More than 160 people are known to have died from Hurricane Helene, one of the worst hurricanes to hit America in recent times.
Hundreds more are still missing after Helene lashed the southeastern states, causing flooding, destroying communities, and reducing power.
Search and rescue efforts are ongoing, and aid deliveries have been made by airdrops and mules. The US government said the effort to clarify could take years.
President Joe Biden is expected to visit hard-hit North Carolina on Wednesday, while Vice President Kamala Harris is traveling to neighboring Georgia.
Both could be key states in November’s presidential election — and the storm is already brewing in politics after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made his trip to Georgia earlier in the week.
Helene hit the US on Thursday as a Category 4 hurricane – the strongest on record to hit Florida’s Big Bend – before moving through neighboring states and downgrading to a tropical storm.
The level of rain clouds was unusual, and the storm lasted relatively long. Wet ground from earlier rains also had a negative impact.
The BBC’s US partner CBS News reported that 162 people died, recorded across six states: North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia.
The number of taxpayers exceeds that of Hurricane Ian, which in September 2022 became one of the deadliest hurricanes of the 21st century – claiming 156 lives.
According to CBS, about half of the people who died in Helene were in North Carolina alone, where it received six months of rain.
The mountainous areas of the state experienced heavy rain – as is common in stormy conditions – which led to the erosion of houses and bridges.
One emergency official in Buncombe County – which includes the worst-hit city of Asheville – said the state had experienced “biblical damage”.
A volunteer involved in relief efforts told the BBC on Tuesday that they knew someone who “lost everything” in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and moved to Asheville, only to be devastated again nearly two decades later.
“Looks like he’s been killed again,” said the volunteer. “He doesn’t have drinking water, he doesn’t have fuel. The food in his fridge is rotten.”
Bad weather also forced the closure of the mines in Spruce Pine, a town that is home to the world’s best-known source of high-purity quartz.
Reconstruction efforts could take years, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. Biden allowed survivors to apply for federal aid money by issuing disaster declarations in various states.
On Monday, Biden revealed reports that up to 600 people were unaccounted for. “God willing, they are alive,” he said. “But there is no way to contact them again because of the lack of mobile phones.”
More than a million people in some of the affected states remained without power Wednesday morning, according to the monitoring website Poweroutage.us.
Preliminary analysis of the storm already suggests that human-caused climate change played a major role in the amount of rain that was dumped.
After Helene hit late Thursday, record flooding was measured in at least seven locations in North Carolina and Tennessee.
In parts of western North Carolina, records that had stood since the “Great Flood” of July 1916 were broken.
The Atlantic hurricane season lasts until the end of November. Waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean are currently above normal temperatures, which means that more powerful storms are still possible.