As waters from Hurricane Helen rose around Tennessee’s Nolichucky River, Boone McCrary, his girlfriend and his chocolate lab headed out to his fishing boat in search of a man stranded by the waters of floods which had razed his house. But thick debris in the water blocked the boat’s engine and, without power, it struck a bridge support and capsized.
McCrary and his dog Moss never made it out of the water alive.
Search teams found McCrary’s boat and the body of her dog two days later, but it took four days to find McCrary, an emergency room nurse whose passion was being on her boat in that river. His girlfriend, Santana Ray, clung to a branch for hours before rescuers reached her.
David Boutin, the man McCrary had decided to save, was distraught when he later learned that McCrary had died trying to save him.
“I’ve never seen anyone risk their life for me,” Boutin told the Associated Press. “From what I’ve heard, that’s how he’s always been. She’s my guardian angel, that’s for sure.
The 46-year-old remembers how the force of the water swept him past his front door and ripped his dog Buddy – “My best friend, everything I have” – from his arms. Boutin was rescued by another team after clinging to tree branches. in the raging river for six hours, Buddy is still missing and Boutin knows he couldn’t have survived.
McCrary was one of 215 people killed by Hurricane Helene’s raging waters and falling trees in six states – Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia – and was part of a group of first responders who died trying to save others. The hurricane caused significant damage in neighboring Unicoi County, where flooding swept away 11 plastics factory workers and forced a rescue mission to a hospital in Erwin, Tennessee.
McCrary, an avid hunter and fisherman, spent his time traveling the waterways that wind around Greeneville, Tennessee. When the hurricane hit, the 32-year-old asked his friends on Facebook if anyone needed help, said his sister, Laura Harville. This is how he knew Boutin.
McCrary, his girlfriend and Moss the dog set off into a flooded neighborhood around 7 p.m. on September 27 and approached Boutin’s location, but debris-strewn floodwaters clogged the boat’s jet engine. Despite pushing and pulling the accelerator, McCrary was unable to clear the debris and crashed into the bridge approximately two hours after the rescue attempt began.
“I got the first phone call at 8:56 p.m. and I was completely nervous,” Harville said. She walked towards the bridge and began to walk the banks.
Harville organized hundreds of volunteers who used drones, thermal cameras, binoculars and hunting dogs to scour the muddy banks, fending off copperhead snakes, trudging through knee-deep mud and wrestling in tangled branches. Harville collected items that carried McCrary’s scent — a pillowcase, a sock and insoles from her nursing shoes — and put them in Mason jars for the dogs to sniff.
On Sunday, a drone operator spotted the boat. They found Moss dead nearby, but there was no sign of McCrary.
Searchers had no luck Monday, “but on Tuesday they noticed vultures flying around,” Harville said. That’s how they found McCrary’s body, about 20 miles (33 kilometers) from the bridge where the boat capsized, she said.
The force of the floodwaters swept McCrary under two other bridges, under the highway and over Nolichucky Dam, she said. The Tennessee Valley Authority said about 1.3 million gallons (4.9 million liters) of water per second flowed over the dam the night McCrary was swept away, more than double the rate of the last regulated release. of the dam almost half a century ago.
Boutin, 46, doesn’t know where he will go next. He is staying with his son for a few days and then hopes to get a hotel voucher.
He didn’t learn of McCrary’s fate until the day after his rescue.
“When the news broke, I didn’t know how to take it,” Boutin told the AP. “I wish I could thank him for giving his life for me.”
Dozens of McCrary’s colleagues at Greenville Community Hospital paid tribute to him, recalling his kindness, compassion and desire to help others. He “was adamant about living life to the fullest and making sure along the way that we didn’t forget our neighbor, man or woman, and that we helped each other,” Harville said.
McCrary’s last TikTok video posted before the hurricane shows him speeding across the surface of muddy water to the beat of “Wanted Dead or Alive.” He wrote a message at the bottom that read:
“Some people asked me if I had a ‘death wish’. The truth is that I have a “life wish”. I need to feel life flowing through my veins. One thing about me is that I may be “crazy”, maybe a little reckless at times, but when it comes time to put myself underground, you could say I’ve lived it until the end.
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Bellisle reported from Seattle.
