The hollering went on for hours, barely audible over the roar of the thrashing French Broad River.
“Bruce!” people shouted from shore.
One word was all Bruce Tipton could muster in response, and he repeated it agonizingly: “Help!”
Mr. Tipton, 75, was clinging to a tree, surrounded by a torrent of murky brown water that had just crushed his trailer home and flung him onto the tree. He was less than 50 yards from shore, but the way the river was moving, he seemed to be on a remote island.
For roughly seven hours, his family, friends and neighbors looked on from the railroad tracks uphill from the edge of the surging water. They pulled out a pair of binoculars and trained a car’s high beams on the tree that had become his lifeline, but it was hard to spot him. Still, they could hear his cries for help.
“I’m not going to tell you I’m going to have nightmares about it, but why wouldn’t I?” said Scott Eastman, a longtime neighbor who was among the people shouting from the riverbank. “To hear somebody yelling ‘Help!’ for hours and to not be able to get to him? It’s just sickening to me.”
The harrowing scene took place on Friday night along Rollins Road in Marshall, N.C., a town of about 800 people that was more or less wiped off the map by Tropical Storm Helene. Local residents said they had never seen the river rise so quickly, or so high, or become so violent. It ripped through the town, destroying houses and businesses, overturning a railroad car and spewing mud all the way up a church’s steps and into the back pews.
“Everything’s done,” said Mallory McCoy, the owner of Mal’s, a bar in town where people play pool, smoke out back and jam to oldies on Thursday nights. “We weren’t ready for this much water.”
Mr. Tipton was raised on Rollins Road, about a mile up the railroad tracks from downtown Marshall. So many of his relatives live along that road that one neighbor called it “Tiptonland.”
Mr. Tipton was known for his red pickup truck, his black German shepherd and his quiet country demeanor. A Navy veteran who always wore suspenders, he could sometimes come off as a grump, friends and relatives said, but he had a warm, generous side and enjoyed a good joke. The children of one of his nieces took to calling him “Slow-Poker” because of his pleas for them to slow down on their bicycles so he could keep up.
People like him, who live by the water in Marshall, are aware of both the joys and the dangers of the French Broad River. In summers, people ride its convulsions in inner tubes, and after a storm, they watch vigilantly to see how high the river rises. But no one alive has seen it rise this high before. Word around Marshall this week was that it may have even surpassed the Great Flood of 1916, which practically washed away the town.
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.
Ms. Meadows said it pained her that Ms. Pressley, her aunt, was still holding out hope that her brother — or at least his body — might still be hidden under the ruins of the neighborhood.
“She made us go through and dig through all this rubble to make sure,” Ms. Meadows said on Monday. “But we watched him go down the river.”
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