Live Map: Track the path of Hurricane Helene

The remnants of Hurricane Helene dissipated Saturday, but millions remain without power across the Southeast and officials warned that record-breaking river flooding is ongoing in parts of southern Appalachia.
The storm has been blamed for at least 52 deaths across five states, including 23 people in South Carolina and 11 in Florida. But the death toll is sure to rise as authorities continue to take stock of Helene’s devastation.
Track the storm with the live map below.

In hard-hit Buncombe County, North Carolina, where Asheville is located, authorities said they know people died but aren’t announcing anything because communication outages haven’t allowed them to reach relatives of the victims.
Image provided by CIRA/NOAA
The hurricane roared ashore Thursday night as a Category 4 storm on Florida’s Gulf Coast and then quickly moved Friday through Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, uprooting trees, splintering homes and sending creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams.
Ten of the 11 people who died in Florida as a result of Hurricane Helene lived in the Tampa Bay area, officials said Saturday. The other victim was killed when a tree fell on a house in Dixie County, in north Florida.
WATCH: Helene’s impact felt far and wide across several Southern states
Nine of the victims lived in mandatory evacuation zones in Pinellas County, where St. Petersburg is located, along Florida’s Gulf Coast. Each of those victims drowned in their homes, according to Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri. They ranged in age from 37 to 89.
The other victim died when a sign fell onto a car in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood.
President Joe Biden said in a statement Saturday he was “deeply saddened” by the loss of life and devastation from Helene and that he and first lady Jill Biden were praying for the families. Biden was being regularly briefed by his team on the storm, and the leader of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was in the region assessing the damage, along with local officials.
“The road to recovery will be long, but know that my Administration will be with you every step of the way. We’re not going to walk away. We’re not going to give up,” he said.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Helene left a wide swath of destruction on the east side of the state.
“What is looks like from the air is it looks like a tornado went off, it looks like a bomb went off,” Kemp told reporters in Valdosta. “And it’s not just here, it looks like this from here all the way to Augusta.”
Utilities in Georgia warned that it will take a significant amount of time to restore remaining electrical outages. Georgia Power Co. said Saturday morning that while it had restored power to more than 450,000 customers, more than 525,000 of its 2.6 million customers remained without electricity. Georgia Electric Membership Corp., which represents electric cooperatives, said it had restored more than 110,000 outages but nearly 320,000 remain.
READ MORE: Helene’s destructive trail across southeastern U.S. leaves at least 52 dead, millions without power
“This is certainly going to be multiple days of outage,” Georgia Power Co. CEO Kim Greene said.
The electric cooperatives continued to warn of serious damage to high-voltage transmission lines and the substations that convert high-voltage power into the electricity that is delivered to customers.
“The damage to the supply side of the electrical grid from Helene is extensive, surpassing that of 2018’s Hurricane Michael in many areas, and will take longer to assess and repair,” Georgia EMC said.
Flash flood risk forecast on Sept. 28, 2024. Graphic by NWS/NCEP Weather Prediction Center (WPC)
The threat of a potential dam collapse in eastern Tennessee, near the North Carolina border, was easing on Saturday morning.
Around midnight the Tennessee Valley Authority had issued an emergency warning that the Nolichucky Dam could breach at any time. An update later on Saturday said the Nolichucky River had crested at 8 feet (2.4 meters) over previous record elevations and was receding at about 1 foot (0.3 meters) per hour.
“Our Dam Safety teams are in the process of assessing the condition of the dam to determine next steps,” TVA posted on X.
A view of a flooded area in Newport, Tennessee, Sept. 27, 2024, in this screengrab obtained from a social media video. Image provided by Curtis Hance/H&H Vapors/via Reuters
Officials in Buncombe County, North Carolina, said in a Saturday news conference, that all roads in western North Carolina should be considered closed. Interstate 40 and I-26 were impassible in multiple locations. Other roads were washed out or blocked by fallen trees and debris.
More than 100,000 Duke Energy customers in the area were without power. In Asheville, there was no cellular service and no timeline for when it would be restored. Residents were also directed to boil their water. Meanwhile, nearby Woodfin had no running water.
Flood waters wash over Guy Ford Road bridge on the Watauga River as Hurricane Helene approaches in the North Carolina mountains, in Sugar Grove, North Carolina, on Sept. 26, 2024. Photo by Jonathan Drake/ Reuters
“We have had some loss of life,” County Emergency Services Director Van Taylor Jones told reporters. However, he said they were not ready to report any specifics. Officials have been hindered in contacting next of kin by the communications outages.
Jones said the area experienced a cascade of emergencies that included heavy rain, high winds and mudslides.
Officials said they tried to prepare for the storm but its magnitude was beyond what they could have imagined.
“It’s not that we (were) not prepared, but this is going to another level,” Sheriff Quentin Miller said. “To say this caught us off-guard would be an understatement.”
Francine Cavanaugh said she has been totally unable to reach her sister, son, or friends in the Asheville area.
“My sister checked in with me yesterday morning to find out how I was in Atlanta,” she said on Saturday. “The storm was just hitting her in Asheville, and she said it sounded really scary outside.”
A stranded car sits in flood waters as Tropical Storm Helene strikes, in Boone, North Carolina, on Sept. 27, 2024. Photo by Jonathan Drake/ Reuters
Cavanaugh said her sister had no idea how bad the storm would be there. She told Cavanaugh she was going to head out to check on guests at a vacation cabin “and that’s the last I heard of her. I’ve been texting everyone that I know with no response. All phone calls go directly to voicemail.”
She saw video of a grocery store near the cabins that was completely flooded.
“I think that people are just completely stuck, wherever they are, with no cell service, no electricity.”
Flooding along Florida’s coast began well before Hurricane Helene made landfall, with rapidly rising waters reported from as far south as Fort Myers on the state’s Gulf Coast.
Peak storm surge forecast for the U.S. Graphic by National Hurricane Center
Early Friday, sheriff’s officials in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, were using a large ATV to rescue people who were stranded by rising waters.
In Cedar Key, an old Florida-style island off the Gulf Coast, many homes, motels and businesses were flooded. Not even the city’s fire rescue building was spared.
“It actually blew out the storm panels on the front doors. Blew out one of the breakaway walls on the back and two entry doors,” the agency posted online. “It appears that we had about 6 feet or better of water inside.”
Storm surge is the level at which sea water rises above its normal level.
Much like the way a storm’s sustained winds do not include the potential for even stronger gusts, storm surge doesn’t include the wave height above the mean water level.
Surge is also the amount above what the normal tide is at a time, so a 15-foot storm surge at high tide can be far more devastating than the same surge at low tide.
A drone view shows a flooded and damaged area, following Hurricane Helene in Steinhatchee, Florida, Sept. 27, 2024. Photo by Marco Bello/Reuters
The most common way to measure a hurricane’s strength is the Saffir-Simpson Scale that assigns a category from 1 to 5 based on a storm’s sustained wind speed at its center, with 5 being the strongest.
— Kate Payne and Heather Hollingsworth, Associated Press