Before and after satellite photos show Helene’s destruction in Florida

• NOAA satellites captured Hurricane Helene’s destruction on the Florida coast.
• Photos show demolished houses, uprooted trees and mass destruction.
• In addition to Florida, Hurricane Helene caused widespread destruction in several states.

Satellite images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show the destruction Hurricane Helene caused when it first made landfall as a Category 4 storm.

Late Thursday night, NOAA’s GOES East satellite caught the storm making landfall near Perry in northwest Florida.

At the time, the storm’s winds reached up to 140 miles per hour, according to NOAA.

Many homes along Keaton Beach (shown below), which is just a 30-minute drive south of Perry, have been leveled.

The sheriff in Taylor County, where Keaton Beach is located, said the hurricane destroyed 90 percent of the homes in the area, WCTV News reported.

The destroyed houses only give a glimpse of the damage. The storm uprooted trees, downed power lines and flooded entire neighborhoods.

As of Tuesday, more than 49,000 people in Florida were still without power, according to the state government.

Other areas near Florida’s Big Bend region, including Dark Island and Fish Creek, suffered damage shown in NOAA satellite images. The agency has not released similar images for other states.

After hitting Florida, Helene moved north. The Associated Press reported that more than 130 people have been killed so far in several states, including Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Countless others lost their homes, businesses and vehicles.

Susan Scoggins owned a coffee shop in Burnsville, North Carolina. When she heard the hurricane was approaching, she wanted to stay and provide food and safety to her community.

“My hope was that Maples would be a little haven for people to come to after the hurricane passed. But now, the building is just gone,” she told Business Insider earlier this week. – There’s nothing left.

Flooding, debris and damaged infrastructure left cities like Asheville, North Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia, without running water and made it difficult to deliver aid to some areas.

“We’re running out of candles, we’re running out of batteries,” Augusta, Georgia resident Shaday Collins told Georgia Public Broadcasting on Monday. “Everybody right now is kind of in survival mode because everything is very limited.”

Why Hurricane Helene Was So Destructive

Parts of the Southeast, including North Carolina, were dealing with rain before Helene arrived. Together, the storms dumped 40 trillion gallons of water — the equivalent of Lake Tahoe — on the region in more than a week, the Associated Press reported.

Typically, hurricanes weaken and winds die as they move from warm ocean to land. As Helene turned into a tropical storm as it moved inland, the warm, soaked ground from earlier rains may have helped propel the storm stronger than usual, Dev Niyogi, a professor of planetary and earth sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. York Times.

“This was an unprecedented storm to hit western North Carolina,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said. “An unprecedented response is needed.”

Swollen rivers overflowed, landslides cut off roads and flash floods swept people away as they tried to find safety. The last time Asheville saw anything like this disaster was in 1916, when two tropical storms collided, killing 80 people, according to The Washington Post.

Affected states try to coordinate disaster relief along with recovery and rescue. Hundreds of people are still missing or unable to contact their loved ones.

Some mountainous areas rely on helicopters to bring in needed supplies. Reaching rural areas was also a struggle.

“We know there are areas we haven’t gotten to yet,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told CNN, “and so we’re going to continue to get that information about places that still need critical equipment, essential food and water.”