‘This just breaks my heart.’ Child swept from grandpa’s arms in deadly flood
At 4:30 a.m. Thursday, Kent Kort finally went to bed.
He’d been up all night checking the level of the South Yadkin River beside Hiddenite Family Campground, which he and his wife, Beth, both 53, have run and lived at for 20 years in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains in Alexander County.
Kent Kort helped evacuate campers in the past when the river threatened or began to flood. This time, the South Yadkin appeared to stay low enough for him to feel OK calling it a night in his family’s modular home.
An hour later, the phone rang.
A woman who lives at the campgrounds was on the other line, reporting the sudden flooding.
Beth Kort dialed 911 and woke her husband up.
“I was just out there,” Beth Kort recalls her husband saying.
In an instant, the river rose “from 2 feet to 12 feet,” Beth told The Charlotte Observer in a phone interview Saturday night from a hotel in Conover where she and her husband and 18 other campground evacuees are staying thanks to the American Red Cross and others.
Flooding last week was the first time they’d seen water sweep in like that. The floodwaters, Beth Kort said, “came down through the woods” that slope to the campgrounds and river.
One woman, fleeing the rising waters, was helped to safety by the Korts’ son after her truck got stuck in the mud ouside their home.
As the current swept away camping trailers, a couple and their two grandchildren held tight on their truck, the man clutching his 1-year-old grandson, Beth Kort said.
But the rushing waters “just tore (his grandson) from his arms,” she said.
The couple and their 11-year-old granddaughter survived by clinging to their truck.
“The only thing I said to him is, he had to be strong for his granddaughter,” Kort said. “He’s just blaming himself so much.”
The next day, search and rescue efforts continued. A 37-member team combed the site. Searchers clad in bright yellow shirts and helmets traversed dense undergrowth on Friday looking for the missing child. Two big front-end loaders were brought in to help.
Emergency responders found the toddler’s body at about 4 p.m. Friday.
The grandfather later told the Korts “he was wishing it was him” who died, not his grandson.
‘Worst I have ever seen’
An estimated 31 people were rescued from the 30-acre camp site. But five people at the campground died from the flood, including the 1-year-old boy.
The five dead at the campground were identified as: Crystal Dawn LeVan Reed, 49; Tyrell Jordan “Ty” Reed, 18; Tina Ann Allen, 52; Ronald James Wintemute, 76, and Mason Lee Flowers, age 1. All were from Hiddenite, officials said.
Including the Alexander County deaths, at least eight people died in the Charlotte region after intense flooding wreaked havoc across the area. Flood waters destroyed bridges and roads, closed parts of Interstate 85, damaged property and prompted water rescues.
“I’ve been in law enforcement for 41 years, and this (death and destruction) is the worst I have ever seen,” Alexander County Sheriff Chris Bowman said Friday. “(The floods) came so fast, they just didn’t have time.”
Screams for help
It was still pitch dark Thursday morning, Beth Kort recalled, when she soon heard people screaming as they stood atop or clung to other parts of their campers.
The waters whisked many of the vehicles 700 to 800 feet into trees and thick brush, Bowman said. Most were mangled.
People clung to trees, their campers and debris, Beth Kort said.
The screams for help continued past dawn, according to Kort. The sun rose at 6:59 that morning as heavy downpours continued to fall.
Kort said emergency responders tried to get lifelines out to the campers in the dark but were unsuccessful at first as the waters remained fierce.
Path of destruction
On Friday, the campgrounds appeared like a moonscape, the flood waters having cleared most everything in their path.
Kids toys, tricycles and bicycles littered the brush, and a number of camper trailers had been washed into a line of trees. One of the trailers ended up aside an old black hearse that had been parked at the site.
“All of these families lost everything,” Kort said. “They won’t let us back in yet to see if we could find anything.”
“The devastation is beyond anything I’ve ever seen,” Ryan Mayberry, the county commissioners’ chair who grew up in Hiddenite said Friday night. “This just breaks my heart.”
The waters at the campground ran 11 to 14 feet deep, said Doug Gillispie, county public services director.
Pray for them
Kort fought tears as she described her close-knit campground community, who all told her they’re still too shaken to speak publicly about what happened.
“These people are our lives,” Kort said. “They are family.”
She said she tries to stay focused on the heroism of the campers and the search and rescue teams.
“As much tragedy as there was, there were a lot of rescues, 32 or 33 in all,” she said.
“We really appreciate all of the help and support and all of the lives saved that wouldn’t have been without the rescuers,” she said.
Kort said the public can help the flood survivors by donating money to a fund set up by East Taylorsville Baptist Church, where Alexander County Emergency Services sheltered people last week. The fund is on ContinueToGive.com.
The church will work with Alexander County Department of Social Services to get the donations to the families.
People can also pray for them, Kort said. “Everybody can use prayers,” she said.
Kort said people have asked if they’ll rebuild. Her in-laws, who live in Florida, own the business, she said. She tells people she’s not even thinking about the answer yet.
“We’re just trying to take it step-by-step,” she said.
This story was originally published November 15, 2020 at 1:25 PM with the headline "‘This just breaks my heart.’ Child swept from grandpa’s arms in deadly flood."