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It’s been nearly three weeks since Hurricane Helene made landfall as a powerful Category 4 storm, plowing through six states in the Southeast.
Officials say dozens of people are still missing as search crews continue to dig through layers of mud and debris. The storm has left at least 244 people dead, most in North Carolina.
Jessica Meidinger’s 58-year-old mother, Kim Ashby, is among the missing. Floodwaters swamped her home in Elk Park, North Carolina, and she was torn from her husband’s arms. CBS News first spoke to Meidinger and her family two weeks ago. She said she now accepts her mother is likely gone.
“It’s hard to truly grieve a person without a body and move on from this,” Meidinger said. “It’s just … we feel stuck.”
Meidinger said the treacherous terrain has hindered the weeks-long search.
“It’s probably 20 miles of river, that there’s just piles of debris all along the way. There’s areas that you basically have to rappel down in order to continue to follow the river, to see if she might be there, and it’s not just piles of debris, there’s just feet high of sediment that you have to dig through.”
On Tuesday, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said close to 100 people remain missing statewide. The Department of Public Safety formed a task force to find who is still unaccounted for and focus efforts where needed, Cooper said.
FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell previously spoke about the historic flooding in North Carolina from Helene on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” saying, “I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides that they are experiencing right now.”
FEMA has resumed its normal operations in North Carolina after temporarily relocating amid a reported threat.
Meanwhile, Meidinger said the hardest part will be telling her 3-year-old son, who adores his grandmother.
“I think we’ve chosen not to tell him because to tell him in a way that she’s still missing is not something you can do for a 3-year-old. It’s gotta be pretty finite and that’s … hard enough to explain that someone is no longer with us, but to say that we don’t even know where she is, that’s impossible.”
