Still searching for their loved ones, a week after Hurricane Helene

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BLACK MOUNTAIN, N.C. — The last time Drew McLean’s parents saw him, he was marveling at the power of Tropical Storm Helene as it washed over their home in the mountains of North Carolina.

He and his mother found that a large tree had split in the front yard and another had been pushed by surging water into McLean’s car, tipping it on its side.

Amid the chaos, McLean, 45, offered his mother a comforting thought: “God is still on his throne,” he said.

McLean has been missing for a week now, ever since he apparently walked off into the storm Sept. 27.

Sitting on the back porch of their secluded home in the hills of Black Mountain on Thursday, his parents were holding out hope that he would be found, even as they wiped tears from their eyes and increasingly feared the worst.

The McLeans are in a fraught and fragile state shared by many across western North Carolina and other regions crushed by Hurricane Helene. The vastness of the devastation, coupled with a lack of phone and internet service after the storm, has left families unsure of what happened to their loved ones.

The storm’s death toll has surpassed 225 across six states, but officials in North Carolina said the situation was changing too quickly to provide an estimate of how many people were currently missing. In Buncombe County, where Black Mountain is one of many small towns outside Asheville, more than 200 people have been reported missing, officials said on Thursday afternoon.

Authorities have been inundated with requests for wellness checks. A spokesperson for Haywood County, west of Asheville, said officials had completed about 860 such checks since the storm. And in Rutherford County, southeast of Asheville, officials confirmed that more than 800 people were found safe.

Requests are still coming in, though not all of them can be completed because some areas remain inaccessible.

Kerry Giles, a spokesperson for Rutherford County, said estimating the number of missing people has been difficult because officials are working from multiple lists compiled from social media, emergency calls and emails. The loss of power and cellular service can also complicate the task.

“It’s a long process, and that’s just for one person,” Giles said.

The lack of immediate answers can be heartbreaking.

Ranee LaPointe, 46, of Athol, Massachusetts, has been searching for her father, Russell Wilber, 67, and stepmother, Charlene Wilber, 70. The couple has been missing from a campground in Newland, North Carolina, since Sept. 26, when they told workers there that they were going to wait out the storm.

A few days later, the campground staff discovered that the couple’s camper was missing, Charlene Wilber’s car was “completely destroyed” and the couple was nowhere to be found, LaPointe said. Since then, LaPointe has been unable to sleep for more than an hour at a time. She spends her nights scanning online videos and photos for any trace of the couple.

The lack of answers has been paralyzing, LaPointe said. With each day that passes, it is harder to believe that her relatives are still alive.

“I was hoping that I’d get a call in the first few days, and I’d be able to go down and say, ‘Don’t ever do that to me again,’” LaPointe said through tears.

Virginia Crider, 34, of Laurel Hill, Florida, said she has been spending “every waking hour” trying to track down her friend Joseph Spencer Ramirez, 36, who is homeless in the Asheville area and appears to have gone missing last weekend.

Crider said she has been reaching out to Ramirez’s social media contacts, posting in Facebook groups for missing people and making TikTok videos.

“Looking for a homeless person on a regular day in a regular city would be difficult,” she said, choking up. “How do you even begin when there’s so much destruction and so many missing people? The footage I’ve seen is devastating, and all you can think is that there’s no way he survived.”

Some bright spots can be found among the desperate posts on Facebook. “BOTH FOUND SAFE,” someone wrote of a woman and her daughter who had been missing.

In Black Mountain, the McLeans got help Thursday from volunteers who scoured the mountainside and its deep ravines for their son but again came up empty-handed.

“I couldn’t find anything but swamp,” said one man who gave his name only as Axe and had come from Pennsylvania to help with relief efforts.

Several volunteers hiked along a steep, windy road, looking for McLean, while Jon Bridgers, founder and CEO of Cajun Navy 2016, a volunteer rescue group, flew a drone to try to locate him. A week after the storm, few held out hope that McLean would be found alive. The family and their neighbors could not be reached for an update Saturday.

On Thursday, his father had been bracing for bad news.

“God’s hands are on Drew, if he’s still on Earth,” Ron McLean, 73, said. “And if he’s not here any longer, he’s already in his hands there.”

McLean, whose parents said he may be on the autism spectrum but has never been diagnosed, lives in an apartment downstairs from his parents and spent the morning of Sept. 27 with his father, building a makeshift dam in the driveway using rocks and concrete blocks. As the water rushed down the mountain, it quickly dispensed of the dam.

At some point that morning, Drew McLean walked off the property. It was not something he had done before.

“We’ve never not known some sense of where he was,” said his mother, Fori McLean, 70. “This is not his character.”

His parents have called and texted him to no avail. “Please come home,” his mother texted him the day after he disappeared. “We are turning on the generator periodically to see if we’ve heard from you. We love you, Dad & Mom.”

With cellphone service spotty at best, the message could not be delivered.

After searching for much of Thursday, volunteers who had been trying to find McLean — some covered in mud and sweat — took a rest. One said parts of the ravine they had been searching in looked like a wasteland.

Up on the mountain, the McLeans remained on the porch with pictures of their son scattered on a table. Neighbors continued to come by, with one bringing prescriptions and an energy bar.

The McLeans said deputies with the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office had checked on them and taken down information about their son. One deputy, recognizing Ron McLean’s deep distress, asked him if he felt safe still keeping his guns at home.

“I have lost a lot of hope,” Ron McLean acknowledged Thursday, recounting his conversation with the deputy. “But I have a responsibility to still be here for my family.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.