgia, 15 people were killed, including a first responder, while two firefighters were among South Carolina's 19 deaths. Two deaths were confirmed in North Carolina and one in Virginia.

By Friday night, Helene was approximately 115 miles northeast of Paducah, Kentucky, and was churning southwest at 8 mph, the NHC said. It was forecast to stall over the Tennessee Valley through the weekend.

Helene was the fourth hurricane to make landfall on the Gulf Coast this year, which has happened only five other times in history, Meteorologist Stephanie Abrams of The Weather Channel told CBS.