Vice President Kamala Harris praised the workers straining to “meet the needs of people who must be seen, who must be heard” on Wednesday, as she and President Joe Biden surveyed Hurricane Helene ’s path of destruction in separate visits to Georgia and the Carolinas.

Biden flew over toppled trees, twisted metal and towering piles of debris in the normally tourist friendly downtown of Asheville as he took an aerial tour of some of the hardest-hit parts of North Carolina. Nearly 200 miles to the south in Georgia, Harris was in Augusta, where fallen trees littered the sides of the highway, their trunks cracked like matchsticks.

″I’ve been reading and hearing about the work you’ve been doing over the last few days, and I think it really does represent some of the best of what we each know can be done,” Harris said. “Especially when we coordinate around local, state, federal resources to meet the needs of people who must be seen, who must be heard.”

She added, “I am now listening.”

Many highways in the hard-hit parts of North Carolina remained inaccessible. But from his Marine One helicopter, Biden saw flooded roads, piles of shredded lumber and displaced sandbags, emergency trucks and downed powerlines. In one area, homes were partly under water, and it was hard to distinguish between lake and land.

The role was familiar for Biden, who has frequently been called on to survey damage and console victims after tornadoes, wildfires, tropical storms and other natural disasters. But it’s less so for Harris until now, as she vies to succeed him as president. Both are also seeking to demonstrate a larger commitment and competence in helping devastated communities after Donald Trump’s false claims about their administration’s response.

Biden wore a vest and boots. Before his air tour, he hugged and grabbed the hand of Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer who was at the airport in Greenville, South Carolina, to meet him. The White House said he would also be visiting storm damaged parts of Florida and Georgia on Thursday.

Manheimer noted that they could not close down the area’s one operable road for Biden’s motorcade. The White House said Harris had also spoken to the mayor and was planning her own trip to North Carolina in coming days.

Before leaving Washington, Biden made a point of mentioning how an ongoing dockworkers strike could make getting supplies to hard-hit areas more difficult.

“Natural disasters are incredibly consequential. The last thing we need on top of that is a man-made disaster that’s going on at the ports,” the president said. “We’re getting pushback already, we’re hearing from the folks regionally that they’re having trouble getting product that they need because of the port strike.”

Harris’ trip, meanwhile, presented an additional political test in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. She’s trying to step into a role for which Biden is well known — showing the empathy that Americans expect in times of tragedy — in the closing stretch of her White House campaign.