As search for Helene's victims drags into second week, sheriff says rescuers 'will not rest'

PENSACOLA, N.C. (AP) — The search for victims of Hurricane Helene dragged into its second week on Friday, as exhausted rescue crews and volunteers continued to work long days — navigating past washed out roads, downed power lines and mudslides — to reach the isolated and the missing.

“We know these are hard times, but please know we’re coming," Sheriff Quentin Miller of Buncombe County, North Carolina, said at a Thursday evening press briefing. “We’re coming to get you. We’re coming to pick up our people.”

With at least 215 killed, Helene is already the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005, and dozens or possibly hundreds of people are still unaccounted for. Roughly half the victims were in North Carolina, while dozens more were killed in South Carolina and Georgia.

In Buncombe County alone, 72 people had been confirmed dead as of Thursday evening, Miller said. Buncombe includes the tourist hub of Asheville, the region's most populous city. Still, the sheriff holds out hope that many of the missing are alive.

His message to them?

“Your safety and well-being are our highest priority. And we will not rest until you are secure and that you are being cared for.”

Now more than a week since the storm roared onto Florida’s Gulf Coast, lack of phone service and electricity continues to hinder efforts to contact the missing. That means search crews must trudge through the mountains to learn whether residents are safe.

Along the Cane River in western North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the Pensacola Volunteer Fire Department had to cut their way through trees at the top of a valley on Thursday, nearly a week after a wall of water swept through.

Pensacola, which sits a few miles from Mount Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi River, lost an untold number of people, said Mark Harrison, chief medical officer for the department.

"We’re starting to do recovery,” he said. “We’ve got the most critical people out.”

Near the Tennessee state line, crews were finally starting to reach side roads after clearing the main roads, but that brought a new set of challenges. The smaller roads wind through switchbacks and cross small bridges that can be tricky to navigate even in the best weather.

“Everything is fine and then they come around a bend and the road is gone and it’s one big gully or the bridge is gone,” said Charlie Wallin, a Watauga County commissioner. “We can only get so far.”

Every day there are new requests to check on someone who hasn’t been heard from yet, Wallin said. When the search will end is hard to tell.

“You hope you’re getting closer, but it’s still hard to know,” he said.

Electricity is being slowly restored, and the number of homes and businesses without power dipped below 1 million on Thursday for the first time since last weekend, according to poweroutage.us. Most of the outages are in the Carolinas and Georgia, where Helene struck after coming into Florida on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane.

President Joe Biden flew over the devastation in North and South Carolina on Wednesday. The administration announced a federal commitment to foot the bill for debris removal and emergency protective measures for six months in North Carolina and three months in Georgia. The money will address the impacts of landslides and flooding and cover costs of first responders, search and rescue teams, shelters and mass feeding.

Contributing to this report were Associated Press journalists Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina; Darlene Superville in Keaton Beach, Florida; John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio; Michael Kunzelman in College Park, Maryland; Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa; and Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City.

President Joe Biden speaks with Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., in Keaton Beach, Fla., Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, during his tour of areas impacted by Hurricane Helene. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Volunteers gather food for families at the volunteer fire station in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A volunteer gathers food for families at the volunteer fire station in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Volunteers prepare meals for firefighters and others at the volunteer fire station in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

The town sign is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

People speak outside the volunteer fire house in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A volunteer gathers food for families at the volunteer fire station in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A bus pushed by flood waters rests against Laurel Branch Baptist church in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A trailer moved by floodwater sits on the side of a road in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

North Carolina National guardsman unload water in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A man makes a call on the wireless system set up at the volunteer fire department in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Homes lie in a debris field in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A bus pushed by flood waters rests against Laurel Branch Baptist church in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A firefighter watches as a helicopter lands at a volunteer fire station in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A woman walks to her damaged home in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Dominick Gucciardo walks to his home in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Dominick Gucciardo walks to his home past a bus pushed by flood waters rests against Laurel Branch Baptist church in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Vehicles roll along on a washed up road in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Thursday, Oct. 3, 2024, in Pensacola, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Dozens of South Korean adoptees, many in tears, have responded to an investigation led by The Associated Press and documented by Frontline (PBS) last week on Korean adoptions. The investigation reported dubious child-gathering practices and fraudulent paperwork involving South Korea’s foreign adoption program, which peaked in the 1970s and `80s amid huge Western demands for babies.

Here are some of the problems adoptees who responded say they faced, along with tips for finding histories and birth families.

Kyla Postrel's paperwork tells two different stories, neither of which she’s sure is true.

After a DNA test last year, Postrel found a half-brother who was also adopted to the West. Comparing their paperwork made her even more skeptical of the stories they’d been told. But part of her is reluctant to keep looking "for something that may or may not exist and could be absolutely devastating.”

She has been flooded with messages from other adoptees looking for help, and tells them not to be disappointed if they can't track down their stories.

“I just don’t want any adoptees feeling like their life is a lie," she says. "Their life is everything that they’ve built since then.”

If her birth mother is still out there, Postrel would want her to know her daughter has had a good life.

Cody Duet, adopted to rural Louisiana in 1986, requested his full file a decade ago. He got back less than one page, saying his mother was a young factory worker, his father was unknown and there was nothing more they were required to give him.

“It was probably one of the most angry moments in my life," Duet says. "Who are you to tell me that I don’t get to know who I am?”

He fell into a depression and couldn’t sleep. He struggled with abandonment, like he was easy to get rid of, easy not to love. But now, he wonders, was that story even true?

The AP investigation found that children were systemically listed as abandoned, even though researchers have found that the vast majority had known relatives.

Now Duet wants to resume his search. He wants to find his mother, to tell her he’s reached a point in his life that he’s proud of.

Amy McFadden always believed what the adoption agency told her parents — that she was abandoned on a staircase at 5 weeks old.

Adopted to the United States in 1975, she’d heard stories about fraudulent adoptions, but always thought of them as one-off problems that had nothing to do with her. She’s grateful for her American life and close to her adoptive parents, and never felt the longing so many other adoptees do to reconnect with their roots.

But when she found out from the AP stories that mothers in South Korea have searched for their missing children for decades, she says, she was in shock for three days. Waves of nausea radiated over her.

She wants to submit her DNA, in case a family has been looking for her.

For Callie Chamberlain, waiting for word on whether her birth parents wanted to connect felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.

Her original documents said her mother was young, unmarried and uneducated, she says. Her full files from the South Korean agency contained a different story: Her mother was married and she was born of an affair. DNA testing showed both stories were untrue, and identified her mother and father as married both back then and now.

When they connected, her mother said she’d nearly died giving birth. The family was poor. Disoriented from labor and medications, her mother said she only vaguely remembered hospital staff insisting she was very sick and the child deserved a better home. The baby disappeared the next day. She lived with that shame for years, and the entire family searched for Chamberlain.

They have now invited her — and her adoptive family — with open arms. But Chamberlain has met many without such happy endings, and feels a sort of survivor's guilt. She also questions the belief that reunions will answer all questions and make you whole.

“There is so much grief and there’s so much sorrow," she says. "There’s this sense of death. And then there’s also so much that gets to be born. It’s an ancestral sorrow that I can feel sometimes, like this wasn’t supposed to happen.”

She has learned of a Korean cultural concept called “han,” an existential and endless grief, born from colonization, war, poverty and the line that cleaves Korea into North and South, splitting families for generations. “That’s something we experience too,” she said. “We are Koreans."

Here are some steps Korean adoptees could take to learn more about their past:

Adoptees can first request information from their adoption agencies. If they don't get results from agencies, they can contact the South Korean government's National Center for the Rights of the Child as a second step.

Birth searches can take months and aren’t always successful. Less than a fifth of 15,000 adoptees who have asked the government for help with family searches since 2012 have managed to reunite with relatives, according to data obtained by AP. Failures are often caused by inaccurate records or the practice of describing children as abandoned even when they had known parents.

Many adoptees also criticize the consent process for reunions. Adoption agencies and the NCRC can only use traditional mail, and only up to three times, to contact birth parents for their consent to provide personal details to adoptees and meet them. Privacy laws prevent agency and NCRC workers from accessing birth parents’ phone numbers. Still, the Korean-language adoption documents kept by South Korean agencies often have more background information than translated files sent to Western adoptive parents.

When they fail to locate birth parents, NCRC may recommend that adoptees register their DNA with South Korean police or diplomatic offices, or help them publish their stories in South Korean media.

Frustrated with search failures and unreliable records, many Korean adoptees in recent years have attempted to reconnect with their birth families through DNA. Adoptees can register their DNA with a South Korean embassy or consulate in the country where they live. They can also register their DNA with a local police station if they travel to South Korea.

DNA testing isn’t common in South Korea, and the process usually depends on whether the birth family had also been trying to find the adoptee through DNA. Once collected at diplomatic or police offices, adoptees’ genetic information is cross-checked with South Korea’s national DNA database for missing persons. When there is a match, the NCRC takes steps to arrange a reunion.

Some adoptees have also found birth relatives through commercial DNA tests popular in the West. The nonprofit group 325 Kamra helps South Korean adoptees and birth families reunite through DNA, by allowing adoptees to upload their commercial test results to a database or providing test kits.

There are various Facebook groups — some open, others closed for adoptees only — where adoptees talk about their lives and interactions with adoption agencies.

One of the most active pages is run by Banet, a volunteer group named after the Korean word for newborn baby clothing. The group helps adoptees search for birth families, connects them with government and police, and provides translation during meetings with Korean relatives.

Some websites are tailored to adoptees sharing the same agency, such as Paperslip, which helps adoptees placed through Korea Social Service with birth family searches and adoption document requests.

The Seoul-based nonprofit Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link assists adoptees with birth family searches as well as language education, social events and obtaining visas for employment in South Korea. KoRoot, another Seoul-based civic group, also helps adoptees searching for their families and backgrounds and runs advocacy programs.

—-

This story is part of an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation includes an interactive and documentary, South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning. Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.

Nicole Motta, whose Korean name is Jang Hyeon-jung, fills out paperwork for a DNA test at the Eastern Social Welfare Society in Seoul, Friday, May 31, 2024, as she and her birth father are reunited for the first time since she was adopted by a family in Alabama, United States, in 1985. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

A city worker posts a flier on the crowded bulletin board of a government office in Bucheon, South Korea, Thursday, May 30, 2024. The flier, featuring two photos of Nicole Motta, an adoptee now residing in Los Angeles, taken as a toddler and an adult, was provided by the Global Overseas Adoptees' Link as part of Motta's search for her birth family. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Photos of adoptees participating at the Overseas Korean Adoptees Gathering are displayed on a large screen during the conference in Seoul Tuesday, May 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

In this photo provided by Kyla Postrel, she stands with her half-brother, Robert Milburn, at his wedding in Norfolk, Va., in April 2024. She found him through a DNA test and their first in-person meeting was one day before his wedding. (Courtesy Kyla Postrel via AP)

Yooree Kim, who was sent to a couple in France by the Holt adoption agency when she was 11, displays some old photos of her and her brother in her apartment in Seoul, Saturday, May 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)