Watch live: Asheville flooding live coverage

Helene’s swath of destruction has caused historic rainfall, flooding, power outages and 140-mile-an-hour winds across the Southeast. But it was North Carolina that bore the brunt of it Saturday with vast swaths of cities like Asheville underwater, residents trapped in their homes with no lights or food and few functioning roads for rescue workers to help them. Helene, Gov. Roy Cooper declared, had become “one of the worst storms in modern history for parts of North Carolina.”