Cat that floated to the top of a trailer’s roof finds its way back to its family

A North Carolina family has been reunited with a beloved pet cat they thought lost in the turbulent waters when Hurricane Helene struck the region last week.

The Collins family was rushing to evacuate their Burnsville property on Sept. 27 when their cat, named Ricardo Blanco and often called simply “Blanco,” escaped from them amid the chaos, Nan Collins told Southern Living magazine.

They then spotted the cat on top of the family’s trailer, which became surrounded by water and began to float.

The water camper crashed into a neighbor’s house, which was also floating. The family watched in horror as the cat tried to climb onto the metal roof of the house, but fell into the water.

“My heart sank,” Collins told the magazine, saying he felt “immense sadness that we were powerless to help him.”

His son, Jonathan, tried to run toward Blanco on higher ground and help him, but was blocked by downed power lines.

Eight days later, they were cleaning up debris from their property when Jonathan heard a soft meow, Nan Collins said in a video posted by Best Friends Animal Society, which set up a free mobile veterinary clinic to help animals after the storm. .

“He knew he had to come home, he is a survivor,” she said in the video.

The family took Blanco to the mobile clinic, where volunteer veterinarians from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals treated him for an ear infection and upper respiratory issues, the nonprofit said in a Facebook post.

Blanco, who Nan Collins described in a Best Friends press release as “full of life and playful,” is now recovering from her terrifying ordeal.

“He’s fine, playing and doing all the normal things,” she said.