A North Carolina family has reunited with a cherished pet cat they thought they’d lost to the churning floodwaters as Hurricane Helene slammed the region last week.

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

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

The waterborne camper slammed into a neighbor’s house, which was also floating. The family watched in horror as the cat attempted to climb up the house’s metal roof, but fell into the water below.

“My heart sank,” Collins told the magazine, saying she felt “immense sadness at how helpless we were to help him.”

Her son, Jonathan, attempted to run towards Blanco via higher ground and help him, but was blocked by fallen power lines.

Eight days later, they were cleaning up the wreckage on 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 in the aftermath of the storm.

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

The family brought 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 press release from Best Friends as “full of life and playful,” is now recovering from his harrowing ordeal.

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