Death toll rises; Millions of dollars in power outages

Dozens killed. Hospital visitors run to the rooftops to be transported away in helicopters. Mayors are desperately calling on citizens to flee. And prisoners desperately pushed out of a prison that was on the brink of flooding.

Helene has brought a cascade of destruction across the Southeast. The record-breaking storm hit Florida as a hurricane with winds of 140 miles per hour, leveling buildings. It has since weakened into a post-tropical cyclone with winds of 25 miles per hour, but the deluge of rain it brings is leaving parts of North Carolina and Tennessee underwater, and about 3.8 million people are without power as of Saturday morning.

“It's destroyed,” Jordon Bowen of the Florida State Guard's Special Operations Unit told the Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Network, of the area where Helene landed. “Inaccessible, rubble, lots of dangers, broken power lines, houses cut in half.”