Bracing himself against the current in waist-deep water, Clancy Loorham wrestles a broken length of PVC pipe from the rocky bottom of the French Broad River and peers inside.
“I got a catfish in the pipe,” the 27-year-old with wispy beard and mustache shouted to fellow cleanup workers floating nearby in rafts, canoes and kayaks piled with plastic pipe and other human-made detritus. “He’s right here. I’m looking him in the eyes!”
It’s been just a year since floodwaters from the remnants of Hurricane Helene washed these pipes out of a nearby factory with such force that some pieces ended up in Douglas Lake, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) away in Tennessee. But they’re already slick with algae and filled with river silt — and creatures.
Helene killed more than 250 people and caused nearly $80 billion in damage from Florida to the Carolinas. In the North Carolina mountains, rains of up to 30 inches (76 centimeters) turned gentle streams into torrents that swept away trees, boulders, homes and vehicles, shattered century-old flood records, and in some places carved out new channels.
In the haste to rescue people and restore their lives to some semblance of normalcy, some fear the recovery efforts compounded Helene’s impact on the ecosystem. Contractors hired to remove vehicles, shipping containers, shattered houses and other large debris from waterways sometimes damaged sensitive habitat.
“They were using the river almost as a highway in some situations,” said Peter Raabe, Southeast regional director for the conservation group American Rivers.
Conservationists found instances of contractors cutting down healthy trees and removing live root balls, said Jon Stamper, river cleanup coordinator for MountainTrue, the North Carolina-based nonprofit conducting the French Broad work.
“Those trees kind of create fish habitats,” he said. “They slow the flow of water down. They’re an important part of a river system, and we’ve seen kind of a disregard for that.”
The Army Corps of Engineers said in a statement that debris removal missions “are often challenging” due to the large volume storms can leave behind across a wide area. The Corps said it trains its contractors to minimize disturbances to waterways and to prevent harm to wildlife. North Carolina Emergency Management said debris removal after Helene took into account safety and the environment, and that projects reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency met that agency’s standards for minimizing impact.
Hannah Woodburn, who tracks the headwaters and tributaries of the New River as MountainTrue’s Upper New Riverkeeper, said waters are much muddier since Helene, both from storm-related vegetation loss and from heavy machinery used during cleanup.
She said it’s been bad for the eastern hellbender, a “species of special concern” in North Carolina. It’s one of only three giant salamanders found in the world, growing up to 2 feet (61 centimeters) long and weighing more than 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms).