US President Joe Biden has deployed 1,000,000 troops to strengthen relief efforts in the southeastern US, after the region was hit by Hurricane Helene.
The troops will join the 6,000 members of the National Guard and 4,800 government aid workers already deployed in the six states hit by the severe weather.
At least 175 people are known to have been killed by Hurricane Helene, one of the worst hurricanes to hit the US in recent times.
Hundreds more are still missing, with search and rescue teams struggling to reach remote areas.
Aid deliveries were made by airdrops and mules. The US government said efforts to clarify could take years.
Biden traveled to the hard-hit states of North Carolina and South Carolina on Wednesday, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to neighboring Georgia.
Both North Carolina and Georgia are key states in November’s presidential election — and the storm is brewing in politics after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made his trip to Georgia earlier in the week.
In North Carolina, Biden took a flight to the western parts of the state affected by the storm. He will visit parts of North Carolina and South Carolina, as well as affected communities in Florida and Georgia on Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
“The Biden-Harris administration remains focused on using all the tools available to help people and their communities begin their road to recovery and rebuilding,” said Ms. Jean-Pierre.
Helene hit the US on Thursday as a Category 4 hurricane – the strongest on record to hit Florida’s Big Bend – before moving through neighboring states and downgrading to a tropical storm.
The level of rain clouds was unusual, and the storm lasted relatively long. Wet ground from earlier rains also had a negative impact.
The BBC’s US partner CBS News reported that 175 people died, recorded across six states: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia.
The number of taxpayers exceeds that of Hurricane Ian, which in September 2022 became one of the deadliest hurricanes of the 21st century – claiming 156 lives.
According to CBS, almost half of Helene’s deaths were in North Carolina alone, where it experienced six months of rain.
The mountainous areas of the state experienced heavy rain – as is common in stormy conditions – which led to the erosion of houses and bridges.
One emergency official in Buncombe County – which includes the worst-hit city of Asheville – said the state had experienced “biblical damage”.
A volunteer involved in relief efforts told the BBC on Tuesday that they knew someone who “lost everything” in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and moved to Asheville, only to be devastated again nearly two decades later.
“Looks like he’s blacked out again,” said the volunteer. “He doesn’t have drinking water, he doesn’t have fuel. The food in his fridge is rotten.”
Bad weather also forced the closure of the mines in Spruce Pine, a town that is home to the world’s best-known source of high-purity quartz.
In Tennessee, state authorities are investigating the operator of a plastics factory where 11 workers were swept away by floodwaters on Friday. Five of the crew were rescued. Two have been confirmed dead and four others are still missing.
Impact Plastics told CBS in a statement that it monitored weather conditions near its Erwin plant in northeast Tennessee, and fired workers “when water began to cover the parking lot and a nearby road, and the plant lost power”.
But in interviews with local shops, the workers said they were told to continue working in the factory until it was time to leave safely.
Jacob Ingram, a mold changer at the factory, filmed himself and four others waiting to be rescued as cars and debris were washed away by the muddy water around him.
“I was working hard when the storm hit yesterday,” Mr Ingram wrote in a Facebook post, adding that he and 11 others were trapped in the back of a semi-truck. “I’m lucky to be alive.”
Reconstruction efforts could take years, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. Biden allowed survivors to apply for federal aid money by issuing disaster declarations in various states.
On Monday, Biden revealed reports that up to 600 people were unaccounted for. “God willing, they are alive,” he said. “But there is no way to contact them again because of the lack of cell phones.”
More than a million people in some of the affected states remained without power Wednesday morning, according to the monitoring website Poweroutage.us.
Preliminary analysis of the storm already suggests that human-caused climate change played a major role in the amount of rain that was dumped.
After Helene hit late Thursday, record flooding was measured in at least seven locations in North Carolina and Tennessee.
In parts of western North Carolina, records that had stood since the “Great Flood” of July 1916 were broken.
The Atlantic hurricane season lasts until the end of November. Waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean are currently above normal temperatures, which means that more powerful storms are still possible.
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