(NEW YORK) — At least 1,000 National Guard troops are heading into the most hard-hit areas in western North Carolina on Thursday in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene as the death toll from the storm approaches 200 with hundreds of people still unaccounted for.
“The nation has your back. We’re not leaving ‘til you’re back on your feet completely,” President Joe Biden said on Wednesday after surveying the mass destruction from the storm in North and South Carolina.
Helene is now the deadliest mainland hurricane to strike the United States since Katrina in 2005 which claimed the lives of nearly 1,400 people.
More than a million people still don’t have power and a nearly completely dark strip marks the path of Helene through the Southeast as the crisis over getting access to drinkable water is growing.
Vice President Kamala Harris met with local authorities and grieving families in Augusta, Georgia, on Wednesday.
“It is particularly devastating in terms of the loss of life that this community has experienced, the loss of normalcy,” Harris said.
Elsewhere, new video captured the moment a landslide hit a house in Newland, North Carolina, as Helene trampled the Southeast.
In Fairview, Connecticut, Philip Morgan showed ABC News the system of ropes he has had to create to rappel the terrain since the bridge to his neighborhood was wiped out.
Morgan’s brother is on a ventilator and in dire need of supplies as Philip Morgan says it is only a matter of time before his brother will need to be moved.
“[My biggest fear is] something happening to him and not being able to get out of here fast enough,” Morgan told ABC News.
Meanwhile, nearby at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, 400 nurses arrived in buses from across the country — even as far as Alaska — all to lend a helping hand in the aftermath of the sheer destruction of the storm.
“They showed up with a smile on their face. Eager to help, eager just to give us a little bit of reprieve,” said Matt Alligood, a resident nurse at Mission Hospital. “So, it’s … it’s been amazing.”
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