Following the wreck of Hurricane Helene , a father traveled 30 miles through flood and debris to make it to his daughter’s wedding on time. Speaking to local Tennessee news station WJHL , David Jones shared that he’d initially planned for a two-hour drive to his daughter Elizabeth’s wedding, which was being held in South Carolina. However, his departure from his hometown in Johnson City, Tennessee, did not go as planned due to Hurricane Helene – which touched down in Florida’s Big Bend on September 26.
The Category 4 hurricane then charted a path north through the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Virginia. According to Jones, his travel plans were initially diverted while he was driving on an interstate in Tennessee at 2am on Friday, September 27 – hours before his daughter’s wedding. Although a state trooper told him that the interstate was being shut down, this didn’t stop him from moving.
“You have to understand. My daughter’s getting married at 11:00 this morning, and I’m going to be there to walk her down the aisle,” he explained to WJHL. At the time, he estimated that he was only 30 miles away from the wedding venue and decided to walk the rest of the way.
However, the task was much harder than Jones anticipated, as he walked through mounds of debris with only the flashlight on his phone to guide him. “It’s awful,” he explained. “And I can tell you a lot about the mud and the debris fields where I have to climb six, seven-foot-.