FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Massive Hurricane Helene crashed into Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend region, bringing storm surges and high winds to the state’s Gulf Coast communities before slamming into southern Georgia. According to an Associated Press figure, the storm is responsible for at least 40 deaths.

Where is the storm now?

Hurricane Helene weakened to a tropical depression over the Carolinas with maximum sustained winds of 30 mph (48 kph) early Friday afternoon, the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm will continue to weaken as it moves further north. At 2 p.m., Helene was approximately 125 miles (205 kilometers) southeast of Louisville, Kentucky.

Helene wobbled as the plane approached the Florida coast late Thursday before landing at the mouth of the Aucilla River, with maximum sustained winds estimated at 140 miles per hour. That location was only about 20 miles northwest of where Hurricane Idalia came ashore last year with almost the same ferocity and caused great damage.

Evacuations were underway in areas of Western North Carolina on Friday. The Haywood County Sheriff’s Office west of Asheville said it was assisting with evacuations in Cruso, Clyde, Canton and lower parts of Waynesville.

What about airports?

Florida airports that were closed due to Hurricane Helene reopened Friday. That included airports in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Lakeland and Tallahassee.

According to FlightAware, there were 130 flight cancellations at Tampa International Airport in the past 24 hours as of Friday afternoon.

Airports in Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, remained open Friday but reported large numbers of cancellations and heavy delays. As of 2 p.m., nearly 400 flights to or from Charlotte, a major hub for American Airlines, had been canceled. Nearly 580 more flights to or from Charlotte were delayed, according to FlightAware.

At the greater Atlanta airport, 175 flights were canceled and more than 500 were delayed, according to FlightAware.

What about roads and bridges?

On Friday morning, inspectors were surveying bridges and causeways along Florida’s Gulf Coast to quickly reopen them to traffic, Perdue said.

In addition, 2,000 miles of roadway across Florida have been cleared of debris, Perdue said at a news conference in Tallahassee.

“Some of the causeways were flooded, so we need to inspect them and make sure they’re safe to pass through,” Perdue said. “We had a lot of storm surges along the West Coast. We had a lot of roads underwater.”

How many people are without power?

According to poweroutage.us, approximately 4.2 million people in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee were without power as of 2:30 PM on Friday.

The most outages occurred in North Carolina and South Carolina, each with more than 1 million outages. Florida had more than 840,000 customers and Georgia had almost 950,000 customers without power.

Nearly 45% of South Carolina homes and businesses were without power Friday. Entire provinces were left without electricity as wind gusts reached almost hurricane force. Trees or other debris blocked every major road leading into Greenwood, a city of about 22,000 residents about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Columbia, Greenwood County officials said on social media.

Linemen were stationed throughout the region, ready to begin restoring power once the winds from Helene died down.

What about storm surge?

Flooding along Florida’s coast began long before Hurricane Helene made landfall, with rapidly rising waters reported from as far south as Fort Myers on the state’s Gulf Coast.

On Friday morning, sheriff’s officials in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, used a large ATV to rescue people stranded by rising waters.

In Cedar Key, an old Florida-style island off the Gulf Coast, many homes, motels and businesses were flooded. Even the city’s fire brigade was not spared.

“It actually blew out the storm panels on the front doors. Blew out one of the rear partition walls and two entry doors,” the agency posted online. “It looks like there was about six feet of water in there.”

What is storm surge?

Storm surge is the level at which sea water rises above normal levels.

Just as the sustained winds of a storm do not take into account the potential for even stronger gusts, a storm surge does not include the wave height above the mean water level.

The peak is also the amount above normal tide at a time, so a storm surge of 15 feet at high tide can be much more devastating than the same wave at low tide.

How are hurricanes measured?

The most common way to measure the strength of a hurricane is the Saffir-Simpson scale which assigns a category from 1 to 5 based on a storm’s sustained wind speed at its center, with 5 being the strongest.