In early September, Cullen Beasley and two cleanup crew members hefted a tire out of the South Fork of the New River near Boone. Silt swirled around their waders in the calf-high, frigid water. They braced the tire against their hips and began a kind of reverse-hula hoop dance around it, shaking the mud loose before strapping it to one of their canoes.
The crew had waded a section of the Watauga River the week before. They found sheet metal, glass, home debris and other remnants left by Hurricane Helene when it flooded western North Carolina last September, items that the bigger, machine-powered removal crews didn't get the first time around.
“You’re pulling up the stuff that gets missed,” Beasley said. “Stuff that just got overlooked.”
This five-person squad is one of nine in the state. After Helene, contractors pulverized streams with heavy equipment to remove storm debris — causing a second ecological disaster in the storm’s wake. In July, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality provided nonprofit MountainTrue $10 million to restore these rivers over the next 18 months.
“No one is getting paid by weight,” Beasley said. “You’re not incentivized to fill your trailer with debris. We’re not taking trees. We’re not taking logs.”
The emphasis for Beasley and the team is improving water quality and making the river safe to recreate in. Along the riverbank, crewmember Harold Hill cuts at a corrugated pipe. He saws at the plastic with a serrated knife — the pipe’s presence in the New River probably predates the flood last September, but Hill doesn’t discriminate.
The storm robbed many folks of their livelihoods, and river cleanup provides replacement income as well as helps the streams. Farmers lost livestock. Guides and outfitters lost business when the rivers became unnavigable. Hill had just obtained his home inspector’s license when Helene flooded Boone.
“Everyone’s been scared off from the area,” Hill said. “We haven’t had the real estate adjustment that we were looking for.”
Clients have been tough for Hill to come by. But now, a year later, the storm also offered him a unique kind of employment, and one that has earned his team praise from the community.
“A lot of people, when they see someone on their property, they’ll come up and be like, ‘Hey, get off my land!’” Hill said. “[But they] see we’re here cleaning up — literally picking it all up by hand, and they’re just very appreciative of it.”
A targeted approach to unnatural disaster recovery
The program employs around 100 people. Soon, the crews will start bank stabilization through live staking — planting branch trimmings from native trees along the banks to reforest riparian buffers.
“We learned that where you have a healthy, vegetated riparian corridor, [it] fared far better in the storm, in terms of flooding, severity, damage and erosion than places that didn't have the native cover,” said Andy Hill, the Watauga Riverkeeper.
After Helene, contractors focused on big debris. Jon Stamper is the river cleanup coordinator for MountainTrue.
“We’re grateful for the heavy lifting that has been done by the Corps of Engineers and other contractors,” Stamper said. “It was necessary to remove the houses, the cars, the porches — the giant debris.”
Even though much of the work was necessary, the methodology sparked concerns among environmental groups.
“In many instances, we’ve seen excessive debris removal, particularly woody debris, to a point where we’re concerned that so much has been removed that it creates a secondary disaster,” Stamper said.
An out-of-state contractor who’s paid by the pound will prioritize big, heavy debris, vs. a local crew with canoes, according to Hill. He said he saw “a living, 100-year-old sycamore tree get taken down 100 feet from the river.”
Humans played a role both in creating the devastating flooding event and the ecological toll exacted in the aftermath. The burning of fossil fuels has warmed our atmosphere, allowing hurricanes to hold more moisture and causing more catastrophic flooding. However, nature wasted no time in remaking itself after the storm. While the crewmembers walked down the New, a pair of wood ducks, with their head feathers slicked back in a mullet, strolled down a riverine avenue of sycamores. Kingfishers chittered and swooped in loping, parabolic arcs. A rock that looked suspiciously like a trout shifted in the current.
Still, alongside the flora and fauna, tires still sit just below the surface. A large chunk of bridge lay on its side, obstructing part of the river. Even before the flood, millions of pounds of junk clogged N.C. rivers. Most of it was plastic waste, but odd treasures popped up from time to time. Antique bottles, white-wall tires and even old pull-tab beer cans. In the world of river cleanups, finding a babydoll head used to be a sign of good luck, akin to the four-leaf clover of trash removal. Helene changed that.
“Now, when you find dolls and children's toys and shoes, it's heavier,” Hill said. “It's not like, ‘Oh, fun. I found this toy someone lost here.’ Like, I found these pieces of someone's life that they lost, or these treasured memories.”
He described it as a mix of “fascinating and haunting.”
Appalachian State University biologist Mike Gangloff said the damage from excessive removals goes beyond what we can see from the surface.
“There was kind of a really unsupervised effort to go in and [...] clean up the rivers, and a lot of that work wound up being perhaps more detrimental than the initial impacts of the flooding from Helene,” Gangloff said.
The heavy machinery that removed trees, cars and other large debris, also decimated aquatic habitat. One of the species that Gangloff has worked closely with is North America’s largest amphibian: the hellbender.
At two and a half feet long, this giant salamander primarily resides under large rocks, snatching up anything that swims too close to its perpetual grin. It’s a gorgeous creature that Gangloff says has a big personality. “If you can just imagine The Incredible Hulk meets an axolotl, that’s a hellbender,” Gangloff said.
“I work with freshwater mussels, which have no head and only one foot,” Gangloff said. “Maybe my standards for charismatic megafauna are low, but I find Hellbenders to be a very endearing and charismatic animal.”
Hellbenders might be the top predator in their food chain, but Helene and the subsequent cleanup efforts have put these snot otters — as they’re affectionately known — at risk.
“The fact that we're not seeing those small and intermediate size classes is worrisome,” Gangloff said. “We expect that following the hurricane, that we're going to see some some dips in recruitment.”
Recruitment is biologist-speak for when critters mature to an age where they can reproduce. When that population shrinks, it can have longlasting impacts on future generations of a species. The storm and subsequent debris removal also altered hellbender habitat.
“The large den rocks that these animals are dependent on for breeding are no longer there. They're buried under sediment,” Gangloff said.
Gangloff said it could be a decade or longer before the current excavates the sediment around these rocks. Helene also flooded these rivers right after breeding season, washing away many of the eggs that the “dominant male” hellbenders were guarding.
Less invasive cleanup options — like the Boone river cleanup crew — can reduce the habitat destroyed — something that will be important for the next generation of hellbenders. They’re already a “species of concern” in North Carolina, and, in 2024, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service proposed listing it as endangered. Although Helene buried habitat and washed away egg clutches last fall, there are still some populations that hunkered down.
“We found a larval Hellbender,” Hill said. He held his thumb and forefinger up. “[It’s] about the size of the first joint on my thumb. A baby hellbender, or larval hellbender, means it was an egg before the storm made it through.”
Getting back on the river
Back on the New, the team continues walking this 2-mile section of the river as it runs toward Ashe County from Boone. Last week, the crew collected around 6,000 pounds of trash along a 5-mile stretch of Cove Creek, a tributary of the Watauga River.
There’s a lot of work to be done, but crewmember Cullen Beasley said business owners and residents want folks to know the region is still open for business:
“People are still — a year out — thinking, ‘Oh, I can’t go up to Boone. I can’t go to Asheville, because it was hit so hard by the storm,” Beasley said.
