Gov. Roy Cooper on Tuesday said, About 100 people remain missing in North Carolina more than two weeks after Hurricane Helene ravaged the western stretch of the state.
Mr. Cooper, at a News Conference cautioned that the latest count, of 92 missing people, could change “as more reports come in and others are resolved.”
Search and rescue teams are still looking for the missing , and officials said that they had so far verified 95 storm- related deaths in North Carolina. The process of reporting and finding missing people was further complicated in the first days of recovery because of widespread communications outages.
Asheville and other communities in the western part of the state are still reeling from the devastation wrought by Helene, with thousands lacking access to power, running water and reliable roads.
Thousands of federal, state and National Guard workers have descended on the region to help with hurricane recovery, and Mr. Cooper said that some progress has been made. Rattling through the latest statistics, he said that there were just under 13,000 reported power outages, compared with one million in the immediate aftermath of the storm. About 580 roads remain closed, down from about 1,200.
But the governor acknowledged the enormousness of the challenges ahead, including ensuring that people who lost their homes and belongings to floodwaters are taken care of as cold weather starts to seep into the state. Asheville and other communities still face some difficulty when it comes to the restoration of running water, he said.
Mr. Cooper also spent part of the news briefing castigating the spread of misinformation and falsehoods about the storm response, ranging from false claims about the Federal Emergency Management Agency seizing local land to misinformation about the aid available to survivors of the storm.
Mr. Cooper said, “This is happening in the middle of an election where candidates are using people’s misery to sow chaos for their own political objectives, and it’s wrong. This is a time where we all need to pull together to help the people of western North Carolina, and it’s disappointing when candidates, knowing full well what they’re doing, are continuing this kind of disinformation filled with lies.”
or a specific category with our 
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.