FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Powerful Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend region, bringing storm surges and strong winds to the state’s Gulf Coast communities before making landfall in southern Georgia. The storm was responsible for at least 40 deaths, according to an Associated Press tally.

Where is the storm now?

Hurricane Helene The National Hurricane Center said the hurricane had weakened to a tropical depression with maximum sustained winds of 30 miles per hour (48 km/h) over the Carolinas by early Friday afternoon.

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

Helene wobbled as it approached the Florida coast late Thursday before making landfall near the mouth of the Aucilla River. Maximum sustained winds were estimated at 140 miles per hour (225 km/h). This place was only about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of there Hurricane Idalia came ashore last year with almost the same ferocity and caused extensive damage.

Evacuations took place 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?

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

There were 130 flight cancellations at Tampa International Airport in the past 24 hours ending Friday afternoon, according to FlightAware.

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

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

What about roads and bridges?

Inspectors were out Friday morning examining bridges and causeways along Florida’s Gulf Coast to quickly reopen them to traffic, Perdue said.

In addition, 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of road across Florida have been cleared of debris, Perdue said during a news conference in Tallahassee.

“Some of the causeways were under water, so we need to inspect them and make sure they are safe to pass through,” Perdue said. “We had a lot of storm surges along the West Coast. We had a lot of streets under water.”

How many people are without electricity?

About 4.2 million people in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee were without power as of 2:30 p.m. Friday, according to poweroutage.us.

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 nearly 950,000 customers without power.

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

Line crews were stationed across the region, ready to begin restoring power as soon as the winds from Helene died down.

What about the storm surge?

Flooding along Florida’s coast began long before Hurricane Helene made landfall. Rapidly rising water levels were even reported in Fort Myers on the state’s Gulf Coast.

Early Friday, sheriff’s officials in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, used a large all-terrain vehicle to rescue people stranded in rising waters.

On Cedar Key, an Old Florida-style island off the Gulf Coast, many homes, motels and businesses were flooded. Not even the city’s fire department building was spared.

“It actually blew out the storm panels on the front doors. “One of the tear-down walls at the back and two front doors were blown out,” the agency posted online. “It appears we had about six feet or more of water inside.”

What is a storm surge?

Storm surge is the level at which seawater rises above its normal level.

Similar to how a storm’s sustained winds do not take into account the potential for even stronger gusts, a storm surge does not take into account the height of waves above the mean water level.

Storm surge is also defined as the amount above the normal tide at a given time, so a 15-foot storm surge at high tide can be far more devastating than the same storm surge at low tide.

How are hurricanes measured?

The most common method for measuring the strength of a hurricane is the Saffir-Simpson scale It assigns a category from 1 to 5 based on the sustained wind speed of a storm at the center, with 5 being the strongest.