The head of the US disaster relief agency, Fema, Deanne Criswell, described Helene as a "true multistate event" that caused "significant infrastructure damage" and had been made worse by global heating.
"This is going to be a really complicated recovery in each of the five states" of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, Criswell said. She said areas of western North Carolina, where search and rescue operations were continuing, recorded 29in of rain when the storm stalled over the region.
"This is historic flooding up in North Carolina," Criswell told CBS on Sunday. "I don't know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides they are having right now."
As many as 1,000 people remained unaccounted for in a single North Carolina county in the Appalachian mountains where the hurricane caused catastrophic flooding.
Across the affected states about 2.7 million people remained without power yesterday, a US energy department official said. Kamala Harris said the Biden administration had approved emergency declarations, "making resources and funding available to maximise our coordinated response efforts at the local, state, and federal levels".
The death toll included 23 people in South Carolina, 10 in North Carolina, and 17 in Georgia, where the governor, Brian Kemp, said on Saturday that it "looks like a bomb went off" after seeing wrecked homes and debris-covered roads from the air.
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