Hurricane Helene: dozens dead as storm pummels south-eastern US

Helene has reportedly killed at least 40 people across four states and inflicted about 4m power outages and dangerous flooding across the south-eastern US after crashing ashore in north-western Florida late on Thursday as a potent category 4 hurricane.

Related: At least 40 people killed by Hurricane Helene in US south-east – latest updates

The storm – which registered maximum sustained winds of 140mph – weakened to a tropical storm and then to a depression as it moved across Georgia as well as the Carolinas on Friday afternoon, when residents whose communities experienced Helene’s peak effects more directly were only just beginning to fathom the recovery process ahead.

At least 17 people had died during the storm across South Carolina, including two firefighters killed when their vehicle was struck by a tree before sunrise, officials said.

Another 15 were killed in Georgia, said Garrison Douglas, a spokesperson for the state’s governor, Brian Kemp.

Five were killed in Florida’s Pinellas county, which includes the Tampa Bay area, with two of those deaths occurring by drowning. A number of the deaths involved trees falling on residences. And among the dead was a four-year-old girl in Claremont, North Carolina, in a car accident in heavy rain.

In western North Carolina, near the border with Tennessee, south-east of Knoxville, Rutherford county emergency officials warned residents near the Lake Lure Dam just before noon to immediately evacuate to higher ground, saying: “Dam failure imminent.”

And on Friday afternoon, North Carolina’s Cocke county mayor, Rob Mathis, warned people in the vicinity to evacuate immediately after the Walters Dam in the community of Waterville suffered a catastrophic failure.

Meanwhile, as of early Friday evening, about 1.1m households and businesses in Florida were without power, though later the number had fallen to about 708,000. South Carolina was reporting 1.2m power outages, Georgia had about 920,000, and North Carolina had approximately 870,000, according to poweroutage.us . Large swaths of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and Ohio were also out.

Helene made landfall at about 11.10pm in Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend area, home to fishing villages and vacation hideaways where the state’s Panhandle and peninsula meet.

Nonetheless, social media site users watched in horror as video showed sheets of rain lashing Perry, Florida, near Helene’s landfall. Winds tore siding from buildings in almost complete darkness. One local news station recorded a home as it flipped over.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) conducted a preliminary assessment of Helene’s storm surge in Florida, and it indicated that water levels reached more than 15ft above normal where the storm came ashore.

Drone video from the storm chaser Aaron Rigsby showed residences that collapsed and were damaged amid storm surge in the Florida community of Steinhatchee. Florida’s Tampa Bay took on about 10ft of storm surge and was among the state’s badly inundated communities.

The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, urged residents to prepare themselves for the likelihood that Helene’s death toll would rise as communities complete damage assessments in the storm’s aftermath. But he also said the state’s rescue crews had ultimately kept that number as low as possible by performing “thousands of missions” overnight.

Officials in Citrus county, Florida, about 120 miles south, warned people who were trapped in homes or other buildings to resist treading through floodwaters without rescuers’ help, saying there could be dangers such as live electric wires, sewage and sharp objects lurking underneath.

Kemp warned Georgians that it was “a very dangerous environment” in the wake of Helene. “One of our finest has lost his life trying to save others,” Kemp said.

In Valdosta, Georgia, a city of 55,000 near the state’s border with Florida, Rhonda Bell and her husband spent a sleepless night in the downstairs bedroom of their century-old home. She told the Associated Press that an oak tree smashed through the roof of an upstairs bedroom and collapsed on to the living room below.

“I just felt the whole house shake,” said Bell, whose neighbors had roof shingles torn away and fence panels knocked down. “Thank God we’re both alive to tell about it.”

Beyond Florida and Georgia, up to 10in of rain fell in the North Carolina mountains. Despite Helene’s weakening, forecasters were predicting the storm could still cause “historic and catastrophic flooding” across multiple state as it plowed through Tennessee and Kentucky.

One dramatic scene in Tennessee reportedly involved more than 50 patients and staff at the state’s Unicoi county hospital who were stranded on the roof while surrounded by rising floodwaters. Emergency vehicles were washed away as they attempted rescues, while helicopters that had initially been held back by high winds, were evacuating people on Friday afternoon.

“This is one of the worst storms in modern history for parts of … North Carolina,” the state’s governor, Roy Cooper, said. “Our hearts are heavy.”

Areas 100 miles north of the Florida-Georgia line expected hurricane conditions. Georgia opened its parks to evacuees and their pets, including horses. Officials imposed overnight curfews in many cities and counties in south Georgia. Atlanta was under a rare flash flood emergency warning.

One county in Georgia, Thomas, extended such a curfew until noon Friday, a signal that conditions were “still very hazardous there”, the local sheriff’s office said in a social media post.

Another sheriff’s office, in Florida’s Taylor county, asked residents who chose not to evacuate ahead of Helene to write their names, birthdays and other identifying information on their limbs in permanent marker. “So that you can be identified and [your] family notified,” the agency wrote in what was grim advice ahead of the storm.

“I’m going to stay right here at the house,” the state ferry boat operator Ken Wood, 58, told Reuters from coastal Dunedin in Florida, where he planned to ride out the storm with his 16-year-old cat Andy.

Afterwards, he told the agency: “I’ll never do that again, I swear. It was a harrowing experience. It roared all night like a train. It was unnerving. The house shook … next time we leave.”

Helene on Wednesday had swamped parts of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. It was the ninth major hurricane – category 3 or higher – to make landfall along the US’s Gulf coast since 2017. Experts attribute such a high rate of powerful, destructive storms to the climate change crisis, which is spurred in part by the burning of fossil fuels.

“It’s as if something has changed,” the Texas meteorologist Matt Lanza said in a widely shared X post .

As for this Atlantic hurricane season, which began 1 June and does not officially end until 30 November, Helene was the eighth named storm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicted this Atlantic hurricane season would be above average because of record high ocean temperatures.

Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting