Before and after satellite photos show Hurricane Helene’s destruction of the Florida coast

Hurricane Helene hit Florida as a Category 4 storm on Thursday, causing severe flooding, power outages, and widespread damage across multiple states.

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

Bird Island in Florida looks like someone erased all evidence of human existence on it. 

Late Thursday evening, NOAA’s GOES East satellite captured 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, were leveled.

Keaton Beach is just a 30 minutes drive south from where Hurricane Helene made landfall. Many homes in this area were destroyed. 

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

Destroyed homes offer only a glimpse of the damage. The storm uprooted trees, downed powerlines, and flooded entire neighborhoods.

Before-and-after satellite images of Hagens Cove Park with debris strewn and trees uprooted. 

As of Tuesday, more than 49,000 people in Florida were still out of power, according to the state government.

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

Before image on left of a house just north of Fish Creek. After image on right shows debris flung across the lawn after Hurricane Helene.

After pummeling Florida, Helene moved north. The Associated Press reported that, so far, over 130 people were killed in several states, including Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

Countless more lost their homes, businesses, and vehicles.

Many houses in Cedar Island were demolished from Hurricane Helene. 

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

“My hope was that Maples would be a little safe haven for people to come to after the hurricane passed. But now, the building is just gone,” she told B-17 earlier this week. “There’s nothing left.”

Some houses on Dark Island appear to have survived while others were demolished.

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

“We’re running out of candles, 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

Hurricane Helene floods destroyed homes and businesses in Asheville, North Carolina.

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

Typically, hurricanes weaken and winds die down as they move from the warm ocean to dry land. While Helene did devolve into a tropical storm as it moved inland, the warm, sodden ground from previous rains could have helped propel the storm more forcefully than usual, Dev Niyogi, a University of Texas at Austin earth and planetary sciences professor, told The New York Times.

“This has been an unprecedented storm that has hit western North Carolina,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said. “It’s requiring an unprecedented response.”

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 during the collision of two tropical storms, which killed 80 people, according to The Washington Post.

The affected states are trying to coordinate disaster relief along with recovery and rescue. Hundreds of people are still missing or unable to contact loved ones.

Some mountainous areas are relying on helicopters to bring necessary supplies. Reaching rural areas has also been a struggle.

“We know there’s areas we haven’t gotten to yet,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told CNN, “and so we’ll continue to get that information of the places that still need critical equipment, critical food and water.”