26 people remain unaccounted for in North Carolina following Hurricane Helene
(ASHEVILLE, N.C.) — Twenty-six people remain unaccounted for in hard-hit North Carolina, weeks after the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Helene, officials said Monday.
Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, wreaking havoc across the Southeast from Florida to Virginia. Helene destroyed homes and roads, stranded residents without cellphone service and water, and claimed the lives of nearly 250 people throughout the Southeast.
At least 95 of Helene’s fatalities were in North Carolina, officials said. Gov. Roy Cooper called Helene “the deadliest and most devastating storm” in the state’s history.
“It hurts the very people we are all trying to help,” he said. “It discourages and makes people fearful of signing up for help. It enables scam artists and it hurts the morale of government officials, first responders and soldiers who are on the ground trying to help.”
Former President Donald Trump is set to visit to the hard-hit city of Asheville on Monday to survey damage from the storm.
Cooper said he’s asking the former president to “not share lies or misinformation while he is here.”
Cooper said the White House “responded quickly and positively to our request from FEMA, which has had 1,400 staff on the ground and has registered 206,000 people for individual assistance, and distributed $124 million directly to people who need it.”
“As for long-term recovery, state and local government will be all in, along with the federal government,” Cooper said. “This will take billions of dollars and years of bipartisan focus from everyone working together to make it happen — from new roads and bridges to public building to water supplies to people’s homes.”
FEMA is now launching a “new initiative” to hire community liaisons in North Carolina’s impacted counties, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell announced Monday.
“We know that so many people have temporarily lost their jobs. We know that others just want to be able to give back, and we want to help keep people in these communities while they recover,” she said. “So these new community liaisons are going to work alongside us at FEMA to make sure that they are the local voice, the trusted voice in their community, and that they can share with us the local considerations and the concerns, so we can include them as part of this recovery. They’re going to be embedded in every county, working directly with county administrators, mayors and community leaders, bridging their concerns with our FEMA staff. And these jobs are available for people to apply right now.”
(WASHINGTON) — The crew of the Titan’s support ship felt a “shudder” around the time they lost contact with the submersible during its doomed dive to the Titanic shipwreck, the Coast Guard said Friday.
U.S. Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation Chair Jason Neubauer revealed during the last day of a two-week hearing on the implosion that the master of the Polar Prince told them that in hindsight, he believes he felt the ship “shudder” around the time when communications with the sub were lost during the June 2023 expedition.
The statement was provided to the board in October 2023, when the unidentified master was asked if he or crew members heard anything indicating the OceanGate submersible imploded, Neubauer said.
“The answer from the master was, ‘With the benefit of hindsight, I now believe I felt the Polar Prince shudder at around the time communications were reportedly lost, but at the time, we thought nothing of it. It was slight,'” Neubauer said.
Capt. Jamie Frederick with U.S. Coast Guard Sector Boston, who testified Friday on the Titan search and rescue mission, said if that information had been reported immediately to the Coast Guard, that could have had a “drastic impact on the search efforts.”
“My initial reaction is, if that was information they have, to me personally, it would be unconscionable that they would not share that with the unified command,” Frederick said.
Neubauer added that from the crew’s perspective, the shudder was “not immediately connected to the event” so wasn’t reported to the Coast Guard.
Frederick detailed during his testimony the complex, international search and rescue response, which culminated with a remotely operated vehicle able to go to a depth of 6,000 meters finding the Titan debris on June 22 on the ocean floor.
“They discovered the tail cone first. And then as we continued to find additional debris, it became apparent that it had been a total loss,” he said.
The implosion killed all five passengers, including Stockton Rush, the co-founder and CEO of the sub’s maker, OceanGate. French explorer Paul Henri Nargeolet, British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman, were also killed.
Frederick said the responders understood the Titan had survival systems on board and that they “never even got to the point to have the discussion of suspension.”
“I wouldn’t even want to speculate on when that would happen,” he added.
Frederick also addressed knocking noises detected by sonar buoys in the vicinity of the search location the day after the Titan imploded. He said the data was given to the U.S. Navy, which determined two days later it was not anyone knocking on the hull of the Titan. “They were 100% certain that it was not human in nature,” he said.
He also addressed an “anomaly” consistent with an implosion that was detected by the U.S. Navy in the general vicinity of where the Titan was at the time communications were lost. He said he was informed of the data a day after the Titan was lost and the information was classified at the time.
“It was one piece of data. It wasn’t definitive,” he said. “The Navy couldn’t tell us that it was 100% definitive, that it was an implosion.”
Rush said he would ‘buy a congressman’ to make Titan problems go away: Ex-employee
A former OceanGate employee testified during the hearing on Friday that he resigned from the submersible company after Rush told him he would “buy a congressman” to make problems with its Titan vessel go away.
Matthew McCoy was an active duty member of the U.S. Coast Guard prior to joining OceanGate as an operations technician in April 2017 as the company was building the first Titan prototype, which was never used on Titanic dives. He said he quit six months later, in September 2017, a day after his conversation with Rush.
McCoy said he told Rush he was concerned about operating the experimental Titan vessel without a certificate of inspection and that it would not be inspected by the U.S. Coast Guard. He said Rush responded that the Titan would be operating in the Bahamas and launch out of Canada and would not fall under U.S. jurisdiction.
“I think I had expressed to him that still taking U.S. passengers on there for hire at any point in time, if they touched the U.S. land, you know, U.S. port, that would also be of consideration,” McCoy said.
He said the conversation became “tense” and ended with Rush saying that “if the Coast Guard became a problem, he would buy himself a congressman and make it go away.”
“That will stand in my mind for the rest of time,” McCoy said. “I’ve never had anybody say that to me directly, and I was aghast. And basically, after that, I resigned. I couldn’t work there anymore.”
Asked by the Marine Board of Investigation if he felt like Rush was trying to intimidate him or if it was “more like bluster,” McCoy said he felt like Rush was trying to “either intimidate me or impress me.”
McCoy, a member of the Coast Guard Reserve, said he wasn’t clear on the regulations for the sub but was concerned about potentially violating U.S. law. He said he considered whether to notify the Coast Guard but OceanGate hadn’t done any dives in the U.S. with Titan.
He said he subsequently learned of a complaint OceanGate whistleblower David Lochridge filed in 2018 with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration following his termination. McCoy said he thought there would be a “deeper investigation” into OceanGate at that point. Lochridge’s whistleblower retaliation case was closed in late 2018 after he and OceanGate entered a settlement agreement in their respective lawsuits, OSHA said. Lochridge’s safety allegations regarding the Titan were referred to the Coast Guard, OSHA said.
McCoy said there was an “alarm bell” before he quit that made him concerned about OceanGate’s operations and the production of the Titan’s carbon-fiber hull.
When he started, he said, it was “made very clear” OceanGate was working with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory and Boeing, “so they had a lot of what sounded like legitimacy behind them, as far as the engineering.”
But he said he soon learned the company had broken ties with the laboratory and Boeing wasn’t going to be doing the layup for the carbon fiber. He said he felt OceanGate’s engineering department “didn’t seem overly qualified” and there were mostly “college interns” during the summer he was there.
He said after he left OceanGate he didn’t keep tabs on the company for long.
“I just kind of quit following the company, not thinking that they would ever actually dive the Titan,” he said.
Coast Guard investigation continues into ‘unprecedented’ incident
OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations after the deadly implosion.
The main purpose of the hearing was to uncover the facts related to the implosion and to make recommendations, the Coast Guard said.
At the conclusion of the two-week hearing Friday afternoon, Neubauer said the Coast Guard will conduct an analysis of the evidence collected and issue any recommendations to the commandant of the Coast Guard “to help ensure that nobody has to endure a future similar occurrence.”
Neubauer said that process can take several months but his priority is to “get this investigation done expeditiously, because I feel there are global issues at stake.”
Any determination on potential criminal acts will also be sent to the commandant of the Coast Guard, who would decide whether to make a referral to the Department of Justice, Neubauer said.
The National Transportation Safety Board will issue a separate report on its findings, including their official determination of the probable cause of the incident, at a later date, Marcel Muise, an investigator with the agency’s Office of Marine Safety, said at the conclusion of the hearing.
Neubauer offered his condolences to the families of those killed and thanked the more than two dozen witnesses who testified in the proceedings.
“It takes courage to testify in the public spotlight, especially in the aftermath of a traumatic event,” he said. “The subject matter covered during the sessions was often highly technical and emotionally charged, and I’m grateful to each witness who stopped and assisted in our efforts to fully understand this unprecedented incident.”
(NOVI, Mich.) — One person was killed and another hospitalized after a shooting at the Michigan State Fair on Saturday, police said.
The fair is being held at the Suburban Collection Showplace in the city of Novi. The Novi Police Department wrote on X there is no threat to the community following what it called the “isolated incident.”
A city spokesperson confirmed to ABC News’ Detroit affiliate WXYZ that there had been a shooting, describing the situation as very fluid.
Witnesses told WXYZ that fairgoers fled after hearing the shots. “We’re all trying to run, duck off somewhere,” one person said.
There was a large police presence surrounding the area following the shooting. The Novi Police Department said the incident remains under investigation.
ABC News’ Victoria Arancio contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Thirty-eight million people are under heat alerts Monday as dangerously high temperatures are set to take over the Midwest.
An excessive heat warning has been issued in Chicago, where the heat index — what the temperature feels like with humidity — could reach a scorching 110 degrees on Monday and Tuesday.
The cities of Minneapolis; Madison, Wisconsin; and Omaha, Nebraska, are also under excessive heat warnings. The heat index may climb as high as 115 degrees in these cities on Monday.
In Detroit, public schools will be released three hours early on Monday and Tuesday due to the heat.
The heat will spread east and south through the week. Record highs are possible from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky, on Tuesday and from Nashville, Tennessee, to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
This comes after record-high temperatures in Texas this weekend. Amarillo climbed to a record of 104 degrees on Sunday.
There are hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S. due to excessive heat, according to CDC WONDER, an online database, and scientists caution that the actual number of heat-related deaths is likely higher.