The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has said it will launch a formal inquiry into the Impact Plastics facility in the eastern part of the state that employees say ignored warnings about Hurricane Helene and required them to report to work despite the incoming storm, leading to at least two deaths as four others remain missing.
Flood damage is seen along Mill Creek in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on September 30, 2024 in ... [+]
The state's criminal investigation agency Wednesday said it will look into the allegations and find out what happened on Friday, Sept. 27 as Helene barrelled toward eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina "to identify any potential criminal violations."
Employees said they were forced to report to work at the Impact Plastics factory in Erwin—a town about 50 miles north of Asheville, North Carolina—and weren't allowed to leave until the plant shut down due to a power outage, at which point the parking lot was already flooded.
Flood waters washed away 11 employees, the Associated Press reported, and five were rescued, including one man who said he survived by grabbing onto plastic pipes and floating about half a mile before he found safety.
Of the remaining six, two have been confirmed dead and four are still among the hundreds of people missing across the southeastern states hit hardest by Helene.
The families of employees Bertha Mendoza, 56, and Lidia Verdugo confirmed to NBC News that both died after being swept away from or falling out of vehicles that had come to rescue them.
Representatives for Impact Plastics did not immediately respond to Forbes request for comment Wednesday, but said in a statement to NBC News that workers were not told they had to stay and had time to leave before the flash flood.
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"I said 'Can we leave?' And the woman said ‘no,’" Robert Jarvis, one of the employees who survived the storm, told News 5 WCYB. "About 10 minutes later she came back and said 'y'all can leave.' It was too late. We have one way in, one way out. When they told us we could leave, the one way out was blocked off so we were stuck."
Parts of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina were slammed by historic flash flooding after Hurricane Helene hit Florida as a Category 4 hurricane and moved north. North Carolina’s governor Roy Cooper said entire communities "were wiped off the map" and at least 57 people died in and around Asheville. President Joe Biden will on Wednesday take an aerial tour of the Asheville damage but will not tour on the ground because of the extensive damage to roadways. Most of the city is without power or drinking water. More than 1.2 million people were still without power in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia on Wednesday morning, according to PowerOutage.US.
The death toll in North Carolina is expected to rise, Cooper said.
Businesses and historic sites in North Carolina are still discovering how much damage the storm inflicted. The Gilded Age-era Biltmore Estate in Asheville is closed indefinitely as damage to the building and extensive grounds is assessed. The nearby Biltmore Village, a walkable shopping district with stores and restaurants, was inundated after Helene passed through. In the small town of Spruce Pine, two major quartz mines that provide essentially all of the ultra-pure quartz for semiconductor production across the world have shut down and don’t know when they’ll reopen.