Hurricane Helene’s death toll has risen to 189 — a number only expected to rise as hundreds remain unaccounted for.
The staggering count — which makes Helene the deadliest storm to hit the US since Hurricane Katrina killed 1,392 in 2005 — covers six states across the south.
North Carolina — one of the hardest hit due to severe flooding which washed out entire communities — has lost 95 people. South Carolina has had 39 deaths; Georgia has had 25; Florida has lost 19; Tennessee has lost 9; and Virginia has lost two, according to numbers tallied by CNN.
Among the dead are a number of first responders and civil servants who remained at their posts in the face of the storm’s dangers.
South Carolina firefighters Chad Satcher, 53, and Landon Bodie, 18, were killed Friday when a tree fell on their engine as they responded to a fire in the small town of Saluda.
Sheriff’s Capt. Michelle Quintero — who ran Florida’s Madison County Jail, right in the path of the storm — was killed Sunday when a dam broke and she was swept away in the floodwaters. Quintero had been driving through Helene’s fallout to reach her jail and tend to inmates when the tragedy struck.
North Carolina deputy Jim Lau was swept away in floodwaters as he was taking a lunch break on duty as a courthouse security officer in Macon County.
Vernon Davis, a firefighter of 30 years, was killed Friday in Blackshear when a tree fell on his truck as he helped clear roads, according to First Coast News.
And in eastern Tennessee, a police K-9 named Scotty was snatched by sudden floodwaters and lost.
Hundreds still remain missing, however, suggesting the death count will keep climbing.
In North Carolina’s Buncombe County alone, at least 600 were considered missing as of Tuesday with much of the mountainous region still cut off from the outside world — both physically from now-vanished roads and bridges, and with communications all but impossible from mass power outages.
“There are reports of up to 600 people unaccounted for because they can’t be contacted,” President Biden said Monday. “God willing, they’re alive.”
Across swaths of the south — especially in the Appalachian regions of Tennessee, Georgia, and North and South Carolina — the situation is much the same.
Even after the bodies stop turning up from the wreckage, the storm’s death toll could continue rising over the coming years — even into the thousands, according to one study.
Powerful storms like Hurricane Helene could lead directly to between 7,000 and 11,000 deaths over the 15 years succeeding them, according to a study published in Nature on Wednesday.
The study looked at mortality rates following 501 tropical cyclones between 1930 and 1950, and found that income loss and health issues stemming directly from storms lead to an “undocumented mortality burden” leading to upwards of 5.1% of all deaths along the US’ Atlantic coast.
Aside from Katrina, Helene’s death toll has no match across more than half a century of hurricanes.
The only storm to claim more lives in that time was Hurricane Camille in 1969, which killed 256.