MAN MISSING AFTER ACCIDENT NEAR MATTHEWS

MATTHEWS -- Emergency workers looking for a man who disappeared after a traffic accident in New Madrid County Saturday plan to resume their search this morning.

Harold Cailteux, 65, of Clifton, Ill., was heading north in driving rain on Interstate 55 just north of the Matthews exit at 3:18 Saturday afternoon when he lost control of his car and skidded off the road, said Gene Carter, a deputy with the New Madrid County Sheriff's Department. "It was raining so hard, you couldn't hardly see," Carter said.

The car ended up overturned in the rain-swollen St. John's Bayou, according to an account from the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Cailteux and his wife Sue Cailteux, 66, got out of the car together and he helped her to safety, then disappeared.

The bayou is a "small ditch," Carter said, but it has been swollen from bank to bank since Saturday. "There's a lot of bridges that go over it. The water's as high as the bridges and you can't go under them," he said.

Rescuers have to take their boats out of the water to get around the bridges, Carter said.