FEMA botched Hurricane Helene cleanup in North Carolina, experts claim

POLK COUNTY, North Carolina — The small section of forest before me looked as though it was clear-cut. The ground was flat and treeless, covered in a thin layer of jumbled sticks and leaves.

This region, a wetland formed by beavers near the South Carolina border, was flooded last September by Hurricane Helene. But it wasn’t the storm that razed the forest. It was the machines that came after. They were part of a hurricane cleanup effort, bankrolled by the federal government, that many environmental experts believe went very, very wrong.

Helene hit North Carolina in late September last year, dumping historic amounts of rain that damaged thousands of homes, killed more than 100 people, and littered rivers with debris including fallen trees, building fragments, and cars. In the months since, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has sponsored an enormous cleanup effort in western North Carolina. It focused, among other things, on clearing debris from waterways for public safety. Storm debris left in rivers and streams can create jams that make them more likely to flood in the future.

In some parts of the state, however, cleanup crews contracted by the federal government removed much more than just dangerous debris. According to several state biologists, environmental experts, and my own observations from a recent trip to the area, contractors in some regions cleared live trees still rooted in the ground, logs that were in place well before the storm, and other natural features of the habitat that may not have posed a risk to public safety.

These experts also told me that the Army Corps of Engineers — a government agency tasked by FEMA to oversee debris removal in several counties — failed to coordinate with the state wildlife agency to minimize harm to species that are in danger of extinction. Those include federally endangered freshwater mussels, which are essential for their role in keeping rivers clean, and hellbenders, iconic giant salamanders that the federal government says are imperiled.

In some stretches of rivers and streams, the contractors ultimately did more harm to the environment than the storm itself, the experts said. The many scientists and environmental experts I spoke to say the main problem is the compensation system for companies involved in disaster recovery: Contractors are typically paid by the volume of debris they remove from streams, creating an incentive for them to take more debris than is necessary.

That’s what happened in this partially destroyed beaver wetland, according to Hans Lohmeyer, the stewardship coordinator with an environmental group called Conserving Carolina, who took me to the wetland in June. “They just removed everything,” Lohmeyer told me, pointing at the bald patch of forest where he said live trees that had survived Helene once stood. “It’s more advantageous for them to remove it all because they’re getting paid for it.”

The damage from Helene was relatively minor here, Lohmeyer said. And he claims that debris churned up by the storm didn’t pose a serious flood risk. The wetland is a large natural area with few homes or buildings and plenty of room for floodwaters, he said. Yet contractors still leveled parts of the forest with excavators, clearing important wildlife habitat.

“We’ve just seen tons of excessive debris removal,” said Jon Stamper, river cleanup coordinator with MountainTrue, a nonprofit that’s being funded by the state to clean up debris in smaller waterways. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many reports and phone calls and public outcries we’ve had about this.” Plenty of contractors have done a good job, he said, but many seem to be “simply grabbing anything they can to make more money.”

Cleanup contractors have faced scrutiny before. In the months after deadly floods swept through southeastern Kentucky in 2022, a report by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting claimed that debris-removal contractors — including AshBritt and its subcontractors, one of the firms contracted by the Army Corps in North Carolina — took trees they shouldn’t have and ignored complaints from residents, prompting lawsuits. (At least some of the claims against the company have since been dismissed, court records show.)

Then there’s the risk of climate change: Rising global temperatures are only likely to increase the need for debris removal, by making natural disasters like floods more frequent and severe in some areas. That will come at a steep cost to public safety and to the economy — Helene’s costs have so far amounted to nearly $80 billion. And without better cleanup systems in place, it will be especially devastating for the wild animals that need intact ecosystems to survive.

Scientists say government contractors were careless and likely killed scores of endangered species

I initially traveled to North Carolina for a story about how damage from Hurricane Helene is pushing some already rare animals closer to extinction. For endangered salamanders like the Hickory Nut Gorge green — a striking amphibian with black skin and splotches of green — forest loss caused by Helene’s floodwaters is a new and urgent threat.

But as I spoke with experts for the story, they told me that a bigger problem for animals in some rivers and streams has actually been the cleanup after the storm.

To clean up debris from Helene, counties in western North Carolina either enlisted help from the Army Corps of Engineers — which then hired contractors — or contracted debris removal companies themselves. In both cases, FEMA provided financial support.

According to three state biologists and several other experts familiar with North Carolina’s stream ecology, it was debris removal contractors working under the Army Corps that created the worst environmental problems.

AshBritt, one of the Corps’ big contractors, managed debris removal in Polk County, where I saw the partially deforested beaver wetland. I also visited a stream west of Hendersonville called Little River that was cleaned up by a different Army Corps contractor.

In Little River, cleanup contractors severely damaged the stream ecosystem, which is home to the world’s highest density of the endangered Appalachian elktoe mussel, said Luke Etchison, a biologist at the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC), the state wildlife agency. Giant excavators drove over the riverbed, almost certainly crushing elktoes and burying rocks used by hellbenders, the largest salamanders in North America, he said.

The contractors also left parts of the bank bare and almost certainly removed natural habitat features that were not a flood hazard, according to Etchison.

On a warm and sunny morning in June, Etchison and his colleague Michael Perkins, another state biologist, visited Little River for an informal survey. I tagged along. The river was shallow and calm with a rocky bottom and flanked by shrubs and trees. It looked like a pretty typical river — and it was beautiful. We threw on wetsuits, goggles, and snorkels and waded into the cold water.

It was only when we swam around with our heads tilted to the riverbed that I started to see some of the impacts Etchison was describing: crushed elktoe shells, broken rocks, and hardly any of the debris that crayfish and hellbenders use, such as old logs and large, flat boulders. Perhaps most telling was that we saw fewer than two dozen elktoe mussels that day. Past surveys at this exact site turned up several hundred of them, Etchison said.

Perkins said that people often have the perception that debris removal is “charitable work,” but it’s not. “This was a taxpayer-funded endeavor,” he said, and some contractors “are making millions by removing not just woody debris but also thousands of live, healthy or otherwise undamaged trees and vegetation that pose no risk to life or infrastructure.”

In another river, known as the West Fork French Broad, a technician working with NCWRC told me that he saw similar signs of damage. Rocks that hellbenders live under were fractured, covered in sediment, or pushed into the riverbed, he said. From his experience walking the stream before and after debris removal, he also claims that contractors removed habitat features that were not a flood risk — either because they were here before the storm or not obstructing the channel. “I don’t know what’s a more telling sign that something is not a threat to a future flood than something that was in the river before this flood and in the exact same place after,” the technician told me.

Etchison and two other state biologists allege that the Army Corps made little effort to coordinate with NCWRC to avoid harming threatened and endangered species. Once they learned that debris removal was underway, NCWRC sent Army Corps and other disaster recovery officials a one-page document with guidance on how to minimize harm to the ecosystems, such as by leaving stumps in place and, when possible, driving machines on the bank and not in the riverbed.

The agency also produced detailed maps that marked areas with rare species, including the section of Little River that I visited. In those areas, the maps say, contractors should avoid running heavy machinery in the stream bed. NCWRC biologists asked the Corps to coordinate with them if they’re clearing debris from rivers in those areas.

“We gave them [the Army Corps] all of this information and they ignored it,” Lori Williams, a conservation biologist and hellbender expert at NCWRC, told me. “They were operating in these rivers, treating them like highways, driving up and down, crushing everything.”

Early one morning I talked to a couple workers who were clearing debris from a stream north of Asheville. They were both from out of state and hadn’t heard any complaints about their work. Locals were happy they were cleaning up, they told me.

But I also heard another story. A man named Nathan Turpin, who briefly worked for a subcontractor of AshBritt doing debris removal, told me that he left the job, in part, because of the focus on “production.”

“I ended up walking off the job just for the fact that we were pressured to produce a lot of yardage of debris every day to make a profit,” Turpin, who said he drove a dump truck, told me. “There were a lot of plants and trees I saw that were being destroyed for no reason.”

Who deserves blame — and are they accepting it?

No single company or organization is at fault for the mismanaged debris removal, experts told me. Cleaning up involves a messy constellation of state and federal government agencies, private contractors and subcontractors, and independent monitors that audit the work. There are so many people involved that it’s difficult to figure out who does what — and who’s paying for it. And when you start asking questions, everyone involved tends to just point at each other.

FEMA declined an interview request. In a written statement, FEMA told Vox that North Carolina coordinated with federal and state agencies to provide guidance for debris removal to counties and the Army Corps including measures to minimize environmental impacts. Those measures include using high-profile machines in riverbeds, so they don’t bottom out, and filling heavy machinery with biodegradable hydraulic fluid, FEMA said in the statement.

The details of that guidance are not clear. FEMA directed my follow-up questions to the Army Corps, which declined to share the environmental guidance that contractors were given.

The Army Corps similarly declined an interview request, though it shared detailed comments in response to our reporting. The Army Corps told Vox that its contractors and subcontractors are required to follow strict environmental rules to minimize environmental harm — though again, it’s not clear what those rules are.

The agency also said that it does not tolerate over-clearing of debris. “Contractors that exceed limits receive warnings or are removed from the job,” according to the statement. Dave Connolly, chief of public affairs for the Corp’s Wilmington District, said the agency has not issued warnings or removed contractors. The agency also said it “constantly” has quality assurance specialists on site to verify that contractors are removing only what they’re tasked to remove.

Some environmental experts I spoke to said the Army Corps didn’t have sufficient oversight over their contractors or subcontractors to know whether or not they were over-extracting debris.

The Army Corps also told me that “wildlife biologists and environmental experts have been involved throughout the operation, particularly in areas where endangered species are known to exist.” That ensures cleanup has a minimal impact on wildlife and their habitats, the statement said.

The state biologists I spoke to said that at least some of the wildlife biologists hired by debris removal contractors have little knowledge of the local endangered and threatened species.

The Army Corps noted that they shared “mapping data” with the state wildlife agency that’s meant to indicate where contractors would be working. According to the Corps, that gave NCWRC the opportunity to advise workers when debris removal is happening in ecologically sensitive areas. The agency said it would “attempt to adjust the debris removal plan in that area, and/or allow wildlife specialists the opportunity to temporarily relocate any discovered wildlife until debris removal in that specific location is complete.”

The state biologists I spoke to said Army Corps contractors showed little indication that they would adjust a debris removal plan to spare rare animals. And often, the state agency wasn’t aware of where the cleanup was happening because the mapping data was so hard to parse. “We were not given the chance to locate and move animals out of harm’s way,” Williams said.

Although AshBritt declined to comment on the record, the Army Corps defended its work with the company: “USACE’s decision to contract with AshBritt was made after a thorough evaluation of their capabilities, experience, and past performance in emergency response operations,” the Corps said in its statement. “There is no evidence to suggest AshBritt is unable to successfully fulfill its contracts.”

(See here for a more detailed response from the Army Corps to our reporting.)

Most of the damage from cleanup is already done. Scientists are looking to the next natural disaster.

Killing federally threatened and endangered species, like elktoes and another mussel variety known as longsolids, is typically a crime — because they’re protected by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). And that’s why some environmental advocates have suggested to me that debris removal in certain regions, such as Little River, may have been illegal.

I raised this with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the ESA. Gary Peeples, the acting supervisor for the Asheville Field Office, told me that, at least so far, debris removal is not violating the act, even if it’s killing endangered species.

This is a bit wonky, but: Typically, the USFWS consults with federal agencies — in this case, FEMA, because it’s financing the Corps’s work — before taking actions that harm endangered species. Those agencies then receive what’s called an incidental take statement, which creates an exception and essentially legalizes harm to federally protected species (assuming their actions don’t jeopardize the entire existence of the species). In an emergency, however, consultation happens while the action is already underway, Peeples said. That’s what happened here.

In the coming weeks, he said, FEMA is supposed to report on how they’ve impacted endangered species, at which point the service will issue the agency a take statement. FEMA and the Army Corps have been “diligently monitoring and documenting” the potential impacts of debris removal on threatened and endangered species, the Army Corps told me in its statement.

“From the legal standpoint, we must remember that the Endangered Species Act does allow for harmful impacts to species,” said Peeples. Still, he added, the impact of debris removal “pains” him. “Not only am I a biologist who works here, but I’m a resident who lives here and recreates in these areas,” he said. “It is grossly unfortunate how things have played out.”

Beyond raising alarm among local environmental experts, the cleanup has also prompted significant public outcry. And those complaints haven’t gone unnoticed.

In May, a number of state residents, including environmental advocates, met with Rep. Chuck Edwards — a Republican who represents western North Carolina — to express their concerns. Afterward, Edwards announced a new agreement with FEMA and the Army Corps “to improve accountability and transparency” in the cleanup process. Under that agreement, landowners can mark important trees and other landscape features with flags. “These flagged areas will not be disturbed until the property owner, the county, and USACE [US Army Corps of Engineers] engage in a consultation,” according to the announcement. Edwards also uploaded maps of where the Army Corps is working to his website.

It’s not clear whether this flagging approach has worked, or whether it was simply too little, too late. Edwards’s office declined an interview request and, along with FEMA and the Army Corps, did not respond to a request to see the agreement.

The opportunity now, experts told me, is to make future debris removal better — to learn from what environmental advocates call egregious mistakes.

There are really only two things that those advocates want. The first is to change the incentive structure in the disaster recovery industry. Paying contractors by volume is “the biggest problem,” Williams, the state biologist, told me. “It puts a dollar sign on literally every leaf, stick, twig, [and] blade of grass out there. That’s how these people are making money.” Instead, Williams, Lohmeyer, and other experts recommended paying contractors by linear foot — meaning the more distance they cover, the more money they make — or by job. A job might be, say, clearing debris from a particular creek or property.

The other key ask is that the Army Corps and disaster recovery companies coordinate with regional environmental experts — the people, like Williams and Etchison, who typically know the ecology of the rivers far better than contractors.

State biologists are not asking to stop or even slow debris removal. Just to take more care in regions known to contain incredibly rare creatures.

Where cleanup has gone right(ish), hellbenders still lurk

In some regions of North Carolina river, cleanup left a much smaller scar. According to Etchison and some of his colleagues, waterways in counties that opted to work with a contractor called Southern Disaster Recovery (SDR) instead of Army Corps contractors were generally left in better shape. SDR tended to listen to state biologists, he told me. “They’ve done a pretty good job coordinating with us,” Etchison said.

For example, when Etchison asked an SDR subcontractor to avoid removing specific bits of habitat, such as a log home to freshwater mussels, the contractor listened, Etchison said. That may be because SDR and their subcontractors are paid by linear foot to remove debris (though they’re paid by volume to haul it away). As a result, Etchison said, there’s still lots of large woody debris and big rocks for hellbenders to hide and nest under.

After the survey in Little River, I drove with Etchison and Perkins to the banks of Mills River, which was cleaned up by SDR. This river, Etchison told me, was a good place to find hellbenders — in part, he said, because cleanup didn’t wreck the waterway. There are still plenty of logs and bramble on the bank and big rocks for hellbenders to hide and nest under. “If you have to do it, it was done the right way,” Etchison said of debris removal here.

We slid down the bank and stepped into the cold water, which was waist deep and moving quickly. The water was murky, so we couldn’t see the bottom, making walking tough and finding a hellbender tougher.

Etchison and Perkins used their hands and feet to feel around for the kinds of rocks that these Hulkish salamanders love — large and flat, with a gap underneath that they can squeeze into. When they found such a rock, Perkins would position a seine in front of it and Etchison would lift the rock up. Then we’d check the net to see if a salamander had entered. We did this for more than an hour, catching mostly leaves and mud and a few crayfish and small fish.

But eventually, somehow, this approach worked. Etchison lifted up a small slab of concrete on the riverbed and when Perkins lifted up the net, there was a squirming hellbender.

These animals are famously ugly-cute: slimy brown with wrinkly skin, tiny eyes, and pudgy little hands. They look like something out of a Miyazaki film.

Perhaps worrying about the future of unconventionally attractive animals like this is not a priority for everyone in the wake of disaster. Biologists have a hard time rallying the public around salamanders, especially compared to animals of the large and fluffy variety.

Yet it’s the hellbenders and the mussels and the crayfish and the fish that make these ecosystems so unique and healthy enough to support our own needs. Mussels clean the water. Crayfish break down debris. Hellbenders tell us when rivers may be polluted.

While traveling in North Carolina I was constantly reminded that natural disasters are disasters for these animals, too. And that’s troubling for North Carolina’s utterly epic array of creatures because many regions — including the American Southeast — will likely face more flooding in the decades to come as the planet warms. The least we can do is be smart about how we react to it.

“We know that these types of high-velocity flooding events are going to continue to happen,” Stamper, of MountainTrue, said. “It’s devastating to watch these contractors and the Corps of Engineers create a secondary disaster. We don’t want to see it happen elsewhere.”