This coverage is made possible through a partnership between BPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
A year and a half after Helene flooded the IPEX plastic plant, there’s still a lot of PVC pipe in the French Broad River. On Tuesday, residents, officials and advocates gathered in the town of Woodfin to discuss the longstanding problem.
At the Riverside Rhapsody brewery, debris cleanup crews with MountainTrue estimated they had cleared nearly 7 million pounds of debris from regional waterways — much of which, they added, is plastic pipes. MountainTrue Clean Waters Director Hartwell Carsen said they’ve tried to contact the multinational company for support in the cleanup, but have been stonewalled.
“They refused to even sit down and talk to us about this,” said Carson from a wooden stage outside the brewery. “We're still happy to go out and clean up the mess. But what we don't want to do is start this over and have to pick up this mess all over again if the next flood comes.”
IPEX did not respond to a BPR request for comment. But a representative told the Asheville Watchdog in November: “We continue to actively support local cleanup efforts, and the site is being restored in line with modern county flood-proofing requirements to help mitigate future flooding risks.”
Carson acknowledged IPEX did help clean up along the immediate vicinity of the plant, but added that the company has not taken responsibility for logjams downstream. Carson, along with other staff at MountainTrue, are hoping to engage residents all along the French Broad Watershed to determine what the next steps could be to pressure IPEX.
The pipes are continually degrading, Carson said, which he worries is a looming public health crisis. “It's plastic breaking down in our water sheds that we don't want and wasn't there before Hurricane Helene,” he said. One Appalachian State University study, published last fall, pointed to signs of new and increased PFAS and other contamination linked to plastic.
IPEX is right across the street from the Riverside Rhapsody brewery. As Carson and other advocates spoke, the late-afternoon sun glinted off the stacks of PVC pipes and other plastic materials stored by the river — in pretty much the same location where they’d been before Helene hit.
The community is doing what it can with the tools it has at its disposal. After the storm, Woodfin adopted floodplain management rules stricter than Buncombe County’s. The town established a floodplain development permit applying to property owners within the FEMA-designated flood hazard area, requiring them to build 4 feet above base-flood elevation, in order to discourage investment in flood-prone structures.
However, Woodfin town manager Shannon Tuch said at the meeting the onus is really on IPEX to store its pipes higher up. According to Tuch, the town can’t make the company store its material higher than it’s already stored because the plant has been there for so long. The town also has little leverage to prevent future heavy industry making similar decisions near the floodplain. That’s part of a unique state rule against downzoning, which prevents local governments from reducing the development density or permitted uses for a property without permission from the property owner.
“A lot of other municipalities and other states can say we're just not going to allow outdoor storage in these flood-prone areas,” Tuch said. “In the state of North Carolina, we can't do that if there were previous rules that allowed it. That authority has been taken away from us.”
Tuch said she’s trying to stay hopeful and notes the situation is still much improved from what it was.
“As water sort of rises and falls, and currents kind of change, It'll displace material,” Tuch said. “I think we will continue to see pipe for a while, but it is looking a lot better.”
She said she’s been hoping that IPEX would eventually work with the town to seek cleanup funding, and said the town is actively looking for grants to continue that work.
