“I’ve never seen so many people homeless as what I have right now,” said Janalea England, of Steinhatchee, Florida, a small river town along the state’s rural Big Bend, as she turned her commercial fish market into a storm donation site for friends and neighbors, many of whom couldn’t get insurance on their homes.

Helene blew ashore in Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday with winds of 140 mph (225 kph).

From there, it quickly moved through Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday that it “looks like a bomb went off” after viewing splintered homes and debris-covered highways from the air. Weakened, Helene then soaked the Carolinas and Tennessee with torrential rains, sending creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams.

Western North Carolina was isolated because of landslides and flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads. All those closures delayed the start of the East Tennessee State University football game against The Citadel because the Buccaneers’ drive to Charleston, South Carolina, took 16 hours.

There have been hundreds of water rescues, none more dramatic than in rural Unicoi County in East Tennessee, where dozens of patients and staff were plucked by helicopter from a hospital rooftop Friday. And the rescues continued into the following day in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where part of Asheville was under water.

“To say this caught us off guard would be an understatement,” said Quentin Miller, the county sheriff.

Asheville resident Mario Moraga said it’s “heartbreaking” to see the damage in the Biltmore Village neighborhood and neighbors have been going house to house to check on each other and offer support.“There’s no cell service here. There’s no electricity,” he said.

While there have been deaths in the county, Emergency Services Director Van Taylor Jones said he wasn’t ready to report specifics, partially because downed cell towers hindered efforts to contact next of kin.

Relatives put out desperate pleas for help on Facebook. Among those waiting for news was Francine Cavanaugh, whose sister told her she was going to check on guests at a vacation cabin as the storm began hitting Asheville. Cavanaugh, who lives in Atlanta, hasn’t been able to reach her since then.

“I think that people are just completely stuck,” she said.

The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, was expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley on Saturday and Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said.

‘Catastrophic’ flooding

It unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina, where Gov. Roy Cooper described it as “catastrophic” as search and rescue teams from 19 states and the federal government came to help. One community, Spruce Pine, was doused with over 2 feet (0.6 meters) of rain from Tuesday through Saturday.

And in Atlanta, 11.12 inches (28.24 centimeters) of rain fell over 48 hours, the most the city has seen over two days since record keeping began in 1878.

President Joe Biden said Saturday that Helene’s devastation has been “overwhelming” and pledged to send help. He also approved a disaster declaration for North Carolina, making federal funding available for affected individuals.

With at least 25 killed in South Carolina, Helene is the deadliest tropical cyclone for the state since Hurricane Hugo killed 35 people when it came ashore just north of Charleston in 1989. Deaths also have been reported in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

Moody’s Analytics said it expects $15 billion to $26 billion in property damage. AccuWeather’s preliminary estimate of the total damage and economic loss from Helene in the U.S. is between $95 billion and $110 billion.

Climate change has exacerbated conditions that allow such storms to thrive, rapidly intensifying in warming waters and turning into powerful cyclones sometimes in a matter of hours.

The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, was expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley on Saturday and Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said.

Evacuations and overtopped dams

Evacuations began before the storm hit and continued as lakes overtopped dams, including one in North Carolina that forms a lake featured in the movie “Dirty Dancing.” Helicopters were used to rescue some people from flooded homes.

And in Newport, Tennessee, Jonah Wark waited so long to evacuate that a boat had to come to the rescue. “Definitely a scary moment,” Wark said.

After touring the damage by helicopter, a stunned U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger said, “Who would have thought a hurricane would do this much damage in East Tennessee?”

Among the 11 confirmed deaths in Florida were nine people who drowned in their homes in a mandatory evacuation area on the Gulf Coast in Pinellas County, where St. Petersburg is located, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.

None of the victims were from Taylor County, which is where the storm made landfall. It came ashore near the mouth of the Aucilla River, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) northwest of where Hurricane Idalia hit last year at nearly the same ferocity.

“If you had told me there was going to be 15 feet to 18 feet of storm surge, even with the best efforts, I would have assumed we would have had multiple fatalities,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday.

Taylor County is in Florida’s Big Bend, went years without taking a direct hit from a hurricane. But after Idalia and two other storms in a little over a year, the area is beginning to feel like a hurricane superhighway.

“It’s bringing everybody to reality about what this is now with disasters,” said John Berg, 76, a resident of Steinhatchee, a small fishing town and weekend getaway.

Timmy Futch of Horseshoe Beach stayed put for the hurricane before driving to high ground when the water reached his house. many homes in the town, which his grandfather helped found, were reduced to piles of lumber.

“We watched our town get tore to pieces,” Futch said.

The storm, now a post-tropical cyclone, was expected to hover over the Tennessee Valley on Saturday and Sunday, the National Hurricane Center said.

The aftermath

A Florida resident provided a devastating first-hand look at hard-hit Cedar Key Friday morning after parts of the town were flattened by Hurricane Helene.

About 60 miles (100 kilometers) to the north, cars lined up before sunrise Saturday at a free food distribution site in Perry, Florida, amid widespread power outages.

“We’re making it one day at a time,” said Sierra Land, who lost everything in her fridge, as she arrived at the site with her 5- and 10-year-old sons and her grandmother.

Thousands of utility crew workers descended upon Florida in advance of the hurricane, and by Saturday power was restored to more than 1.9 million homes and businesses. But hundreds of thousands remain without electricity there and in Georgia.

Chris Stallings, director of the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency, said crews were focused on opening routes to hospitals and making sure supplies can be delivered to damaged communities.

Helene was the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted an above-average season this year because of record-warm ocean temperatures.

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RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled $82 million for North Carolina to help connect 16,000 new households and businesses to high-speed internet, delivering an election-year pitch about policies he says are “just getting started” at improving the United States.

Biden, the Democratic incumbent who is campaigning to win a second term, coupled his economic message with a few jabs at his predecessor, Donald Trump, currently the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his most likely future challenger.

Biden brought up Trump’s recent comment that he hoped the economy would crash soon because he doesn’t want to preside over job losses if he were to be reelected in November. Biden told his audience that Trump already was like Herbert Hoover, who held office during the 1929 stock market crash.

“He’s the only president to be president for four years and lose jobs,” Biden said of Trump.

Biden said the work his administration is doing in North Carolina, on high-speed internet, infrastructure and more, is happening in communities across the country, regardless of the politics.

“What we’re doing here in North Carolina is one piece of a much bigger story,” he said. Biden said he was keeping his promise “to be a president for all America, whether you voted for me or not.”

Biden talked about all the people who need high-speed internet because they work from home, businesses who need it to reach customers and students who need to do their school work.

“High-speed internet isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s an absolute necessity,” he said in Raleigh, the state capital. “The investment in high-speed internet means something else as well: good-paying jobs.”

Biden’s reelection campaign has made winning North Carolina and its 16 electoral votes a top priority. The Democrat narrowly lost the state in 2020 by 1.34 percentage points to Trump. They are expected to face each other again in November.

Fast-growing North Carolina is considered a presidential battleground, but only twice in the last 40-plus years has a Democrat won the state’s electoral votes: Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008.

Trump won the state in both 2016 and 2020, with the latter victory in part a result of massive turnout for Republicans in rural and non-urban counties overcoming increasingly Democratic strongholds in and around Raleigh and Charlotte.

Republicans hold narrow veto-proof control of the state legislature and a majority on the state Supreme Court. But voters still appear comfortable with a Democratic state chief executive who attempts to counteract GOP policies, which recently have included more abortion restrictions and expanded private school vouchers. Democrats have held the governorship for all but four years since 1993.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who is term-limited from running this year, spoke before Biden on Thursday, boosting Biden and criticizing Trump.

“I want a president who wakes up every morning thinking about the American people instead of a president who wakes up every morning thinking about himself,” Cooper said.

Polling shows that the economy has been a weakness for Biden, a reflection of inflation hitting a four-decade high in June 2022. Easing inflation rates since then have yet to pull Biden’s approval ratings back to their levels at the start of his presidency. The president has tried to empathize with voters grappling with higher inflation, but he has stressed that his policies are fostering the creation of factory and construction jobs with middle-class wages.

“When jobs grow, everything grows,” Biden said as he ticked through federal spending on projects made possible by his pandemic aid package and an infrastructure law.

The president later picked up a burger, fries and shake from Cook Out and held what his campaign described as a “kitchen table conversation” at the home of a family that benefited from the administration’s student loan forgiveness programs.

The administration is committing a total of $3 billion to build and fund internet connections in North Carolina. The administration estimates that an additional 300,000 state residents will be able to access the internet by the end of 2026.

One way the administration says it has lowered costs for families is by providing discounted internet service to 880,000 households in North Carolina. But the administration is calling on Congress to renew the Affordable Connectivity Program, a separate source of funding that is set to run out of money in April. The program has helped 22 million people save $30 to $75 a month on their internet bills, the administration says.

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RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Legislation banning most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy will become law in North Carolina after the state’s Republican-controlled General Assembly successfully overrode the Democratic governor’s veto late Tuesday.

The House completed the second and final part of the override vote Tuesday night after a similar three-fifths majority voted for the override earlier Tuesday in the Senate. The outcome represents a major victory for Republican legislative leaders who needed every GOP member on board to enact the law over Gov. Roy Cooper’s opposition.

Cooper vetoed the measure over the weekend after spending last week traveling around the state to convince at least one Republican to uphold his expected veto.

Republicans have pitched the measure as a middle-ground change to state law, which currently bans nearly all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, without exceptions for rape or incest.

The vote came as abortion rights in the U.S. faced another tectonic shift with lawmakers considering sharply limiting abortion both in North Carolina and South Carolina, two of the few remaining Southern states with relatively easy access.

Nebraska joined the two states in debating abortion restrictions Tuesday that are possible because the U.S. Supreme Court last year struck down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which established a nationwide right to abortion.

Under another bill up for a vote Tuesday in the South Carolina House, abortion access would be almost entirely banned after about six weeks of pregnancy — before women often know they’re pregnant. The South Carolina state Senate previously rejected a proposal to nearly outlaw abortions.

Abortion is banned or severely restricted in much of the South and is now banned throughout pregnancy in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia. In Georgia, it’s allowed only in the first six weeks.

The Carolinas, Florida and Virginia are now the main destinations in the region for those seeking legal abortions. Florida has a ban that kicks in 15 weeks into pregnancy. Under a recent law, that would tighten to six weeks pending a court ruling. Further west, women often travel to Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico or Colorado.

Nationally, bans on abortion throughout pregnancy are in effect in 14 states.

If both the North and South Carolina bans become law, combined with Florida’s recent ban, “it would be just devastating for abortion access in the South,” Jamie Lockhart, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, said Tuesday.

During the North Carolina Senate debate, Republicans said Cooper ignored $160 million within the measure that would boost funding to increase contraceptive services, reduce infant and maternal mortality and provide paid maternity leave for state employees and teachers.

“North Carolinians watching this debate, you are bearing witness to exaggerated and extremist objections from some Democrats,” Republican Sen. Vickie Sawyer of Iredell County said. “Their anger is that this bill is mainstream and a common-sense approach to a very difficult topic.”

Democrats focused on details of the abortion rules, which they said would place barriers between women and their doctors, leaving those who are pregnant in danger.

And the 12-week cutoff means that young women will have potentially only a couple of weeks to decide whether an abortion is the right decision, leading them to continue with unwanted pregnancies, Democratic Sen. Natasha Marcus of Mecklenburg County said.

“This bill is a slap in the face. It is a muzzle over our mouths, and it is a straitjacket on our bodies,” Marcus said. After the Senate vote, loud chants of “Shame!” could be heard outside the chamber doors.

Anti-abortion protesters who arrived hours before the vote packed the North Carolina Senate gallery, with about 150 supporters of the proposed ban holding identical “Vote Pro-Life” signs.

“So many Republicans have just keeled over from pressure from all the groups who are just filled with hate and are pushing things that are going against God,” said Sharon Dooley, 63, of Garner, North Carolina.

In South Carolina, the impasse dates back to a special session last fall when House lawmakers demanding a near-total ban did not meet to negotiate with their Senate counterparts pushing for a ban around six weeks.

The stalemate persisted even after the state Supreme Court in January struck down a previous law banning abortions once cardiac activity is detected.

That decision left abortion legal through 22 weeks of pregnancy. A sharp increase in abortions since then has rankled Republicans.

The House was weighing a Senate bill similar to the one they denied last year. The measure would ban abortion when an ultrasound detects cardiac activity, around six weeks.

A late night is expected even after Republicans invoked rules to limit debate. House Speaker Murrell Smith has said the chamber will not adjourn until the measure gets approval. Democrats slowed the process Tuesday by speaking for all three allotted minutes on each of their hundreds of amendments and forcing other procedural votes.

Lawmakers in Nebraska were debating a proposal that would ban abortion at 12 weeks of pregnancy. The proposal comes after lawmakers rejected a bill last month that would have banned abortion after cardiac activity is detected.

This latest proposal is tacked onto a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors. Conservatives in Nebraska’s unique single-chamber, officially nonpartisan Legislature will need 33 out of 49 votes for these proposals to advance.

In Montana, Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte’s office announced Tuesday that he had signed into law a bill that makes performing the abortion method most commonly used after 15 weeks of gestation a felony. Planned Parenthood of Montana asked a judge to temporarily block the ban on dilation and evacuation abortions.

A separate challenge to abortion access will be considered Wednesday, when a federal appeals court hears arguments on whether the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the widely used abortion drug mifepristone should be overturned. A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will review a ruling last month by a federal judge in Texas who ordered a hold on approval of mifepristone, a decision that overruled two decades of scientific approval of the drug. That ruling was stayed while the appeal is pending.

The three judges who will hear the case each have a history of supporting restrictions on abortion. A ruling is not expected immediately.

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Lavoie reported from Richmond, Virginia. Associated Press writers James Pollard and Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Amy Beth Hanson in Helena, Montana and Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Virginia contributed to this report. Schoenbaum and Pollard are corps members for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina residents can now buy a handgun without getting a permit from a local sheriff, after the Republican-controlled legislature on Wednesday overrode the Democratic governor’s veto — a first since 2018.

The House voted 71-46 to enact the bill, which eliminates the longstanding permit system requiring sheriffs to perform character evaluations and criminal history checks of pistol applicants. The Senate overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto in a party-line vote on Tuesday.

The permit repeal takes effect immediately. Cooper and Democratic lawmakers warned it allows a greater number of dangerous people to obtain weapons through private sales, which do not require a background check, and limits law enforcement’s ability to prevent them from committing violent crimes.

Those who purchase pistols from a gun store or a federally licensed dealer are still subject to a national background check, and concealed weapons permits are still required.

Bill supporters say the sheriff screening process for handguns was no longer necessary in light of significant updates to the national background check system. They also argue the permit system wasn’t very effective at preventing criminals from obtaining guns.

The North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association supports the repeal in light of national system updates, but its current president does not.

Although Republican seat gains in the midterm elections gave them veto-proof margins in the Senate, they were one seat shy of a similar majority in the House.

Wednesday’s House vote tally showed three Democrats — Reps. Tricia Cotham of Mecklenburg County, Cecil Brockman of Guilford County and Michael Wray of Northampton County — failed to vote on the override, creating enough of a margin to meet the constitutional requirement. Republicans needed at least one Democratic member to join them, or as few as two Democrats not to vote.

Brockman was in urgent care Wednesday morning, according to a statement released by his office. Cotham said in a statement that she was receiving scheduled hospital treatment and had informed both parties that she would be absent. She said she does not support the permit repeal.

A phone message left at Wray’s legislative office wasn’t immediately returned Wednesday. Republicans gave Wray and Cotham key committee chairmanships this year — a rarity for the majority party in power.

A liberal-leaning group called Carolina Forward put out a fundraising tweet soon after the vote targeting the three representatives, vowing to “hold them accountable.”

House Speaker Tim Moore, a Cleveland County Republican presiding over the chamber during the override vote, said the provisions contained within the bill “have been long-standing goals of Second Amendment advocates in our state, and we have finally brought this legislation over the finish line.”

Moore used parliamentary maneuvers Wednesday to block floor debate before the vote, causing frustration among Democrats.

Cooper, who is term-limited from seeking reelection next year, criticized the the move by House leadership, saying in a tweet that arguments to uphold his veto would have been “too compelling for them to hear.”

Before the Senate vote Tuesday, some Democrats urged against loosening gun access in the immediate aftermath of Monday’s mass shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville, despite Republicans’ insistence that lawmakers refrain from politicizing the shooting.

“For us to come in this tone deaf about what happened in Nashville and to pretend that it doesn’t matter, to pretend that that might not be an issue that we’ve got to bring up, is disturbing — with a bunch of kids sitting up here,” said House Minority Leader Robert Reives, referring to the school group watching from the gallery.

While Reives said he asked all Democratic caucus members to be present, he refused to criticize those who were absent or didn’t vote. The Chatham County Democrat told reporters the permit repeal could allow domestic abusers and mentally ill people at risk of suicide to obtain guns.

The enacted bill also will allow guns on some school properties where religious services are held, effective Dec. 1. The new law also creates and funds a two-year awareness campaign on the safe storage of firearms, which will distribute free gun locks.

In 2021, Cooper successfully blocked standalone versions of the pistol permit repeal and another provision allowing people with concealed weapons permits to carry openly or under clothing at houses of worship where private or charter schools also meet. At the time, Democrats had enough seats to block any override attempt if they stayed united.

Guns will not be permitted on campus during school hours or when students are present for extracurricular activities, and houses of worship can opt out by posting signs.

Gun-rights advocates celebrated the override after trying for years to pass the pistol permit repeal.

“Second Amendment supporters made history today,” said Paul Valone, executive director of Grass Roots North Carolina, which campaigned last year for candidates so that Republican majorities could override Cooper’s gun-related vetoes.

Gun-control advocates lamented the override, saying the handgun permit elimination would imperil more people’s lives in the nation’s ninth-largest state.

“We will wake up five or 10 years from now and see that our gun homicide and gun suicide rates have risen,” Becky Ceartas with North Carolinians Against Gun Violence said in a news release.

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Hannah Schoenbaum is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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