Bruce Tipton, 75, was in his trailer home when it was washed away by Tropical Storm Helene’s floodwaters. As his agonized family watched, he slipped into the raging river.
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Some longtime Rollins Road residents who initially dismissed the warnings to leave the area last week ended up fleeing as the storm approached. But Mr. Tipton, whose trailer house had weathered previous storms, apparently did not change his mind. On Friday, the river continued its advance, making an island of his low-lying plot of land.
Jason Blankenship said that when firefighters came through the neighborhood that morning, he urged them to help evacuate Mr. Tipton, who was standing in his doorway. He said a firefighter told him that Mr. Tipton had already refused their aid on Thursday night.
As the water continued to swirl Friday afternoon, Mr. Tipton remained in his doorway, waving to his family up on the railroad tracks. Then, all of a sudden, his doorway — and the rest of his home — disappeared into the water, leaving behind only a few pieces of foundation.
“One minute he’s standing in the front door, and the next minute, the trailer’s gone,” said one of his nieces, Annie Meadows, who watched the horror unfold. “It kind of exploded.”
Watching from the tracks, his family all feared for nearly an hour that he was lost. Then came a shout from behind a tree in the water: “Help!”
It felt like a miracle at first, Ms. Meadows said, but it was soon apparent how bleak the situation was.
The houses on the riverbank were flooding, and there seemed to be no way to get to Mr. Tipton. Though Ms. Meadows’s fiancé, Cody Rice, cannot swim, he tied a cable around his waist and got up on the roof of a nearby house to see if he could reach Mr. Tipton. The cable was too short.
From the tree, Mr. Tipton continued for hours to plead for help. Trying to encourage him to keep going, relatives called out that they had rescued his dog and asked him if he could see them. He said he could.
As dusk neared, a group of firefighters arrived, including the county’s only river rescue team. But they said that the water was too dangerous to enter, and that they would return at daybreak. Family members expressed shock.
“When they told me they wouldn’t put boats in the water, I lost it,” Ms. Meadows said.
Mitch Hampton, an assistant chief of the Walnut Volunteer Fire Department and the leader of its river rescue team, said that the water was too turbulent for his squad, which does not have the powerful equipment that teams in larger regions do. All of the team’s rescue boats are inflatable, and none has a motor.
“The resources we have are for normal conditions,” Mr. Hampton said. “This is nothing that any of us have ever seen before.”
At that point, all Mr. Tipton’s family could do was watch and yell as his cries for help grew intermittent.
At 10:51 p.m. — the time is seared into the minds of the people who watched it happen — Mr. Tipton’s body went limp and he fell headfirst into the water, which carried him out of sight.
Mr. Hampton, a Coast Guard veteran, said that if he and the other rescuers had perished while attempting to save Mr. Tipton, the entire county would have been without a river rescue team. The team carried out several dramatic rescues in other places during the storm, he said, including pulling five people from a hotel and saving two older residents from their home in Marshall as a rush of large debris flew down Main Street.
But the situation with Mr. Tipton was heartbreaking, he said.
“That was the worst one,” he said. “Because the family’s there, because you can’t do anything. We couldn’t get to him.”
On Sunday, a group of volunteers walked through the wasteland that Main Street in Marshall had become, searching through buildings with shovels for bodies. All they found to rescue were some American flags from a government building.
Mr. Tipton is survived by a daughter, his nieces and nephews, and a sister, Betty Pressley, 84, who lived across the road from him and left before the water rolled in.
