Two hundred and sixteen. That’s how many days passed before crews in East Tennessee discovered the body of a man swept away in raging floodwaters caused by Hurricane Helene, providing much-needed closure to his family after months of searching.
Steven Cloyd and his dog went missing on September 27 while attempting to flee rapidly rising water from the Nolichucky River near his home, approximately 500 miles north of where Helene, a former Category 4 hurricane, made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region.
Cloyd’s goldendoodle, Orion, was discovered alive 3 miles down the road, but Cloyd was still missing, a painful wound the family described as “numb confusion.”
On May 1, a crew tasked with debris removal discovered human remains along the Nolichucky River, about 4 miles from where Cloyd was last seen. Two days later, Washington County Sheriff Keith Sexton announced that the medical examiner had confirmed the remains were Cloyd’s.
“With heavy hearts, we the family of Steve Cloyd announce that our husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, and friend was found,” his widow Keli wrote on Facebook. “We have the patriarch of our family again.”He is in the light, at peace, free, and perfect,” she said.
Hurricane Helene killed at least 250 people in six states, making it the deadliest hurricane to strike the US mainland since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report released in March.
In Tennessee, 19 people died, according to a state emergency management agency spokeswoman who spoke with CNN on Tuesday.
With Cloyd’s remains discovered, only one person remains missing in Washington County, according to the county sheriff’s office.
Holding onto hope
Two weeks after Cloyd went missing, his son Matthew said he had given up hope of finding his father alive. But he never completely gave up hope that he would be found. “I’d say, the hope of finding him, I think I always had a glimmer of hope that we would find him. I don’t believe I’ve completely lost that,” he said.
“You don’t want him out there. And you see the debris and the stuff, and you don’t want him out there,” an emotional Matthew explained.
Matthew went on to say that whenever the family was about to give up hope, someone from the Washington Sheriff’s Office or emergency management would speak with them and help them regain it.
A roller-coaster ride
Matthew told CNN that the past few months of searching for his father have felt like a “roller-coaster ride.”
“There’s a lot of emotions that run through your mind,” he told me. “You wonder if people are looking? Do people care? “Is he going to be forgotten?”
He and his family tried to remain calm and let the search process unfold, but “panic starts to set in.” “Especially once you get into one month, two months, three months, four months and five months …you start thinking, is he really not going to be found?”
Matthew experienced a range of emotions, including feelings of inadequacy and overload on search teams. “You feel like you’re causing unwanted stress,” he told me.
Matthew, who lives in Illinois, said he would divide his time between looking for his father in East Tennessee and being at home with his two children and girlfriend. He would spend weeks searching through mud and debris, sometimes with search personnel, sometimes alone with his younger brother.
The piles of debris and mud left by the flooding were overwhelming and made search efforts nearly impossible, he said. Matthew stated that one day, while searching with his brother, they were standing on debris the size of a football field. “It kind of felt like the ground was beneath you, but it wasn’t – you were six, seven feet in the air,” said the man.
Steven Cloyd’s remains were pulled from under six feet of debris, according to Matthew. Two men tasked with debris removal told his mother that a flash of light caught their eye. It turned out to be Cloyd’s wedding band. That’s when they called in the authorities, he said.
Matthew said he cannot thank those two men enough. “They could’ve said screw it, we’re just gonna scoop this whole pile and throw it in the back of a truck,” he said.
