State officials in Tennessee announced on Wednesday that they are looking into the business that owns a plastics plant where 11 employees were washed away by water caused by Hurricane Helene’s aftereffects.
In Erwin, a small rural Tennessee town, workers at the Impact Plastics business continued to work while the neighboring Nolichucky River surged due to rainfall. Many claimed they were denied the opportunity to evacuate in time to escape the storm’s effects. The plant didn’t close and send employees home until water began to flood the parking lot and the electricity went off.
A few of them never arrived.
The roaring seas took 11 individuals away, and only five were saved. There have been more than 160 confirmed deaths among them, two of which are in six states.
Since they were washed away on Friday in Erwin, where other people were also rescued off the top of a hospital, four more workers in the factory remain unaccounted for.
Leslie Earhart, a spokesman for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, stated on Wednesday that the local prosecutor has directed the bureau to look into claims pertaining to Impact Plastics.
In a statement, district attorney Steven R. Finney said he had instructed the bureau to investigate any possible criminal offenses connected to the “occurrences” on Friday.
While some employees were able to escape the factory by car, others became stuck on a congested route where the water level was high enough to wash cars away.
A mold changer at the facility named Jacob Ingram recorded himself and four other people waiting for help as bobbing cars passed past. “Just wanna say im lucky to be alive,” was the description he used when he later shared the footage on Facebook. Later on Saturday, social media users shared videos of the helicopter rescue.
In one video, Ingram is seen raising another victim while a green Tennessee National Guard chopper hovers above him and he stares down at the camera. In another, an evacuee is put in a harness by a soldier.
In a statement released on Monday, Impact Plastics stated that managers fired staff members on Friday “when water began to cover the parking lot and the adjacent service road, and the plant lost power.” The company added that it “continued to monitor weather conditions” on Friday.
Employee Robert Jarvis stated that the business ought to have permitted them to depart sooner. According to Jarvis, he attempted to leave the flood zone in his car, but only off-road vehicles were able to escape because the water level on the main road had risen too high.
“The water was coming up,” he stated. “A guy in a 4×4 came, picked a bunch of us up and saved our lives, or we’d have been dead, too.”
On the back of a truck that a bystander was driving, the 11 workers sought momentary solace, but Ingram said the truck eventually overturned after debris struck it.
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Ingram said he survived by clinging onto plastic pipes that were on the vehicle. He claimed that after floating for almost 800 meters, or half a mile, he and the other four people finally reached safety on a solid mound of debris.
According to Lisa Sherman-Nikolaus, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, the two individuals who have been verified dead at the plastics business in Tennessee are citizens of Mexico.
According to her, a large number of the victims’ families have set up online fundraisers to pay for the funeral and other expenditures.
According to a eulogy written by her daughter-in-law on her GoFundMe page, Bertha Mendoza was with her sister when the floods began, but they got separated.
