FLAT GAP, ky. — As the Johnson family dug through the wreckage where their trailers once stood, they found a mud-soaked box of family photos, cherished heirlooms and a tiny porcelain statue of Jesus, but not what they were looking for.
Scott Johnson, 34, was swept away two days ago, trying to save his grandmother as a flash flood Monday ravaged this rural eastern Kentucky community.
He is still missing. Three others are confirmed dead, and the fate of four more remains uncertain. Families reported them missing, but they could be stranded in their homes, without power or phone service.
Rescue teams are slogging through knee-deep mud, door to door, across the rugged Appalachian terrain, painting orange X’s on each structure they search. Desperate families roam the banks of the swollen creek, looking for their lost loved ones.
Kevin Johnson last saw son Scott wading through rushing floodwater with his 74-year-old grandmother on his back.
Scott Johnson had already guided his father, uncle and sister from the raging flood that inundated their cluster of trailers. He turned back one last time to save his grandmother, called Nana, and a 13-year-old family friend.
“We told him, ‘You can’t make it,'” his father recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to get her out of that trailer.”
Standing in a cemetery on a hill overlooking the creek that had swallowed his son, Kevin Johnson said he had watched his son push the teenager to safety in the branches of a catalpa tree and hoist his Nana onto his back, only to be swept away.
“Scott wouldn’t turn her loose, that’s why he died,” said Veronica Marcum, Scott Johnson’s sister. The grandmother, Willa Mae Pennington, was found dead Tuesday among the debris.
