SWANNANOA, N.C. — Cadaver dogs and search crews trudged through knee-deep muck and debris Tuesday looking in the mountains of western North Carolina for victims of Hurricane Helene, days after the storm carved a deadly and destructive path through the Southeast.

With Helene’s death toll nearing 160, searchers fanned out across the region, using helicopters to get past washed-out bridges and hiking through wilderness to reach isolated homes.

Many who lived through what was one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history were left without electricity or any way to reach out for help. Some cooked food on charcoal grills or hiked to high ground in the hopes of finding a signal to call loved ones.

“Communities were wiped off the map,” North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, said at a news conference Tuesday.

The devastation was especially bad in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where at least 50 people died in and around Asheville, a tourism haven known for its art galleries, breweries and outdoor activities.

Just outside the city, in the small community of Swannanoa, receding floodwaters revealed cars stacked on top of others and mobile homes that had floated away during the storm. Roads were caked with mud and debris and pockmarked by sinkholes.

Exhausted emergency crews worked around the clock to clear roads, restore power and phone service, and reach those still stranded by the storm, which killed at least 159 people in six states. Nearly half of the deaths were in North Carolina, while dozens of others were in South Carolina and Georgia.

President Joe Biden was set to survey the devastation in the region Wednesday.

More than 150,000 households have already registered for assistance with the Federal Emergency Management Agency — a number that is expected to rapidly rise in the coming days, said Frank Matranga, an agency representative.

Nearly 2 million ready-to-eat meals and more than a million liters of water have been sent to the hardest-hit areas, he said.

The North Carolina death toll included one horrific story after another of people trapped by floodwaters or killed by falling trees. Among the dead were a couple and a 6-year-old boy who were waiting on a rooftop when part of their home collapsed.

Search crews around Asheville first checked on the most vulnerable.

“We’ve been going door to door, making sure that we can put eyes on people and see if they’re safe,” said Avril Pinder, the county manager for Buncombe County, which includes Asheville. “We know that there are places that are still hard to access.”

The storm unleashed the worst flooding in a century in North Carolina. Rainfall estimates in some areas have topped more than 2 feet since Wednesday, and several main routes into Asheville were damaged or blocked by mudslides.

A section of one of the region’s main arteries, Interstate 40, reopened Tuesday after a mudslide was cleared, but a collapsed stretch near the North Carolina-Tennessee line remained closed.

Helene blew ashore in Florida late Thursday as a Category 4 hurricane and quickly moved north. The storm upended life throughout the Southeast, where deaths were also reported in Florida, Tennessee and Virginia. Officials warned that rebuilding would be long and difficult.

The widespread damage and outages affecting key communications infrastructure left many people without stable access to the internet and cellular service, the Federal Communications Commission said.

Teams from Verizon were working to repair downed cell towers and damaged fiber cables and provide alternative forms of connectivity across the region, the company said in a statement.

AT&T, meanwhile, said it launched “one of the largest mobilizations of our disaster recovery assets for emergency connectivity support.”

Western North Carolina suffered relatively more devastation because that’s where the remnants of Helene encountered the higher elevations and cooler air of the Appalachian Mountains, causing even more rain to fall.

Asheville and many surrounding mountain towns were built in valleys, leaving them especially vulnerable to devastating rain and flooding. Plus, the ground was saturated before Helene arrived, said Christiaan Patterson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Across Georgia, Helene’s inland path knocked out power and shattered lives from Valdosta to Augusta.

With at least 36 killed in South Carolina, Helene passed the 35 people who were killed in the state after Hurricane Hugo made landfall north of Charleston in 1989.