Hundreds of miles from landfall, Hurricane Helene’s ‘apocalyptic’ devastation unfolds
(NEW YORK) — The death toll from Hurricane Helene is still climbing as Americans across the Southeast count the cost of last week’s massive storm.
The storm made landfall Thursday night as a Category 4 hurricane in Florida’s Big Bend region with sustained winds of 140 mph.
Helene intensified as it approached the U.S. coast, bringing with it devastating winds, massive flooding and enormous storm surge.
In North Carolina, extreme floods washed away homes and bridges. At one point, authorities closed 400 roads deeming them unsafe for travel. At least 30 people died and dozens are missing, state authorities said.
“This is an unprecedented tragedy that requires an unprecedented response,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said.
Members of the National Guard and relief teams from 19 states joined search and rescue missions in the state.
William Ray, the director of the North Carolina Department for Public Safety emergency management, said response teams “are working around the clock to make rescues, to access neighborhoods.”
In Asheville, there has been no cell service or water supply for several days. Zeb Smathers — the mayor of Canton, to the west of Asheville — told Good Morning America the situation was “apocalyptic, not just for Canton, but the entire region.”
The area is suffering from a total cell phone “blackout,” Smathers said, meaning residents are unable to check on loved ones or urge those at risk from further flooding to evacuate.
Parts of North Carolina were inundated with up to 30 inches of rain, triggering deadly flash floods and landslides.
In Lake Lure in the west of the state, resident George Carter told Good Morning America: “When you turn the corner and you see your community just full of buildings and trash and floating boathouses and floating homes, it just sort of takes your breath away.”
“It was scary,” he added.
Adam Jackon, from Tyron, North Carolina, said neighbors were trapped by falling trees.
There were “probably 50 trees blocking my neighbors from coming out,” he said. “I started helping them yesterday, the neighbors at the other end of the road. We got us out, but the other neighbors are trapped.”
The Painter family from Asheville, meanwhile, returned home to find 35,000 gallons of water in their basement. “It’s eerie,” Jacob Painter said. “I had a pit in the bottom of my stomach the whole time.”
“You’re stepping on mud and trying not to fall because it’s so thick and slippery,” Ciara Lantz-Painter said.
Randall Houghton spoke with Good Morning America near a devastated motorhome site. His camper was washed away by floodwaters, he said, forcing him to spend the night on the side of the road.
“It’s crazy,” said Houghton. “I anticipated something bad when she said the water is going to come over the top of the parking tables.”
At least two people were killed in Tennessee, though that number may rise as search and rescue efforts continue. More than 70 people are still missing, state officials said.
Among them is Steve Cloyd, whose jeep was found in the aftermath of the storm, according to his family.
His family’s hope, wife Keli told Good Morning America, is that Steve was able to escape the vehicle. “I need that big one, so I can breathe again, so my kids can breathe again,” she said.
“His Minnesota Vikings won today. So I want to sit here and watch those highlights with him.”
ABC New’s Joel Lyons, Dom Proto, Octavio Cadenas, Alex Colletta and Kimberly Randolph contributed to this report.
(IRVINE, Calif.) — Eight firefighters were hurt — including two critically — when the fire truck they were in rolled over while returning from a 12-hour shift battling the Airport Fire wildfire, one of several large blazes raging in Southern California, officials said.
The truck crashed on State Route 241 in Irvine just before 7 p.m. Thursday, Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy said.
The California Highway Patrol told ABC Los Angeles station KABC that a car in front of the truck swerved to avoid hitting a ladder that was in one of the lanes, causing the fire truck to swerve, lose control and overturn after hitting the guard rail. No other cars were involved in the crash, Fennessy said.
Six firefighters were taken to trauma centers in conditions ranging from “stable to critical,” Fennessy said at a news conference Friday. Two firefighters were treated at Hoag Hospital Irvine and have since been released, he said.
Of the six taken to trauma centers, two were admitted in critical condition and are in the intensive care unit on Friday, Dr. Humberto Sauri told reporters. One is considered “critical but stable” and the other’s condition is “quite critical,” he said.
Four of the eight firefighters “are more seriously injured than the others,” Fennessy said.
Fennessy called the crash “devastating” and a “huge tragedy for our family.”
Firefighters have been battling the Airport Fire “non-stop” since Sept. 9, Fennessy said.
He said this team of firefighters was responsible for removing fuel from the path of fire.
The crash remains under investigation by the highway patrol.
Fennessy said, “What I’ve heard was that the crew carrier, you know, the crew buggy, as we call them, did swerve for whatever reason, and did roll several times.”
“They’re heavy vehicles,” he said. “They’re very top-heavy. So it wouldn’t take much, you know, at speed, you know, for them to roll over.”
(TULSA, Okla.) — A dog in Tulsa, Oklahoma, started a house fire after biting into a lithium ion battery, fire officials said.
The Tulsa Fire Department recently released dramatic footage of the fire, which took place in May, showing the portable cellphone battery sparking and bursting into flames, sending two dogs and a cat running.
The home sustained significant damage in the fire, but the pets escaped through a dog door and were not harmed, according to Andy Little, a spokesperson for the fire department.
“However, the outcome could’ve been much worse if there had been no means of escape or if the family was asleep at the time,” Little added.
Little called lithium ion battery fires a “critical issue that has been affecting fire departments across the United States.”
The batteries, commonly used to charge cellphones, are “known for storing a significant amount of energy in a compact space,” Little said.
“However, when this energy is released uncontrollably, it can generate heat, produce flammable and toxic gases and even lead to explosions,” he added.
Extreme heat exposure, physical damage, overcharging and using incompatible charging equipment can lead to the devices catching fire, according to experts.
Little urged the public to exercise caution with lithium ion batteries, including storing them out of reach of children and pets.
To dispose of the devices, Little said they should be brought to a designated recycling center or hazardous waste collection point — not simply thrown in the garbage, which could damage the batteries and potentially cause fires.
“Let us work together to prevent lithium-ion battery-related fires and keep our homes and communities safe,” Little said.
(NEW YORK) — When Jill Antares Hunkler purchased land in Belmont County, Ohio, in 2007, she never envisioned her home would be surrounded by 78 oil and gas fracking wells a decade later, she said.
“I wanted to build my home where I had roots,” Hunkler, a seventh-generation Ohio Valley resident, told ABC News. “It was a place where I could live a more traditional, natural life.”
Hunkler’s three-acre property at the headwaters of the Captina Creek Watershed was one of hundreds in the area that she said became a magnet for fracking.
Her property sits on the Utica and Marcellus Shales in the Appalachian Basin, geologic formations known to hold large reserves of oil and natural gas.
As of April 2024, the Marcellus Shale contained about 120 million barrels of oil, while the Utica Shale contained 2.3 million barrels, according to the United States Geological Survey.
There are 1,625 fracking wells in Belmont Country this year, which marks a 25% increase from 2023, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), which oversees unitization orders in the state.
Hunkler said when oil and gas representatives called “landmen” came knocking on her door, calling her home and sending repeated notices, she learned of the state’s unitization laws. The fate of her land was largely out of her hands, she said.
“To be perfectly honest, it makes me cry even now,” Hunkler said.
What is unitization?
Unitization is the consolidation of multiple land parcels into a single operational unit for fracking, according to ODNR.
Instead of drilling multiple wells on separate properties, which can be inefficient, unitization combines adjacent properties over a pool to allow for a more coordinated approach to extracting oil or gas.
Because it’s multiple properties, most neighbors in the area must apply to lease their land, according to state law.
In Ohio, 65% of property owners in a project area must sign an application to lease their property for drilling before going forward, according to ODNR.
This leaves a population of dissenting or “non-participatory” landowners forced into fracking in the area, even if it’s not on their property.
Unitization has been legal in Ohio since 1965, however, the last decade has seen unitization orders surge to meet fracking demands.
The ODNR enacted 112 unitization orders in 2022 and nearly 100 in 2023, according to ODNR records.
Before 2021, which saw 73 unitization orders, ODNR enacted less than 50 orders per year between 2012 and 2020, according to records.
Negotiating a lease
Proponents believe fracking brings jobs back to the region, which historically relied on coal and steel manufacturing, and gives residents the opportunity to make passive income by leasing land.
“Natural gas production has been tremendously profitable for Ohio,” state Sen. George Lang and two researchers said in a 2023 press release posted on the Ohio Senate website. “The shale revolution has been the greatest driver of the state’s economic progress since the late 1990s. Ohio now ranks sixth among states in natural gas production, exporting to our neighbors and the world.”
Ohio law states landowners must make “just and reasonable” compensation for leasing sites, which can vary based on location, under state law.
In 2024, some local drillers reported paying landowners an average of $500 per acre, but lease bonus payments in southeast Ohio can range from $3,000–$6,000 per acre, according to McCleery Law Firm, which provides consultation and legal services to landowners considering entering, or impacted by, a leasing agreement.
“It is also an area where landowners are chronically exploited,” the firm says in their “Landowner’s Guide.”
“This is because landmen usually offer significantly less per acre if they suspect you lack knowledge of the market. Without knowledge of fair market value, an increase of two thousand dollars per acre might seem advantageous, when in reality, the starting offer was simply egregiously low,” the firm claims.
Property owners also receive royalties on the gas produced, which typically begins at 12.5%, according to ODNR.
Echoing Hunkler’s story, a study published this month in Nature Energy reviewed detailed records of landmen’s dealings with 37 property owners in Ohio to investigate how they may be disadvantaged in lease negotiations.
The records spanned from January 2014 and April 2021, which saw a boom of fracking increases in the state, according to the study.
Researchers found that companies used persistent and personal strategies to overcome landowner reluctance, such as repeated in-person visits, calls and in some cases, contacting their family members and neighbors.
The study cited a log of contact between a landman and a property owner in Noble County, Ohio.
“When their calls go unanswered, they send letters. When those are returned with ‘REFUSED’ handwritten across them, landmen drive to her house. When she refuses to answer the door, they speak to her neighbours and family members,” according to the study.
When property owners refused all requests, the study found widespread use of compulsory unitization.
“In roughly 40% of the wells drilled in Ohio, compulsory unitization applications were used because voluntary consent from landowners was not obtained,” according to the study.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources did not comment on claims against oil and gas agents to ABC News.
Changed way of life
“People that don’t live in southeast Ohio have no concept of what it’s like,” Randi Pokladnik, a lifelong resident of the Ohio River Valley and retired research chemist, told ABC News about fracking in the area.
“It sounds like a jet engine in the middle of the night and you can smell the emissions. It’s a constant barrage of sand trucks and fracking trucks with brine in them,” Pokladnik said.
She unaffectionately calls the nightly traffic the “brine truck parade.”
Pokladnik and her husband own property in Tappan, Ohio, and despite denying leasing requests from oil and gas representatives for over a decade, in February, Pokladnik’s property was “force pooled” to participate without their consent.
“It made me sick to my stomach when I first got the notice in the mail that they were going to be doing this,” Pokladnik said.
“This is like the ultimate slap in the face for somebody who’s an environmentalist,” she added.
Environmental and health effects
In 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency found scientific evidence that fracking can potentially impact drinking water resources under some circumstances.
Chemicals used for fracking may travel through cracks in the rock into an underground drinking water source and contamination could also occur if a well is improperly installed, if chemicals are spilled from trucks or tanks or if flowback is not effectively contained, according to the agency.
The Yale School of Public Health found that fracking has led to heightened concerns about its impact on the environment and human health due to wastewater and greenhouse gas emissions.
In response to health and environmental concerns, Rob Brundrett, president of the Ohio Oil & Gas Association said companies work to ensure the safety of the properties they work on and the record stands for itself.
Speaking about conventional fracking wells Brundrett told Energy News Network, “The fact that there have been only three major incidents since 2018 is a testament to the industry’s rigorous safety standards and practices.”
“Considering that only .004% of Ohio oil and gas operations have had a major reportable incident during that timeframe, I would put our industry’s safety numbers against any other manual industry in Ohio,” he added.
The incidents include a gas leak, crude oil spill and a combustor fire, according to the outlet.
ODNR says it has addressed water well complaints since 1983 and none of the investigations revealed groundwater quality problems due to fracking, the department said in a fracking fact sheet.
However, Pokladnik believes that the effects of fracking in the Ohio River Valley are not in a bubble and should be considered by everyone.
“There’s not a dome over these well pads and everything that we do here is eventually going to cause more climate change,” Pokladnik said.
“So even though you’re not living here and you won’t have to worry about drinking contaminated water or breathing these emissions directly, it is affecting your life,” she added.