Desperate footage shows empty shelves in a Walmart after the destruction from Hurricane Helene has left communities reeling.
A TikTok video went viral on Thursday, taken in Asheville, North Carolina, depicts a bleak scene as locals desperately seek supplies at a Walmart only to encounter barren shelves. One disillusioned shopper described it as "like an apocalypse."
Crowds queued up hoping to stock up on essentials were met with disappointment when they entered, greeted by empty aisles.
Footage shows the person recording wandering through the store from one cleared aisle to another, showing just how desperate the situation had got.
The death toll has soared to at least 215 across six states. At least 72 of those were in hard-hit Asheville and surrounding Buncombe County from flash floods, mudslides, falling trees, crumbled roads and other calamities.
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“Despite the dire, dire predictions, the impacts were probably even worse than we expected,” said Steve Wilkinson, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service’s regional office in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina.
“We reserve this strong language for only the worst situations,” he said. “But it’s hard to go out and tell people this is going to totally change the landscape of western North Carolina.”
As the region begins its long road to recovery, a task complicated by cut-off communities, a lack of running water and still-spotty cellphone service, the growing number of casualties has prompted soul-searching among devastated homeowners and officials alike. They wonder whether more could have been done to sound the alarms and respond in a mountainous region that’s not often in the path of hurricanes.
“It sounds stupid to say this, but I didn’t realize it would be like bombs going off,” Brenton Murrell said after surveying his Asheville neighborhood strewn with mud and debris, military Osprey aircraft whirring overhead. “It’s like a war zone.”
Like many residents interviewed by The Associated Press, Murrell had never experienced the effects of a hurricane and felt detached from the danger despite receiving numerous warnings of “extreme risk of loss of life and property.”
Murrell said those words never really scared him, in part because his neighbors had been talking for days about the last big flood two decades ago and offered mostly reassuring words that “if you’re not in a low-lying area, you’ll be fine.”
“There was some sort of disconnect,” said Murrell, who now regrets riding out the storm at home with his wife, two children and dog, even though they are all safe. “It’s human nature to not truly comprehend something until you’ve felt it yourself.”
Many residents said they had not grasped the magnitude of the storm until it was too late. For some, evacuating became impossible as fallen trees and surging floodwaters made roads and bridges impassable. The cascade of emergencies caught seemingly everyone off guard.
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