As floods recede after Helene, anguished families wait for answers

Monica was among five Impact Plastics employees and one contractor reported missing after Helene tore through town.

It was the start of a period of agonizing limbo for Guadalupe and the families of other missing employees, who said they struggled to get information from local officials.

Impact Plastics didn’t immediately respond to questions about whether missing employees had been recovered and local authorities and the Tennessee Department of Health declined to share the names of those killed in the storm, citing concerns for their families’ privacy.

After Monica didn’t return home Friday, the family grew worried. Guadalupe said she spent the next day checking hospitals and shuffling between information centers set up at local schools, but it was becoming clear that answers would not come fast, or easy.

“Absolutamente nada” — absolutely nothing — Hernandez said Sunday evening as she described the lack of information from local and state officials.

Erwin, a mostly working-class former railroad town of about 6,000 people where many are cradle-to-grave residents, is a “tight-knit, God-fearing Appalachian hometown,” according to city Mayor Glenn White.

But in the days after the storm, twice-daily local news conferences have sometimes turned into quiet standoffs with the families of the missing employees showing up with photos of their family members.

In addition to his nonpartisan part-time role as mayor, White teaches American government at the high school and was for years its assistant football coach. Before one news conference, White, 62, was weaving through a crowd, offering hugs and hellos to students and their parents; in some instances, he had taught both.

White said he had learned that one of his former students, Rosa Maria Andrade Reynoso, 29, was among those missing from the plastic plant. Andrade Reynoso was a “beautiful child,” White recalled.

Her husband showed up at one of the news conferences holding her picture and challenged the city’s response to the storm. “I want to know why help didn’t come to rescue the people there. People were calling for help, calling 911, calling their loved ones,” Rosa’s husband Francisco Javier Guerrero said during the news conference.

A resource-intensive rescue mission began before trapped plant workers began calling for help, Jimmy Erwin, director of the Unicoi County Emergency Management Agency, responded. But the local emergency response system was quickly overwhelmed, he said.

“When a disaster like this happens, we can’t predict it. We can prepare and prepare and prepare,” Erwin said. But “our services in Unicoi County were maxed; they used everything they had to save lives that day.”

Some members of the city’s growing Latino community have also struggled to access material in Spanish, making it more difficult to provide information local authorities requested to identify bodies, said Sherman Luna, president of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, in a statement.

White said the small local government was doing its best to respond to a crisis few could have imagined. Sometimes he learns information through his mayoral position that he can’t provide to his neighbors until they are released officially, he said.

“Boy, it’s a really tough place to be,” White said.

The day of the storm, water began covering the parking lot of the plant and adjacent service road, according to a statement from Impact Plastics. The plant lost power and employees were told — in English and Spanish — to go home, the statement said.

“While most employees left immediately, some remained on or near the premises for unknown reasons,” Impact Plastics said.

As the flooding continued, some employees boarded a truck owned by a neighboring company, the company said. An Impact Plastics employee said that he and other employees clung to the truck for at least two hours before it tipped over and five employees and a contractor went missing.

“Those who are missing or deceased, and their families are in our thoughts and prayers,” Gerald O’Connor, the company’s founder, said in the statement.

But some Impact Plastics employees and family members of those missing have complained that the company should have evacuated workers sooner.

Around 10:15 a.m. that day, Robby Jarvis, who works at the plant, said in an interview he asked a senior company official whether employees could leave.

The official told workers they could depart about 10 minutes later, Jarvis said, but by then it was already too late.

“We shouldn’t have been there that day at all,” Jarvis told The Washington Post.

Jarvis said he escaped the rising waters with “less than a minute left,” driving until his 2011 GMC truck got stuck in the mud and he began to walk. Eventually, a man who Jarvis calls his “hero” picked him up in a “jacked-up Dodge truck.”

“The employees were like family. They died so senselessly,” Jarvis said about those that went missing.

In a statement, Impact Plastics denied that workers were kept at the plant unnecessarily, adding that “at no time were employees told that they would be fired if they left the facility.”

By Sunday morning, Guadalupe Hernandez had become a frequent attendee of the local news conferences held by state and local emergency management agencies.

Carrying a large, laminated photo of her sister, Monica, Hernandez alternated between smiles and tears as she described her sister: a happy, loving mother who cheered at her sons’ baseball and football games; a beloved wife whose husband, Diego, was too devastated to speak; a younger sister whom Hernandez feared she would never see again.

Her sister has three sons, ages 7, 11 and 16. The older two knew she was missing, but not the youngest, Hernandez said.

She attended the news conference to pressure officials into listening to their concerns, she said. “We really don’t feel heard,” Hernandez said.

On Monday, Hernandez wouldn’t turn up for the evening news conference. According to a GoFundMe, Monica had died in the storm.

As of Tuesday afternoon, three of the six plant workers remain missing.