Hurricane Helene caused 57 deaths in Buncombe County, left 'miles of complete devastation'

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and other government officials told residents displaced by Hurricane Helene and those worried about loved ones that a massive effort continued Tuesday to bring stability to the mountains - and to their lives.

"No matter where you are in western North Carolina, if you need help, we are working around the clock to reach you," Cooper said at a media briefing in Raleigh.

The state Division of Emergency Management confirmed 38 storm-related deaths in North Carolina from Helene, with the number expected to rise.

"The devastation brought by Helene is beyond belief. Communities were wiped off the map," Cooper said. He planned to return the damaged areas later Tuesday.

More than 1,100 people were staying in close to 30 shelters in the region, with over 400 roads still closed and hundreds of rescues completed, officials said. First responders and others were working to locate people whose loved ones or friends had not heard from or needed welfare checks.

The National Guard ferried close to 200,000 pounds (90,700 kilograms) of food and other necessities out of the Asheville Regional Airport on Monday, North Carolina guard Major General Todd Hunt said.

The storm unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina. Rainfall estimates in some areas have topped more than 2 feet (61 centimeters) since Wednesday, and several main routes into Asheville were damaged or blocked by mudslides. That includes a 4-mile (6.4-kilometer) section of Interstate 40 that was heavily damaged.

Joey Hopkins, North Carolina's secretary of transportation, asked people to stay off the roads.

"We're continuing to tell folks if you don't have a reason to be in North Carolina, do not travel on the roads of western North Carolina," Hopkins said. "We do not want you here if you don't live here and you're not helping with the storm."

At a grocery store in Asheville, Elizabeth Teall-Fleming stood in line hoping to find nonperishable food, since her home had no power. She planned to heat canned food over a camp stove for her family.

"I'm just glad that they're open and that they're able to let us in," she said.

She was surprised by the storm's ferocity: "Just seeing the little bit of news that we've been able to see has been shocking and really sad."

In one neighborhood, residents collected creek water in buckets to flush toilets. Others waited in a line for more than a block to fill up milk jugs and whatever other containers they could find with drinking water.

Helene blew ashore in Florida late Thursday as a Category 4 hurricane and quickly moved north. The storm upended life throughout the Southeast, where deaths were also reported in Florida, Tennessee and Virginia. Officials warned that rebuilding would be long and difficult.

"This has been an unprecedented storm that has hit western North Carolina," Gov. Roy Cooper said Monday after an aerial tour of the Asheville area. "It's requiring an unprecedented response."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Western North Carolina suffered relatively more devastation because that's where the remnants of Helene encountered the higher elevations and cooler air of the Appalachian Mountains, causing even more rain to fall.

Asheville and many surrounding mountain towns were built in valleys, leaving them especially vulnerable to devastating rain and flooding. Plus, the ground already was saturated before Helene arrived, said Christiaan Patterson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

"By the time Helene came into the Carolinas, we already had that rain on top of more rain," Patterson said.

Climate change has exacerbated conditions that allow such storms to thrive, rapidly intensifying in warming waters and turning into powerful cyclones, sometimes within hours.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Families like the Meidingers are in agony, waiting to find out if their loved one in western North Carolina is OK after Helene ripped through causing devastation and damage.

Chris and Jessica Meidinger are brother and sister, and their mom, Kim Ashby, was last heard from on Thursday night.

Kim and her husband, Rod Ashby, had just finished building their dream home in Elk Park, near Banner Elk. They live in Sanford, where Kim is a seventh-grade math teacher at SanLee Middle School. They decided to go up to their new mountain home to make sure everything would be OK during the storm.

"Obviously, they didn't know that it was going to be what it turned into," Jessica told ABC11 on Monday night.

Rod Ashby had largely built the home with his own two hands, and some of the wood came from his family's barn. He had even marked where historical floods had hit the area and made sure to build the house more than a dozen feet higher than the highest past flood, hoping to avoid the possibility of ever seeing that kind of damage to their home.

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