FLAT GAP, KY. — Kevin Johnson last saw his son Scott wading through the rushing water with his 74-year-old grandmother on his back.

Scott Johnson had already saved his father, his uncle and sister as a flash flood ravaged the rural town of Flat Gap. He returned to their cluster of trailers for his grandmother and teenage nephew and started to carry them to higher ground. As the flood raged out of control, he wedged his nephew safely into a high tree before the water washed Johnson and the grandmother away.

The grandmother, Willa Mae Pennington, was found dead Tuesday among debris from the family’s shattered mobile homes, Johnson County Coroner J.R. Frisby confirmed. Scott Johnson, 34, is one of six people still unaccounted for after the raging Monday afternoon flood.

Rescue crews combing the hilly Appalachian terrain Tuesday were hampered by more heavy rains, swarming mosquitoes, soupy humidity and knee-deep mud.

“It just wears your legs out to walk,” said Gary McClure, the local emergency management director. “You walk from here to there in that mud and you’re ready to sit down. It just pulls you down.”

Authorities called off the search around 8 p.m. Tuesday, but resumed Wednesday morning after a convoy of National Guard vehicles and heavy equipment, including excavators and dump trucks, traveled down the road toward the hardest hit area.

“They will be going back over the same areas again and starting new searches that we haven’t gone over so far. Every inch of all this debris has not been searched through yet,” Frisby said Wednesday. “Just haven’t had time.”

On Tuesday, emergency personnel went door-to-door in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, searching for those who might be trapped in their homes, Kentucky State Police Trooper Steven Mounts said. Like Scott Johnson’s nephew, some were rescued from trees, Price said.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear declared a state of emergency to give local officials immediate access to state resources to assist in recovery efforts.