Helene reportedly killed at least six people and caused about 3.5 million power outages in the southeastern U.S. after crashing onto the northwest Florida coast late Thursday as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, officials said.

The storm — which recorded maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (230 km/h) — had weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia by early Friday, as residents whose communities more directly experienced Helene’s peak impacts were only just beginning to fathom the coming recovery process.

One person in Florida was among those killed after a sign fell on their car. Two more people reportedly died in South Georgia in a possible tornado spurred by Helene on its approach. Another person died in Charlotte, North Carolina, after a tree fell on a house as the storm raged through that area.

Also in Claremont, North Carolina, a four-year-old girl was killed earlier Thursday when two cars crashed in heavy rain conditions prior to Helene’s arrival.

Meanwhile, about 1.2 million Florida homes and businesses were without power early Friday. Georgia and South Carolina each reported about 975,000 power outages — and North Carolina had about 330,000.

Helene made landfall around 11:10 p.m. in Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend area, home to fishing villages and resorts where the state’s Panhandle and Peninsula meet.

Nevertheless, social media site users watched in horror as the video showed images of rain lashing Perry, Florida, near Helene’s landfall. The wind ripped the siding off buildings in almost complete darkness. A local news station filmed a house as it flipped.

Forecasters had asked residents to prepare for what they called a “nightmare” 20-foot storm surge, essentially a wide wall of water pushed inland by the approaching storm. Areas heavily inundated by storm surge could not be fully assessed for property damage or human casualties until the storm began to subside and daybreak broke.

“When Floridians wake up tomorrow morning, we will wake up to a state in which more lives have most likely been lost and property will certainly have been lost,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said late Thursday. at a press conference.

At a hotel in Valdosta, Georgia, a city of 55,000 near the state border with Florida, 20-year-old Fermin Herrera sought shelter with his wife and their two-month-old daughter because they feared a tree might fall on their house. . He told the Associated Press about the sights and sounds that convinced him to flee his home for a structure he considered sturdier.

“We heard some rumbling,” Herrera said, as she rocked the sleeping baby in a downstairs hallway. “At first we saw nothing. After a while the intensity increased. It looked like a gutter hitting our window. That’s why we decided to leave.”

Nearby, dozens of people huddled in the darkened lobby after midnight Friday as the whistling wind swirled outside. There was no electricity, emergency lighting illuminated the hallways, along with flashlights and cell phones. Light fixtures were dripping water in the lobby dining area and the ground outside was covered in roof debris.

Outside of Florida and Georgia, up to 10 inches of rain fell in the mountains of North Carolina. Forecasters predicted up to 14 inches more before the end of the Flood, an amount that could cause flooding more severe than anything seen in the past century.

Areas 100 miles north of the Florida-Georgia line were expecting hurricane conditions. Georgia has opened its parks to evacuees and their pets, including horses. Officials have imposed curfews in many cities and counties in South Georgia. Atlanta was under a rare flash flood emergency warning.

A county in Georgia, Thomas, extended such a curfew until Friday afternoon, signaling that conditions there “were still very dangerous,” the local sheriff’s office said in a social media post.

Another sheriff’s office, in Florida’s Taylor County, asked residents who chose not to evacuate before Helene to write their names, birthdays and other identifying information on their limbs in permanent marker. “So that you can be identified and (your) family notified,” the agency wrote in a grim advisory ahead of the storm.

“I’m staying here in the house,” 58-year-old state ferry operator Ken Wood told Reuters from the coast of Dunedin, Florida, where he planned to ride out the storm with his 16-year-old cat Andy.

School districts and several universities in the affected region have canceled classes. Airports in Tampa, Tallahassee and Clearwater were closed Thursday, while flight cancellations and other issues were widespread elsewhere in Florida and beyond.

Helene had flooded parts of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula on Wednesday. It was the ninth major hurricane – Category 3 or higher – to make landfall along the US Gulf Coast since 2017. Experts attribute such a high number of powerful, destructive storms to the climate crisis, which is caused in part by the burning of fossil fuels.

As for this Atlantic hurricane season, which started on June 1 and doesn’t officially end until November 30, Helene was the eighth named storm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicted that this Atlantic hurricane season would be above average due to record high ocean temperatures.