The Latest: Residents line up for food and water in storm-battered North Carolina mountains

Desperate residents of western North Carolina’s storm-ravaged mountains lined up for water and food, searched for cell phone signals and dredged buckets from creeks to flush toilets, days after the remnants of Hurricane Helene flooded the region

Desperate residents of the storm-ravaged mountains of western North Carolina lined up for water and food, searched for cell phone signals and dragged buckets from creeks to flush toilets days later Hurricane Helene remnants flooded the region. Emergency workers have been working around the clock to clear roads, restore electricity and phone service and reach people stranded by the storm, which killed at least 133 people in the southeast, a toll that is expected to rise.

President Joe Biden was expected to survey the devastation on Wednesday.

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Here’s the latest:

More than 40 trillion gallons of rain have drenched the southeastern United States this past week as a result of Hurricane Helene and a regular rainstorm that sloshed ahead of it — an unprecedented amount of water that has baffled experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it were concentrated only on the state of North Carolina, that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have never seen anything so geographically vast and the sheer amount of water that fell from the sky in my 25 years with the weather service.”