Kamala Harris hands out meals, consoles families as she surveys Hurricane Helene devastation in Georgia

Kamala Harris /AFP

Vice-President Kamala Harris handed out meals, embraced a shaken family and surveyed Hurricane Helene's "extraordinary" path of destruction through Georgia on Wednesday as she left the campaign trail to pledge federal help and personally take in scenes of toppled trees, damaged homes and lives upended.

She visited Augusta, where power lines stretched along the sidewalk and utility poles lay cracked and broken. The vice-president spoke from a lectern erected in front of a house with a fallen tree teetering on its roof, acknowledging those who had died in the disaster while also trying to project a tone of unity and hope for communities now facing long and expensive rebuilds.

Harris and President Joe Biden, who visited the Carolinas on Wednesday, were seeking to demonstrate commitment and competence in helping devastated communities after Republican former president Donald Trump's false claims about their administration's response. Harris said she wanted to "personally take a look at the devastation, which is extraordinary". She expressed admiration for how "people are coming together. People are helping perfect strangers".

The Democratic presidential nominee said that shows "the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us", an echo of a line she frequently uses on the campaign trail. Before delivering her remarks, Harris could be seen embracing and huddling with a family of five grappling with the storm's aftermath.

"We are here for the long haul," she said. Harris also toured a Red Cross relief centre and received a briefing from local officials, praising those working to "meet the needs of people who must be seen and must be heard". "I am now listening," she said. Brittany Smith, an Augusta resident, walked away from the distribution centre with Styrofoam boxes of food and some fruit cups, beaming that she got a photo with the vice-president. She said there's a hole in her roof and she had to send her kids elsewhere to live because it wasn't safe.

Harris' visit, she said, "made it better" despite the hardship. Smith said she was encouraged that Harris travelled to the town instead of just appearing on television. "She's a person. She's not just a voice." About 200 miles north in the Carolinas, Biden was also surveying the storm's aftermath. With many of the area's roads inaccessible, he flew by helicopter over toppled trees, twisted metal and towering piles of debris in the normally tourist-friendly downtown of Asheville.

From the air, Biden saw flooded roads, piles of shredded lumber and displaced sandbags, emergency trucks and downed power lines. In one area, homes were partly underwater, and it was hard to distinguish between lake and land. Visits to disaster zones are a familiar responsibility for Biden, who has frequently been called on to survey damage and comfort victims after tornadoes, wildfires and tropical storms. But this was Harris' first visit to a disaster area as vice-president.

Because of the destruction where Biden was on Wednesday, he was unable to walk around and personally comfort people as Harris did in Georgia. Biden wore a vest and boots and, before his air tour, he hugged and grabbed the hand of Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, who was at the airport in Greenville, South Carolina, to meet him. The mayor, with visible emotion. said they could not close down the area's one operable road for Biden's motorcade.

Biden will be back in the region Thursday to visit Florida and Georgia, and Harris plans her own North Carolina trip in coming days -- as Helene's aftermath continues to pose a political and humanitarian test for the administration. Before leaving Washington, Biden made a point of mentioning how an ongoing dockworkers strike could make getting supplies to hard-hit areas more difficult.

"Natural disasters are incredibly consequential. The last thing we need on top of that is a man-made disaster that's going on at the ports," he said. "We're getting pushback already, we're hearing from the folks regionally that they're having trouble getting product that they need because of the port strike." Harris is being especially watched as her bid for the White House enters its closing stretch, and Helene's path included the battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina.

The vice-president last visited scenes of natural disasters as a California senator, including when she went to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 and when she walked through charred wreckage in Paradise, California, after the camp fire in 2018. Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Harris' campaign manager and former state director in her Senate office, said the vice-president uses her experience consoling victims as a courtroom prosecutor to connect with people after tragedies.

She said the trip to Georgia was a chance for Harris "to continue to show her leadership and her ability to get things done, versus Donald Trump and JD Vance who want to dismantle the basic services and the role that the government should play". Trump, the Republican nominee, travelled to Valdosta, Georgia, on Monday with a Christian charity organisation that brought trucks of fuel, food, water and other supplies.

The storm's death toll climbed to at least 178 people, and power, running water and cellular service remained unavailable in some places. Later Wednesday, Biden flew to Raleigh, North Carolina, for a briefing with officials and called Helene a "storm of historic proportions". "The nation has your back," Biden said.

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