Originally published in CBN
The scale of destruction left behind by Hurricane Helene is only expanding with each passing day as new details become available.
More than 185 people are now confirmed dead from the Category 4 storm, which is being etched in history as the fourth deadliest storm to hit the United States in this century. Hundreds are still missing.
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President Biden is expected to survey the devastation in North and South Carolina on Wednesday, just a day after former President Donald Trump visited hard-hit areas in south Georgia.
Thousands from the Gulf Coast to the Appalachia Mountains are still without running water, cellular service, and electricity. Some are still trapped due to impassable roads or no gas.
“We are seeing just piles of people’s houses that were destroyed. Buildings that were destroyed. Cars overturned,” Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer said Monday.
“The power lines look like spaghetti. It’s hard to describe the chaos that it looks like. It really feels like a post-apocalyptic scene.”
Hundreds of others are mourning the loss of loved ones including one Asheville mother who lost her 7-year-old son and two parents.
Meghan Drye told Fox Weather that when the floodwaters crept into her home, she and her family went to the roof for safety. But the floodwaters eventually broke apart their house, sending all four of them into the river.
“[My son] reached for something past flesh, past human, past anything that even grown adults, I think, would reach for,” Drye said. “My son called out to the one God Almighty. And I think at that moment he was rescued, and he became my hero, and I think all of them carried me through that moment.”
Helene’s destruction is widespread.
“This storm literally spared no one,” said Georgia Governor Brian Kemp.
Meanwhile, rescue workers, disaster relief teams, and churches are on the ground helping residents pick up the pieces. For the first time, Operation Blessing’s international disaster relief is working hand-in-hand with the ministry’s US branch in western North Carolina.
“We are coming together to bring hope to the hopeless during the devastation,” OB shared in a Facebook post.
OB National Media Liason Hayley Henson was trapped in Ashville, NC without power and water, and zero communication for several days. She recently shared that the situation for many residents is dire.
“It’s devastating,” she emotionally explained. “Families that have six children…that have no gas to get out, no food, no water. Families that need insulin, that can’t get out.”
“We are going to try to help everyone that we can,” Henson added.
OB teams, in partnership with Element Church in Forest City, NC, are busy distributing water, emergency meals, and hygiene kits from their base of operations in Asheville.
Asheville resident Rodney Botkins told OB, “I’ve been told it will be another week for electricity and another two weeks for water.”
Operation Blessing is working around the clock to provide help in any way they can, to everyone they can.
OB’s director of transportation and logistics Doug Ressler shared how one OB truck driver gave away his own dinner to a family who hadn’t eaten in days.
“He delivered a relief load to Greenville, South Carolina last night. It was water and food. And as he was unloading the trailer, the people had told him that most of them had not eaten in a couple of days,” he explained. “There were a couple of little toddlers running around there as well and they came running over to him and said,’ Hey mister, did you bring us food?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I did.’ And he said, ‘Have you eaten?’ And they said, ‘No, we haven’t eaten.'”
Ressler said the mother of the toddlers told the driver they lost their house and everything in it during the storm.
He continued: “Well, he had been preparing his supper in a crock pot in the back of the truck. [It was] spaghetti and sausage…He went into his truck and broke out the crockpot. The toddlers ate at the kiddy table and the adults who were around finished up the rest of the food.”
“I thanked him for doing that,” Ressler expressed adding that the truck driver replied: “‘That’s why God bought me to Operation Blessing.'”
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