“Your father is in trouble”: the desperate search for a family continues after Helene’s passing

() – Safe at home in Illinois on Friday afternoon, Matthew Cloyd knew that the hurricane that had hit the Big Bend area of ​​Florida overnight was going to continue its brutal onslaught through the Southeast.

But he never thought that included his parents’ home near the Nolichucky River, about 500 miles north of where Helene made landfall in far northeastern Tennessee.

Tropical systems, of course, can devastate coastlines. And perhaps, if the gusts are strong enough, snap trees 80 km inland. Or, if they stagnate, they may dump rain in the same place for days, filling basements and streets like bowls of soup.

But even if a storm like that were to reach Matthew’s parents’ neighborhood, their house rests on a mound. In the Appalachians. About 1,700 feet above sea level.

And Matthew thought that certainly couldn’t happen with Helene, even though the Category 4 monster showed little sign of calming its fury.

Then his phone rang.

It was his mother: “Your father is in trouble.”

“I think the house is fine.”

Hours earlier, Hurricane Helene had unleashed a nightmare across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas: debris piled up everywhere, houses fell off their foundations, cars sank into the murky water of swollen streams.

Some people had already lost their lives. Many, many others had disappeared.

And the storm continued to move north, toward eastern Tennessee, saturated in recent days by at least 10 cm of rain from another system.

Drizzle from the outer bands of Helene had settled before dawn on Friday over the community of Keli and Steven Cloyds, before becoming a steady and then heavy rain at 8am.

Still, Keli headed to her job as a manager at a beauty supply store about 20 miles east, in Johnson City. Her husband, to whom she has been married for 36 years – and exactly one week – stayed home with their 2-year-old goldendoodle dog, Orion, named after the hunter that a god placed among the stars, and their black Jeep in the entrance.

Anyone who knows Steven will agree that he’s a tough guy, his son would later say. And as Helene’s gangs dumped more and more rain, he kept his wife informed through calls and text messages, including a video of a rising puddle in the middle of a grass field near their house.

“Ummmm, isn’t there another front coming???” Keli asked. “Is it safer for me to come home??”

However, very soon the water began to saturate the pavement.

“I think the house is fine being on the mound it is built on,” Steven wrote, “but the drain outside…”

Before long, the waterline had almost reached the garage. And by then, the tough guy seemed to understand more clearly what could await him:

“Uh oh,” he messaged Keli with another video showing water near his Jeep. “You’re not going to get home right now.”

“God,” was his response. “I SHOULD HAVE LEFT.”

“You wouldn’t have made it,” he said. “Things are getting ugly.”

The next videos Steven sent showed murky beige water getting closer.

“This is not good,” he sent a message to his wife. “If he continues like this, he will destroy the upper floor. The basement is lost.”
“We are… Trapped in the house,” he soon wrote. “The basement is filling up quickly…”

She had never heard fear in her husband’s voice like on those calls, Keli would later say.

“Your father is in trouble,” he told his 35-year-old son.
“What do you mean Dad’s in trouble?” Matthew asked.
“Your father just called me and told me it’s flooding like crazy,” Keli said.
“The house is flooded.”

Matthew searched for his younger brother and a vehicle. And they set out to travel about 700 kilometers to find their father.

Hunting in lines, in the fields and on the banks of the rivers

The GPS says the trip from Rockford to Jonesborough should take 11 hours and 8 minutes, as the crow flies. But after Hurricane Helene, it was not a straight path.

When Matthew and his brother arrived Saturday afternoon, the nightmarish storm scenes that had seemed impossible in East Tennessee had materialized.

There was debris everywhere. Houses were torn from their foundations. The bridges were separated from the land they were supposed to join.

The brothers searched and searched, and finally found a bridge they could cross. They were reunited with their mother.

By then, on the other side of Helene’s destruction zone, police and firefighters, friends, spouses and children had also launched their own searches. By canoe, in offshore vehicles, on foot, and online, they hunted people whose cell phones went straight to voicemail.

That they had not appeared.

That they weren’t where they were supposed to be.

Together, Keli and her children found Steven’s Jeep in a field, about 400 meters southwest of the couple’s home.
The removable roof panel was not there.

Steven wasn’t there either. Nor his goldendoodle.

The family took to social media to ask for information about their missing husband and father, and their dog. Soon, a lady got in touch to say she had found Orion alive. He lives 5 km from the road.

Now, almost a week after Keli professed, in that frenetic 27-character text message, her deepest love for her husband of 36 years, the Cloyds feel “helpless,” Matthew told .

They, like countless other families, have contacted authorities to report their loved one missing. On social media, the Cloydes continue to post new pleas about Steven, hoping someone will respond saying he is safe.

Matthew wants anyone who lives along the Nolichucky River to check their backyard and surrounding areas to see if anyone has washed up on the banks. It could be his father, he says. Or maybe someone else.
Everyone, he said, deserves to be found.

When this is all over, Matthew wants to join the other people Helene has sent on an unthinkable hunt, relentless even as the stars have appeared night after night since the storm broke.

“I think right now we are the only people who know what each of us is going through,” he said. “It doesn’t feel real.”

– meteorologist Mary Gilbert contributed to this report.