President Joe Biden is set visit North Carolina on Wednesday to survey the devastating damage from Hurricane Helene, the White House announced on Monday.
The record-breaking storm that tore through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee over the weekend has killed over 130 people as of Tuesday, according to a tally from CNN. Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for.
Buncombe County, N.C., which includes Asheville, was hit the hardest. At least 40 people have died and many remain without running water, electricity, internet or phone service. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Tuesday that over 1,100 people are in shelters and 57,000 people have already applied for FEMA assistance, WSOC reported.
Biden will start his visit at the Emergency Operations Center in Raleigh before taking an aerial tour of Asheville. He said he plans to visit Florida and Georgia “as soon as possible after that.”
Since Helene touched down in Florida on Thursday, Biden has approved major disaster declarations in both Carolinas, Florida and Georgia and deployed more than 3,000 federal workforce employees to support the impacted states alongside FEMA response.
“I’ve directed my team to provide every resource as fast as possible to your communities, to rescue, recover and begin rebuilding,” Biden said on Monday.
The president’s response to the storm has been criticized by Republican nominee Donald Trump. At an event in Valdosta, Ga., on Monday, Trump falsely claimed that Biden was “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” asserting without evidence that the president was not responding to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp because he was “sleeping.”
The same day, Kemp confirmed that he had in fact spoken with Biden, telling reporters that the president asked: “Hey what do you need?”
“And I told him we got what we need, we’ll work through the federal process. He offered that if there’s other things we need just to call him directly, which I appreciate," Kemp said.
Even with the full extent of damage not yet known, Hurricane Helene already ranks among the top 10 deadliest storms in U.S. history.
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