Hurricane Helene live updates: Dolly Parton announces donation

Tennessee native Dolly Parton has pledged a $1 million donation to Hurricane Helene victims.

"These are my mountains … these are my rivers," she told community members gathered in a Newport, Tennessee, Walmart parking lot on Friday.

Helene "was devastating," Parton said. "Not just because it was my family, because all these people feel like my people. We all feel related, and we are in some sort of way. So it just devastated me, just to know that we had suffering like that. So anything we can do to help."

Parton's businesses in east Tennessee -- Dollywood Parks & Resorts, Dolly Parton’s Stampede, and Pirates Voyage Dinner & Show -- as well as The Dollywood Foundation are combining efforts to match Parton’s donation with their own $1 million contribution.

"You just try to step up. God has been good to me and so has the public. And I feel like anything I can do to give back and do what I can, I’m always willing to do that," Parton said as the crowd applauded.

"We are with you, we love you, we hope that things get better real soon, and we’re gonna do our part," she said.

Walmart also announced a $10 million donation to relief efforts.

-ABC News’ Jianna Cousin

On Friday, 1,000 active-duty U.S. Army troops from Fort Liberty arrived in hard-hit western North Carolina to join the roughly 1,000 North Carolina National Guardsmen already on the ground.

Their responsibilities will "include delivering support and commodities [needed items] to impacted and isolated communities, assisting with supply point logistics at commodity staging locations, and removing debris from affected routes," officials said.

-ABC News’ Luis Martinez

The White House continues to push back on the false narrative from former President Donald Trump and other Republicans that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is going to run out of money for Hurricane Helene relief because of funding to programs that support migrants.

"This is FALSE," senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates wrote in a memo circulated to reporters on Friday. "No disaster relief funding at all was used to support migrants housing and services. None. At. All."

Bates said funding for migrant services is run through a separate spigot at Customs and Border Protection, and ultimately administered by FEMA, but that it's in "no way related" to FEMA's hurricane recovery efforts, which are plentiful for immediate Helene response.

"FEMA has the funds it needs for immediate response and recovery efforts for Hurricane Helene," he wrote.

FEMA does need more funding to sustain that support, though.

"To be clear: the Biden-Harris Administration has sought additional disaster funds for a year to ensure that FEMA has the resources it needs in the face of increasingly frequent severe weather events across the country," Bates said. "We’re glad to see Congressional Republicans finally joining our calls."

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said after touring hurricane damage that Congress should allocate more money to FEMA, one week after he voted against $18.8 billion for the agency.

-ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett

Hundreds of thousands of customers in the South are still without power over one week after Hurricane Helene made landfall.

More than 277,000 customers are in the dark in South Carolina and 230,000 are without power in North Carolina.

Another 200,000 are without power in Georgia.

"This has been a historic storm. We've never seen anything like this," Duke Energy spokesperson Bill Norton said. “The biggest challenge has been the unprecedented flooding. It’s not just poles and wires that are down -- it's the backbone of our system, the transmission infrastructure and substations."

Duke Energy has a "crew of 21,000 line workers, vegetation crews and more across the Carolinas," Norton said.

In North Carolina, crews have repaired more than 1.2 million power outages and are on track to restore an additional 27,000 customers by Friday night and another 69,000 in the hardest-hit areas by Sunday evening, Norton said on Friday.

The water line is almost to the top of the substation that serves Biltmore Village, North Carolina, and the substation will take three to four months to repair, Norton said.

Crews have wheeled in a 200,000-pound mobile substation to serve in the interim, Norton said, noting that it was a "slow, meticulous" process to get the mobile substation to the region because crews had to make sure the bridges hit by Helene could withstand it.

The mobile substation "will effectively allow us to bypass the substation for the next three to four months as we level it and build it again on higher ground," Norton said. "Those customers will have power even as we rebuild that substation."