Displaying items by tag: helene flooding

MountainTrue, a Western North Carolina conservation group, has orchestrated the cleanup of thousands of pounds of PVC pipe flushed into the river by Tropical Storm Helene in September 2024. MountainTrue "spent over 44,000 labor hours solely on removing IPEX’s pipe from the river. Despite being 20 months from the storm, in the last 3 months alone, we have removed over 20,000 pounds. And yet, there are thousands of more pipes out there," the group said on its website. MountainTrue

County officials warned company of flood-debris risk posed by product that polluted French Broad River at Woodfin

This story was originally published by Asheville Watchdog.

ASHEVILLE — Nearly two years after floodwaters from Tropical Storm Helene pulled thousands of PVC pipes into the French Broad River, creating an ongoing environmental crisis and safety hazard, the corporate owner of a riverside plastics manufacturer has emerged from a period of silence with promises to improve how it stores its goods.

At the same time, emails newly obtained by Asheville Watchdog confirm that a Buncombe County official warned the company of the risk — and attempted to impose measures that could have made the site more secure — more than two years before Helene.

Brad Burton, a retired county floodplain administrator, aired his concerns earlier this year, describing correspondence he’d had with an engineer seeking a development permit on behalf of Woodfin’s Silver-Line Plastics and its owner, IPEX. The actual emails, which the Watchdog received this month after a public records request, support his recollection: the threat of Silver-Line product washing away from its outdoor storage area “is quite real during ‘the big one,’” he wrote in 2022. 

This still image from video shot by a victim of the flooding at Impact Plastics in Erwin illustrates the terror of the flood that killed six employees of the plant at the height of Tropical Storm Helene in September 2024.  Family of Johnny Peterson via WSMV

Attorney for families says evidence ignored; some cases will move to civil court

ERWIN — Prosecutors decided that no criminal charges will be filed in connection with the deaths of six employees of a Unicoi County manufacturing facility during last year’s catastrophic Hurricane Helene.

District Attorney General Steven Finney of the First Judicial District — whose office oversees cases in Washington, Carter, Unicoi and Johnson counties in northeastern Tennessee —  announced the decision nine months after asking the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to determine what happened on September 27, 2024, when six employees of Impact Plastics lost their lives as unprecedented flooding from Hurricane Helene, downgraded to a tropical storm at that point, swept the region and killed hundreds.

It remains unclear what the future holds for communities devastated by the hurricane, many of which are still struggling to rebuild. It’s believed that 252 people lost their lives due to Helene, and officials have estimated the storm caused nearly $80 billion in damage.