The financial toll of Hurricane Helene continues to climb, putting the storm that battered parts of the US Southeast on course to be one of the country’s costliest in history, Bloomberg reported. Industries of all types, including staffing, were impacted.

Jason Leverant, president and COO of staffing firm AtWork, told SIA the company has an office in Hendersonville, North Carolina, near hard-hit Ashville, North Carolina. Fortunately, the office didn’t lose power or water services, but the franchise owner’s home lost power and internet. Still, the owner was able at his office to help others who had lost power and water. Right now, the full extent of the impact is still being discovered, Leverant said.

Separately, healthcare staffing provider Supplemental Health Care released information on Sept. 25 — prior to the hurricane’s landfall — urging employees in affected areas to follow local guidance, communicate with the facilities to discuss any protocols or special instructions and to stay connected and follow their facility’s communication plan.

As of Monday morning, AccuWeather estimates the total damage and economic loss from Helene may be as high as $160 billion, according to Bloomberg. That’s up sharply from the $95 billion to $110 billion range it forecast late last week, before the magnitude of devastation became apparent. If losses match those preliminary estimates, Helene will go down as one of the nation’s top five most costly storms ever, the forecaster said.

“This is going to be one of the worst natural disasters in US history in terms of total damage and economic loss and the tremendous and urgent humanitarian crisis that is going on right now,” said Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather. AccuWeather’s forecast is higher than that of many competitors because its calculations include a wider variety of items like lost wages, canceled flights and supply-chain disruptions in addition to more traditional metrics such as damaged buildings, bridges and roads, Porter said.

Regardless of how companies measure the damage, forecasters across the board are revising their projections higher as scenes of widespread devastation emerge from the Appalachian region, according to Bloomberg. Enki Research, for instance, which initially called for just $12 billion in losses while Helene was getting organized, has nearly tripled its prediction to an estimated $30 billion to $35 billion as of Monday morning. More than 100 people have been killed, making it the deadliest storm since Ian in 2022. That could change as more deaths are reported in the coming days.

Predicting a storm’s damage is tough business. Modelers will map a storm’s potential path across the landscape, taking into account wind, rain and storm surge but also factoring in local construction methods, how rigorous governments are in enforcing building codes and even what kind of trees grow in a region, which can help determine how long and extensive power outages will be. In theory, a Category 5 storm will do more damage than a Category 1 storm, but it is often days or even weeks before a storm’s true destruction is clear.

(Bloomberg contributed to this report.)