LAMAR COMMUNITY, WASHINGTON COUNTY, Tenn. (WJHL) — Some of the best years of Vicki Hunter’s life came to a tragic end Friday after a raging Nolichucky River ripped through the bottomland where she and her husband, Jerry, lived with more than a dozen horses.
The water rose so fast on Ol Huff Road it trapped the couple at their home. Rescue crews managed to rescue Vicki minutes later, after the home had been torn from its foundation and floated down the river. Jerry, a Vietnam veteran, didn’t make it.
“When we married, he says, ‘I’m going to build a house,'” Vicki Hunter recalled Wednesday of the home they shared for well over a decade. “I said, ‘Really?’ We were out riding horses together. He said, ‘whatever you want.’ He was that kind of guy.”
Hunter said she expected a lot of rain Friday, but nothing that would force the couple from their home nestled under low but rugged mountains in a beautiful spot near the river just upstream of the now-destroyed Taylor Bridge.
“By the time we realized that it was flooding into the pasture and we were trying to grab my little dog and trying to grab a purse and Jerry was getting dressed, we’re like, ‘we’ve got to get out of here.'”
By the time they had gathered themselves, even Jerry’s large truck wasn’t capable of driving to nearby Tennessee Highway 81 and up to higher ground.
“He’s got a big 1-ton truck,” Hunter said. “Picked it up like an apple. It was just bobbing in the water.”
Within minutes, the violent force of the water had begun straining the house Jerry had built for his bride.
“We’re basically on the ground floor. He’s watching the back, hoping for a rescue. I’m out in the front. We just couldn’t go anywhere.”
‘We cleared 20-foot trees’
Seconds were dragging by as the Hunters heard the sound of rescue crews trying to get to residents of their neighborhood. Vicki was on the front deck when she got a strange visual sensation.
“I’m wondering, why are the trees coming at the house. I didn’t even feel the house pick up. It had picked up and the water is pushing it, and we cleared 20-foot Bradford pear trees.”
Hunter said the house kept floating, pulled down a river that had swelled to many times its normal width and depth.
“I could see people on the shoreline waving at me and and they said, ‘come to the back door.’ I had to go back through the house, and the furniture is floating and knocking me over.”
That struggle was for naught, and Hunter returned to the front porch. A protruding bedroom was blocking the current’s full force from hitting her.
“Eventually the house came up to rest against some trees, and I was praying to God. I’m like, ‘Jesus, please, not today. I don’t want to die today.'”
As she pondered whether to jump, worrying that she could get tangled in a web of strings used to tie tomato plants in a nearby field, Hunter tried to put her little 10-pound schnauzer, Batman, on the roof for safety.
“He just clung to me,” she said. “He was like, ‘I’m not going anywhere.'”
Eventually, Hunter heard a rescue crew blowing a whistle.
“I’d start screaming, ‘help, help, help,’ and they’d blow the whistle, and I’d scream, ‘help, help, help.’
“And when they finally came around some trees and I seen the orange boat, I would say they were probably 20 feet away.”
That was right around the time her house finally began succumbing to the water’s pressure.
“The post I was hanging on to, all of a sudden you just heard the cracking and the popping and I had to jump,” she said. “I still had my little dog on a lead, and when I jumped into the water I sank and I lost him, and I was clawing my way back up to the top of the water.
“I hit a post and I pushed on the post and popped up.”
Two rescuers, Brandon and Levi, were there to pull her into their boat.
“I looked and I seen my little dog bobbing down the river, and I said ‘can we get my little dog’ and they said, ‘no,'” Hunter said, beginning to cry. “They said, ‘we’re sorry, but we have to get you to safety.'”
The men struggled to get the boat to shore, drifting into some trees and tying off to deal with propeller trouble. The trio ended up crawling out through some brush.
“The current took us down like two houses and we eventually we got to shore and they were ecstatic that they had saved me,” Hunter said. “It’s coming to me then that I was safe, and I was trying to stand up, and I was crying and sobbing.”
A neighbor, Diane Shelton, ran up to tell the rescuers she could take care of Hunter and they walked her over to Shelton’s house, which lies on higher ground and was unscathed.
The worst possible news
Before the walk to Sheltons’, though, Hunter learned the worst.
“Johnson City Rescue was there also, and they said, ‘your husband jumped in. He never resurfaced.'”
In the moment, Hunter said she thought about Jerry Hunter’s meticulousness.
“I said, ‘Please find him. He doesn’t like to be dirty. He doesn’t like dirty water,” she said, beginning to sob. “Please find him. I need my husband.’ It took a day or two, and someone said they found him.”
Vicki Hunter said the 14 years with Jerry — a Vietnam veteran — were among the best of her life.
“He’s such a character. He was a horse lover, horse enthusiast. He loved to buy. He loved to sell. He was a salesman. He loved that.”
Vicki Hunter moved to the area from Minnesota in 2006, but Jerry Hunter was a native. He worked for Budweiser after serving in the Vietnam War. The couple both loved horses and would spend countless hours riding together in the mountains.
“He could back a horse trailer — if you said back it between that cone over there and that cone over there, he said, ‘no problem.'”
Hunter said people would drive by their house and say it looked like a golf course it was so immaculate. She said Jerry spent much of this summer fixing fenceline.
“I’d say, ‘what are you doing today, honey,’ and he says, ‘I’m fixing fence. I’m fixing it until I die.'”
Vicki Hunter retired earlier this year and began keeping brood mares. She said she’ll sell the couple’s property. “But I’m going to have horses forever, and he and I talked about that,” Hunter said.
She’s staying at her sister’s several miles from their former home. She said she’ll look for a place closer to them and keep a few horses there. The couple’s dozen horses are safe and boarded right now.
She said she’s holding up by “having family here to lean on and say, ‘it’s gonna be OK, it’s gonna be OK, we’re gonna do one day at a time.'”
‘There’s so many people that are lost’
Jerry Hunter will be laid to rest Saturday, and a celebration of life is planned for Nov. 11 — the day he would have turned 78. But Vicki Hunter said she’s afraid there are many more victims that haven’t been confirmed yet.
“The funeral director said, ‘you are one of the lucky ones. We found your husband.'”
She said that hasn’t happened yet, to her knowledge, with a couple the Hunters knew as friendly neighbors and saw for the last time as the storm pounded her home.
“I’m standing on the railing of the deck and I look over … and here comes the neighbors’ house. I seen them and I waved at them — I don’t know what I could do — but I mean I’m waving at them, and they had a glass front door and they seen me and they just sort of looked and they shut the door.
“They washed about a half a block further past me, hit the tree line and disintegrated. So they’re looing for that couple.”
“There’s so many other people out there,” she said. “There’s so many people that are lost, and there’s just so much debris you can’t imagine it.”
Hunter said she’s not sure she would have had the will to help work her own rescue if she’d known her beloved husband hadn’t survived.
“It was my whole world. I can replace a house. He loved me. He loved me.”