The death toll from the hurricane Helene rises this Friday to more than 215, while the teams of lifeguards work tirelessly in the search for missingwhich number in the hundreds, just over a week after the cyclone made landfall with category 4.
The channel C.B.S. reports today that the number of fatalities amounts to 219 people, while NBC accounts for “at least 215” at the same time of the reduction in the possibilities of finding “hundreds of missing people alive” due to this hurricane that entered northwest Florida on the night of September 26.
Search and rescue teams continue this Friday with recovery tasks in the southeast of USA, in the middle of impassable roads, destroyed bridges, flooded towns and more than 700 thousand homes still without power, especially in North Carolina, where the dead exceed one hundred.
In Buncombe County of this state, where the hard-hit town of Asheville is located, more than 200 people are missing, according to the Local Sheriff’s Office, Quentin Miller.
“There are still isolated communities, with difficulties in obtaining basic products,” he acknowledged in statements to NBCNews the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Deanne Criswell, who reiterated that the priority continues to be the search for the missing.
This federal agency has deployed emergency personnel, up to about 1,500, and has so far distributed about $45 million in aid to those affected in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia.
Criswell It will remain in North Carolina until the affected areas reach some stabilization, a task for which since yesterday they have had the help of up to a thousand active soldiers sent by the United States Department of Defense.
Harris and Trump visit affected areas
Following the visit of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, to the punished areas between Wednesday and Thursday, which included an aerial visit to Asheville, the vice president and current Democratic candidate in the general elections next November, Kamala Harris, He will do the same this Saturday in North Carolina, after touring destroyed areas in Georgia on foot on Wednesday.
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iden was not received or met with any of the governors of the states he visited, unlike the former president and republican candidate, donald trumpwho will be accompanied this Friday afternoon by the governor of Georgia, also a Republican Brian Kemp, during his visit to the town of Evans, near the border with South Carolina.
Deaths in plastics factory rise to four
In Tennessee, the family and friends They held a vigil on Thursday in honor of the four workers of a plastics company who died due to the flooding produced by Helene, classified as the deadliest hurricane in the last 50 years in the continental United States.
Guadalupe Hernández Corona, sister of one of the deceased (Mónica Hernández), paid tribute to her family member and asked the authorities to continue the search for the workers, many of them Mexican, of the Impact Plastics plantin the town of Erwin.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation began investigations into the plant’s response following complaints from factory employees, who have alleged that they were not allowed to evacuate after flood alerts were issued in Erwin, located on the border with North Carolina.
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