"I've never seen so many people homeless as what I have right now," said Janalea England, of Steinhatchee, Florida, a small river town along the state's rural Big Bend, as she turned her commercial fish market into a storm donation site for friends and neighbors, many of whom couldn't get insurance on their homes

Helene blew ashore in Florida's Big Bend region as a Category 4 hurricane late Thursday with winds of 140 mph (225 kph)

From there, it quickly moved through Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp said Saturday that it "looks like a bomb went off" after viewing splintered homes and debris-covered highways from the air. Weakened, Helene then soaked the Carolinas and Tennessee with torrential rains, sending creeks and rivers over their banks and straining dams

Western North Carolina was isolated because of landslides and flooding that forced the closure of Interstate 40 and other roads. All those closures delayed the start of the East Tennessee State University football game against The Citadel because the Buccaneers' drive to Charleston, South Carolina, took 16 hours

There have been hundreds of water rescues, none more dramatic than in rural Unicoi County in East Tennessee, where dozens of patients and staff were plucked by helicopter from a hospital rooftop Friday. And the rescues continued into the following day in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where part of Asheville was under water

"To say this caught us off guard would be an understatement," said Quentin Miller, the county sheriff

Asheville resident Mario Moraga said it's "heartbreaking" to see the damage in the Biltmore Village neighborhood and neighbors have been going house to house to check on each other and offer support

"There's no cell service here. There's no electricity," he said

While there have been deaths in the county, Emergency Services Director Van Taylor Jones said he wasn't ready to report specifics, partially because downed cell towers hindered efforts to contact next of kin