What to know about Hurricane Helene and the flooding the storm left across the Southeast US

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Massive Hurricane Helene crashed into Florida's sparsely populated Big Bend region, bringing storm surge and high winds across the state's Gulf Coast communities before ripping into southern Georgia.

Hurricane Helene weakened to a tropical storm over the Carolinas with maximum sustained winds of 45 mph (75 kph) by mid-morning Friday, the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm will continue to weaken as it continues to move north across Georgia. At 11 a.m., Helene was centered about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southwest of Bryson City, North Carolina, and about 105 miles (165 kilometers) north-northeast of Atlanta, moving north at 32 mph (52 kph), the hurricane center in Miami reported.

Helene wobbled as it approached Florida's coast late Thursday before making landfall near the mouth of the Aucilla River with maximum sustained winds estimated at 140 mph (225 kph). That location was only about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of where Hurricane Idalia came ashore last year at nearly the same ferocity and caused widespread damage.

Evacuations were underway Friday morning in areas of Western North Carolina. The Haywood County Sheriff’s Office west of Asheville said it was helping with evacuations in in Cruso, Clyde, Canton and lower-lying parts of Waynesville.

The storm has been blamed for at least 25 deaths.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Friday that at least 11 people in his state have been killed and dozens are still trapped in homes damaged by Helene.

Gov. Ron DeSantis confirmed two deaths in Florida. One person was hit by a falling sign in Tampa's Ybor City neighborhood and another was killed when a tree fell onto a home in Dixie County. Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said five deaths occurred in neighborhoods where residents were told by authorities to evacuate, but many chose to stay and then found themselves trapped by 8 feet (2.4 meters) of storm surge.

South Carolina officials confirmed that six people were killed, including two when trees fell on their homes in Anderson County, South Carolina.

Another person was killed when a tree fell into a home in North Carolina, and a second person died in a car accident on a flooded road in Catawba County, Gov. Roy Cooper said.

Airports in Florida that closed due to Hurricane Helene will be reopened Friday, Secretary of the Florida Department of Transportation Jared Perdue said. That includes airports in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Lakeland and Tallahassee.

At Orlando International Airport, Florida’s busiest, there had been 77 flight cancellations in the past 24 hours, as of Friday morning, according to FlightAware.

Airports in Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, remained open Friday morning but were reporting large numbers of cancellations and heavy delays. By 8 a.m., nearly 300 flights to or from Charlotte, a major hub for American Airlines, had been canceled. Nearly 400 more, to or from Charlotte, were delayed, according to FlightAware.

At the larger Atlanta airport, more than 130 flights were canceled and more than 180 delayed, according to FlightAware.

On Friday morning, inspectors were out examining bridges and causeways along Florida's Gulf Coast to get them back open to traffic quickly, Perdue said.

In addition, 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of roadway across Florida have been cleared of debris, Perdue said during a news conference in Tallahassee.

“Some of the causeways were underwater, so we have to inspect them and make sure they are safe to pass,” Perdue said. “We had a lot of storm surge up and down the west coast. We had a lot of roads underwater.”

As of 9:15 a.m. Friday, some 3.2 million people across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee were without power, according to poweroutage.us.

Most of the outages, were in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina — each with more than 1 million outages.

Almost 45% of homes and businesses in South Carolina were without power Friday morning. Whole counties were without electricity as winds gusted to near hurricane force. Trees or other debris blocked every major road leading into Greenwood, a city of about 22,000 people about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Columbia, Greenwood County officials said on social media.

Crews of linemen were stationed across the region, ready to begin the process of restoring power as soon as the winds from Helene died down.

Flooding along Florida's coast began well before Hurricane Helene made landfall, with rapidly rising waters reported from as far south as Fort Myers on the state's Gulf Coast.

Early Friday, sheriff's officials in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, were using a large ATV to rescue people who were stranded by rising waters.

In Cedar Key, an old Florida-style island off the Gulf Coast, many homes, motels and businesses were flooded. Not even the city's fire rescue building was spared.

"It actually blew out the storm panels on the front doors. Blew out one of the breakaway walls on the back and two entry doors,” the agency posted online. “It appears that we had about 6 feet or better of water inside.”

Storm surge is the level at which sea water rises above its normal level.

Much like the way a storm’s sustained winds do not include the potential for even stronger gusts, storm surge doesn’t include the wave height above the mean water level.

Surge is also the amount above what the normal tide is at a time, so a 15-foot storm surge at high tide can be far more devastating than the same surge at low tide.

The most common way to measure a hurricane’s strength is the Saffir-Simpson Scale that assigns a category from 1 to 5 based on a storm’s sustained wind speed at its center, with 5 being the strongest.

A man lights charcoal to cook dinner in his flooded home after the passage of Hurricane Helene in Guanimar, Artemisa province, Cuba, Sept. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

Charles Starling, a lineman with Team Fishel, is pelted with rain as he walks by a row of electrical line trucks stage in a field in The Villages, Fla., Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024, in preparation for damage from Hurricane Helene. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel via AP)

This GOES-16 GeoColor satellite image taken at 5:46 p.m. EDT and provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows Hurricane Helene in the Gulf of Mexico moving towards Florida, Thursday, Sept. 26 2024. (NOAA via AP)

Emergency workers in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere rescued hundreds of people from boats, their homes and their cars as Hurricane Helene's winds, rain and storm surge created havoc Friday on the Gulf of Mexico, in coastal neighborhoods and further inland.

The efforts of Florida's 1,500 search-and-rescue personnel will be concentrated on securing and stabilizing affected communities through the weekend, said Kevin Guthrie, the state's emergency operations director. The Category 4 storm made landfall on the Northwest Florida coast late Thursday, but it created flooding from storm surge all along the state's Gulf Coast.

“As those sorts of rescue missions happen today, and continue, please do not go out and visit the impacted areas,” Guthrie said Friday morning at a news conference in the Florida capital of Tallahassee. “I beg of you, do not get in their way.”

The reported rescues ranged from life-threatening situations to people trapped in their homes by waist-high water and unable to flee on their own.

Five people died in Pinellas County and dozens were rescued after the storm surge hit an unprecedented 8 feet (2.4 meters), forcing some to seek shelter in their attics. Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said the deaths all occurred in neighborhoods where authorities told residents to evacuate, but many residents ignored the warnings.

He said survivors told deputies they didn’t believe the warnings after other residents told them the surge wouldn’t be that bad.

“We made our case. We told people what they needed to do, and they chose otherwise,” Gualtieri said.

Gualtieri said his deputies tried overnight to reach those who had been trapped, but in some neighborhoods it just wasn’t safe. Pinellas County includes St. Petersburg.

“I was out there personally. We tried to launch boats, we tried to use high-water vehicles and we just met with too many obstacles,” Gualtieri said. He said the death toll could rise as emergency crews go door-to-door in the flooded areas to see if anyone remains.

In neighboring Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, the sheriff’s office rescued more than 300 people overnight from storm surge. Spokesperson Amanda Granit said those included a 97-year-old woman with dementia and her 63-year-old daughter, who got surprised by the surge and needed help fleeing their flooded home; and a 19-year-old woman whose car got stuck as she drove in the rising water and couldn’t get out.

Granit said deputies were conducting rescues in such large numbers they had to request county transit buses to get the people to safety.

“Deputies couldn’t move them fast in enough in their patrol vehicles,” Granit said.

In the Tampa Bay-area city of South Pasadena, rescue video shows a house burning early Friday amid flooded streets. Other counties along the Gulf reported more than 100 rescues.

The Coast Guard said it rescued three boaters and their pets from the storm in separate incidents. In a Thursday helicopter rescue captured on Coast Guard video, a man and his Irish setter were stranded 25 miles offshore in the Gulf on their 36-foot sailboat in heavy seas.

The video shows the man putting his dog into a yellow rescue vest and pushing it into the raging sea before jumping in himself. A Coast Guard swimmer helped them into a rescue basket and they were hoisted into the copter.

In North Carolina, more than 100 swift-water rescues had occurred as Helene's rains caused massive flooding Friday, particularly in the state's western section. Gov. Roy Cooper said the flash floods are threatening lives and are creating numerous landslides.

“The priority now is saving lives,” Cooper said, begging people to stay off the roads unless they were seeking higher ground.

“With the rain that they already had been experiencing before Helene’s arrival, this is one of the worst storms in modern history for parts of western North Carolina,” Cooper said.

In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp said crews are working to rescue people trapped in more than 115 homes.

Helene's rains flooded homes in Hanover West, a neighborhood in north Atlanta. Emergency personnel rescued several people from their homes, said Richard Simms, a resident in a nearby neighborhood.

This photo provided by Venice Police Department rescue crews assist residents after conducting door-to-door wellness checks, in coastal areas that were flooded by Hurricane Helene on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024 in Venice, Fla . (Venice Police Department via AP)

This photo provided by Venice Police Department rescue crews assist residents after conducting door-to-door wellness checks, in coastal areas that were flooded by Hurricane Helene on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024 in Venice, Fla . (Venice Police Department via AP)

This photo provided by Venice Police Department rescue crews assist residents after conducting door-to-door wellness checks, in coastal areas that were flooded by Hurricane Helene on Friday, Sept. 27, 2024 in Venice, Fla . (Venice Police Department via AP)