• NOAA satellites have captured the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene on the Florida coast.
• The photos show destroyed houses, uprooted trees and mass destruction.
• In addition to Florida, Hurricane Helene caused widespread destruction in several states.

Satellite images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene when it first made landfall as a Category 4 storm.

Late Thursday evening, NOAA’s GOES East satellite captured the storm making landfall near Perry in northwest Florida.

According to NOAA, the storm reached wind speeds of up to 140 miles per hour at the time.

Many homes on Keaton Beach (see below), just 30 minutes’ drive south of Perry, were leveled.

The sheriff of Taylor County, where Keaton Beach is located, said the hurricane destroyed 90% of the homes in the area, WCTV News reported.

Destroyed houses only give a glimpse of the damage. The storm uprooted trees, destroyed power lines and flooded entire neighborhoods.

According to the state government, more than 49,000 people in Florida were still without power on Tuesday.

Other areas near Florida’s Big Bend region, including Dark Island and Fish Creek, sustained damage shown in NOAA satellite imagery. The agency has not released similar images for other states.

After devastating Florida, Helene moved north. The Associated Press reported that over 130 people have been killed so far in several states, including Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Countless others lost their homes, businesses and vehicles.

Susan Scoggins owned a coffee shop in Burnsville, North Carolina. When she heard the hurricane was approaching, she wanted to stay and provide food and safety to her community.

“My hope was that Maples would be a little refuge for people to come to after the hurricane. But now the building is just gone,” she told Business Insider earlier this week. “There’s nothing left.”

Flooding, debris and damage to infrastructure have left cities like Asheville, North Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia without running water, making it difficult to provide aid in some areas.

“We’re running out of candles and running out of batteries,” Shaday Collins of Augusta, Georgia, told Georgia Public Broadcasting on Monday. “At the moment everyone is kind of in survival mode because everything is very limited.”

Why Hurricane Helene was so destructive

Parts of the Southeast, including North Carolina, were dealing with rain before Helene’s arrival. Combined, the storms dumped 40 trillion gallons of water — the equivalent of Lake Tahoe — on the region in more than a week, the Associated Press reported.

Typically, hurricanes weaken and winds decrease as they move from the warm ocean to dry land. While Helene turned into a tropical storm as it moved inland, the warm, drenched ground from earlier rains could have helped push the storm harder than usual, said Dev Niyogi, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of Texas at Austin , told The New York Times.

“This was an unprecedented storm that struck western North Carolina,” said North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper. “It requires an unprecedented response.”

Surging rivers overflowed their banks, landslides cut off roads and flash floods swept away people searching for safety. The last time Asheville experienced something resembling a disaster was in 1916, when two tropical storms collided, killing 80 people, according to the Washington Post.

The affected states are trying to coordinate disaster relief as well as recovery and rescue. Hundreds of people are still missing or cannot contact their relatives.

Some mountain areas rely on helicopters to transport necessary supplies. It was also difficult to reach rural areas.

“We know there are areas we haven’t reached yet,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told CNN, “and so we will continue to receive information about the places that still need critical equipment, essential food and water.”