The remnants of Hurricane Helene have been wreaking havoc hundreds of miles from where it made landfall in Florida three days ago.

Western North Carolina is one of the hardest hit areas.

Laura Hackett is a reporter for Blue Ridge Public Radio in Asheville.

Laura, give us some sense of what it's been like in Asheville the last few days.

Yeah, it's been almost total infrastructure loss in Asheville. It's been really hard. There's no water in the city currently.

Cell service has been gone, internet power. We're just starting to get a little bit back online. Some people are

starting to get self-service. So it's been really challenging. Water is definitely the most

dire thing right now. We don't have water yet in the city. Folks are trying to bring it into

Asheville, but because Hurricane Helene wiped away large swaths of the highway.

It's stopping tractor trailers from getting into the region.

So that's the situation we're in right now.

I know that you said that cell services out

and the roads have been closed.

Are there people who can't call for help and are people who the help can't get to them?

Yeah, that's been one of the most challenging aspects of this as well. There's

somebody in Asheville who's keeping kind of a grassroots database and so far around

a thousand folks have last time I checked yesterday

I've submitted, they're trying to find missing people

for welfare checks because they haven't heard from them.

So yeah, folks have been really having a hard time

connecting in places in the area like Swananoa and the Lorne Village, which went completely

underwater during when we did have the big floods, search and rescue missions are still going on,

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