Bradley County Fire & Rescue workers Matt Ballard, left, and Mike Tyndall use their kayaks to help search for the bodies of an adult and two young children who went missing after a boat they were in overturned last Wednesday. The accident happened near Delano and Conasauga creeks, in the small town of Delano, Tenn., near the Polk-McMinn county line.DELANO, Tenn. – The searchers are waiting for the water to go down, waiting for the mud to settle. They are waiting for crews to clear logs and branches from the creek.
On Monday — five days since a man and two of his children went under — about 50 people kneeled on the creek bank or paddled in kayaks, looking for bodies.
“They are in the water,” said a sure Stephen Lofty, chief of the West Polk Fire and Rescue, as he scanned the dirty creek from a bridge.
Nick Alley, 36, and two of his children, 7-year-old Helana Alley and 6-year-old Lazarus Alley, spilled out of their canoe on the rain-swollen Conasauga Creek on Wednesday, and not a sign of them has been found since. Three of his other children who had gone on the creek that day returned safe.
A few miles down the road, past chicken pens, turned dirt and rows of blue cabbage, people gathered in a cabin-style church for singing and sermons in honor of the missing. It was a funeral without bodies. They didn’t think it was right to wait. Nearly 500 people attended.