Gaby Torres thought she’d have returned to work by now at Plastiexports in Erwin, Tennessee, one of several businesses destroyed or damaged when Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters ripped through the town’s industrial park on Sept. 27.
But the new year is fast approaching and there are still months of work expected to dig the business out of mud and debris, and repair or replace equipment there.
“I’m going to keep on volunteering until maybe the 1st of the year,” Torres said. Though she’s had other job offers, she hates the idea of leaving her old job.
"I've worked there for so long," Torres said. "I've been with that plant, the same owners, for 19 years, so it's hard to start all over again."
The violent storms of this year's hurricane season, which dropped death and devastation in the mountainous region of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, have given way to Arctic cold fronts and bouts of snowfall.
Erwin, a small town of about 6,000, was flung into mourning and survival mode in September when the swollen Nolichucky River swept away people’s lives and livelihoods. The surging water wiped out several businesses in the town’s industrial park, including Impact Plastics. It killed six workers, sweeping them away as they struggled to reach safety.
The town has been left with the sorrow of those losses. It took more than a month to find the bodies of all the Impact Plastics workers gone missing; the last one to be found was Rosa Maria Andrade Reynoso, 29, on Oct. 31.
Along with the trauma and grief, Erwin was left with destroyed roads, devastated farms, unemployed residents, costly rebuilding and tons of mud and debris that has made the cleanup slow and daunting.
Days punctuated by sadness
The relatives of the dead are now enduring holidays without their family members.
The body of Monica Hernandez-Corona, 44, was flown back to her hometown village in Mexico this month, fulfilling her wish, said her sister Guadalupe Hernandez.
An employee of Impact Plastics, Hernandez-Corona had been taking refuge from the raging floodwaters on a flatbed trailer when water and debris tipped it over, spilling her and others into the flood.
This was typically the time of year for sisterly bonding between Monica and Guadalupe. They would anticipate the coming holidays and organize their family gathering, usually at Guadalupe’s house, where they dined on pozole and tamales, played games with their children and did a little karaoke.
“On these dates, we were always planning — what were we going to do for Christmas? What plans? What gifts? ‘What do you want? I’m going to give you a gift card so you can buy yourself something you like,’” Hernandez said.
Her days are now punctuated by profound sadness, what she called a “pesadez,” a heaviness.
“I’m carrying a big boulder," Hernandez said. "It’s going to be very difficult.”
Devastation ‘like nothing in the past’
Unemployment jumped overnight in Erwin, said Unicoi County Mayor Garland “Bubba” Evely. Hundreds of jobs were affected by the loss of the industrial park businesses and the closing of the hospital, which was also flooded. Some people have since found other employment or, in the case of the hospital, have shifted to other facilities, including a 24/7 urgent care in Erwin.
Lee Brown, Erwin Utilities CEO and Unicoi County economic development chairman, said unemployment rose from 4.3% in September to 5.6% in October.
In the utilities’ electric service area, which includes Erwin and part of Unicoi County, Embreeville and Bumpus Cove, officials counted 145 damaged homes: 80 of them destroyed, about 40 with major damage and 25 with minor damage.
They also estimated 31 businesses and industries were affected, with about 11 destroyed, 14 with “major, major, major damage,” according to Brown, and six with minor damage.
“It’s hard to really have a tremendous amount of joy in your conversations when you think of all the community lost and those people who lost everything,” Brown said.
The devastation has been felt in nearby communities as well.
Heathur Sawyer, owner of a Johnson City tattoo studio, said she lost $17,000 in business in the first month after the flood because of cancelled appointments.
“Economically, our area has been hit like nothing in the past ever before,” Sawyer said.
Her father was fortunately not home when the swollen Nolichucky swamped his house and destroyed everything in it. Her stepfather, an Impact Plastics engineer, was able to get safely out of the plastics plant with the help of his friend Johnny Peterson, one of the employees who died in the flood.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigations confirmed to NBC News on Dec. 11 that it’s continuing to look into what happened at Impact Plastics, and, specifically, “to identify any potential criminal violations.”
The Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration (TOSHA) is also conducting its own investigation of the circumstances of the deaths of Impact Plastics workers. A TOSHA spokesperson also said a fatality investigation typically can take six to eight months and will include whether Impact Plastics was required to have an emergency action plan.
‘Trying to rebuild on our own’
J.P. Metcalf, a part owner of Plastiexports, a plastics injection molding business in the industrial park, is trying to reopen and save local manufacturing jobs. He’s worked at the plant, which has changed owners several times, since he was 15, he said. The town has already lost manufacturing jobs over the years and, when it was going to lose Plastiexports, too — the plant’s parent company is now based in Mexico — Metcalf rounded up investors to keep the plant and jobs in town.
Metcalf is taking this latest threat head on, but the challenge is mighty, he said.
“We had a lot of equipment completely destroyed. It was pretty much a total, total loss, to be quite honest,” Metcalf said.
His business couldn’t afford the steep price tags of the large contractors that showed up to bid on cleanup, so “we’ve tried to clean it out and we’re trying to rebuild on our own,” he said.
Metcalf hired a local contractor, thus providing some work locally, and his own staff — “people who typically are not used to standing in 3 and 4 feet of mud” — spent nine weeks shoveling mud and sand.
“And we haven’t received one cent of help from any agency, from FEMA, the state, federal. It appears that we are expected to do this on our own,” he said. “So if some of us local guys weren’t fighting to keep the industrial park alive, I don’t know what would happen. I don’t know if it would be rebuilt.”
A spokesperson for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) confirmed that the agency does not provide assistance to rebuild small businesses. The agency did set up a disaster recovery center in Erwin to take applications for assistance for residents whose homes suffered damage and other purposes.
Farmland along the river also took a big hit. “What was crop ground is now bedrock,” said Chris Mackey, University of Tennessee’s Unicoi County director and agricultural and natural resources agent.
That has affected residents of multiple counties. Returning land to production, if it can be returned, is likely to be costly. Unicoi County farmers tend to grow tomatoes and strawberries, fruit and corn. Farms along the Nolichucky River in Washington, Greene and Cocke counties were also hit, as were some properties where livestock is raised.
There’s been an outpouring of support nationally for farmers and ranchers in the area, Mackey said, with tractor companies providing discounted equipment, donations of supplies, fencing and other needs. The biggest need will be grass seed to return land to production, he said.
The farmland loss also affected farmworkers who come seasonally to the region on agricultural visas. Generally they work through November, but some returned to their countries ahead of schedule due to the losses following the hurricane, said Ana Gutiérrez, a workers rights organizer for the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.
Soon after the flooding, families who remained were asking Gutiérrez’s group to connect them with financial assistance because bills were coming due and winter utility bills were about to go up as colder weather set in. FEMA assistance is not generally available for temporary agricultural workers and noncitizens without legal status.
The coalition also helped to bring attention to the plight of Impact Plastics families, many of them Latino, when they were searching for their missing loved ones. Following the employees' deaths, they've also provided assistance to some of the families.
“Some of the women missing were in charge of making sure the bills were paid, making sure to drive down to the utility company to make the payment,” Gutiérrez said.
But a bigger problem was that, for many families, financial stability depended on both income earners. The loss of the plant workers shook those families' stability, Gutiérrez said.
Plans for rebuilding — and building resilience
During the flooding, waters engulfed Unicoi County’s privately owned hospital adjacent to the industrial park, stalling the ambulances on hand to evacuate patients. Instead, helicopters had to rescue patients from the rooftop.
The hospital’s owner, Ballad Health, has opened a 24-hour triage facility in the meantime where some of the hospital staff are working. Evely, the Unicoi County mayor, said the company is trying to find property to rebuild the hospital, “but that’s a two-year window.”
Many hospital employees were moved to other locations or are working in the urgent care, according to Evely.
Roads in the county are open but a lot of repairs that need to be done will have to wait until warmer temperatures return, the mayor said. The county estimates that repairing the Chestoa Pike Bridge, one of the county’s main bridges, will cost more than $13 million, Evely said.
The county is working with FEMA on plans to rebuild the industrial park and a rail spur that runs by the park, which became a place where many workers found safety during the storm.
“But, you know, it’s going to take several months to try to get the infrastructure back — and the road and utilities and all that,” Evely said. “For our industrial park, which is a major issue to us, when you are talking about finances, a lot of budgets are based on tax revenue that we receive from businesses and property.”
Erwin is a tight community, Gutiérrez said, and despite the hardships, its residents continue to be resilient.
Some families have organized themselves after the tragedy and are working together to find ways to inform and help each other.
“They are talking about how they can organize power of attorney clinics for families that may need it — many of the children whose mothers tragically passed away are now having to go through an attorney for the father to have right to their medical bills or their medical history or at school," Gutiérrez said.
“I believe the Erwin community will continue to work with one another,” she said.
