Did Factory Supervisors Cause Deaths Of Workers In Tennessee Helene Flood?

Managers at an Impact Plastics plant in Erwin, Tennessee
allegedly did not let employees leave as Hurricane Helene
floodwaters rose around them. This resulted in six deaths.

Another huge disaster, another case in which a major employer did not protect their workers from danger as they should have. 

At the Impact Plastics factory in Erwin, a small town in eastern Tennessee, employees kept working last Friday as waters in the nearby Nolichucky River rose.

Erwin is in the western foothills of the Appalachians, very close to the North Carolina border and right next to the tall mountains that collected two to three feet of rain from Hurricane Helene and a torrential rainstorm that immediately preceded the tropical system. 

They kept working into the power went out and water swirled into the factory's parking lot. Ultimately 11 factory workers and a contractor were swept away as they tried to escape and only five of them were rescued. The others are dead or presumed dead. Not all the bodies have been found. 

There's plenty of credible stories emerging there that plant managers wouldn't let people flee the rising flood waters until it was far too late. 

Here's part of a report in the Knoxville News Sentinel:

"Jacob Ingram has worked at Impact Plastics for near nearly eight months as a mold changer. It's a role, he said, that keeps him on his feet for the entire first shift.

As the waters rose outside, managers wouldn't let employees leave, he said. Instead, managers told people to move their cars away from the rising water. Ingram moved his two separate times because the water wouldn't stop rising. 

'They should've evacuated when we got the flash flood warnings, and when they saw the parking lot,' Ingram told Knox News. 'When we moved our card we should've evacuated then...we asked them if we should evacuate and they told us not yet, it wasn't bad enough. 

'And by the time it was bad enough, it was too late unless you had a four-wheel drive.'"

Ingram went on to tell the paper that he and 10 others fought their way through waist deep water when a semitruck driver called them over and helped them get on an open-bed truck, which was packed full of large flexible gas pipes.

A piece of debris smacked into the truck, knocking a woman off and sweeping her away. Then another piece of debris did exactly the same thing. Now two women were gone. 

Then the truck was hit by a much larger piece of debris, overturning the entire vehicle. Ingram thought to grab onto the plastic gas pipes, because he had seen some other pieces of the material floating downstream rather than sinking. 

Ingram and four other employees floated a half mile downstream until they hit a large pile of debris they could hang on to. An hour after that, a Tennessee National Guard helicopter plucked them from the pile to save them.  

We know one of the women who fell off the truck died. The body of Bertha Mendoza, 56, was found on September 29. Others from the truck are missing. 

Ingram managed to post some harrowing videos on Facebook that make it clear at least to me that employees of Impact Plastics should have been evacuated far sooner. 

Impact Plastics officials are circling the wagons on these damning accounts. As the Associated Press reports:

"Impact Plastics said in a statement Monday that it 'continued monitor weather conditions' Friday and that managers dismissed employees 'when water began to cover the parking lot and the adjacent service road, and the plant lost power.'"

But in a separate interview, Ingram told WVLT: "I actually asked one of the higher ups (if we should leave) and they told me, 'No, not yet.'. They had to ask someone before we was able to leave. Even though it was already above the doors of the cars."

 Ingram told WVLT that employees were made to stay on site for 15 to 20 minutes after the power went out. 

CBS News reported another employee, Robert Jarvis, gave exactly the same account as Ingram.  Jarvis also asked this question during an interview with television station WBIR: "Why would you make us stay there? Why would  you keep us there if you knew it was going to be bad, if you were monitoring it? Why were we still there?"

Well, my cynical but possibly accurate answer is some mucky muck with Impact Plastics somewhere was loathe to let their commodity, I mean human beings, get out of harms way. That is until the power failed, at which point the factory could no longer make revenue. By then, of course, it was too late for many of the employees to flee.  

Or, if I'm more charitable, the culture at Impact Plastics is that supervisors were tyrants, and there's not a lot of jobs in eastern Tennessee so employees were fearful of getting fired for, you know, trying to save their own lives. 

Notice how carefully Impact Plastics statements are worded. The statement said that while most employees left immediately, some remained on or near the premises. Yeah, because by then they were trapped by the raging floodwaters. 

The owner of a manufacturing plant near Impact Plastics had sent his employees home before they could become endangered and tried to drive a piece of heavy equipment to Impact Plastics in a rescue attempt. 

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is now looking into the allegations against Impact Plastics at the direction of a local prosecutor. 

EMPLOYEE DISASTER SAFETY OFTEN IGNORED

I admit part of all this might be Monday morning quarterbacking. I'm sure nobody in Erwin could have imagined things would get that bad that fast.  This is why in the same town, close to 60 people ended up trapped on the roof of a small local hospital as rapids raced around and through the building. 

Still, it fits a pattern in which too often, keeping employees safe during dangerous weather is just a drag on profits, sure to make shareholders unhappy. What's a few dead employees it allows you to buy a second yacht, right?

I've covered other examples like what allegedly happened at Impact Plastics. 

After a deadly tornado outbreak in December, 2021, employees of a Mayfield, Kentucky candle factory hit by a powerful tornado that night said managers would not let them leave to seek safer shelter ahead of the approaching twister. Nine people who were in the factory died in the storm. 

During that same, December, 2021 tornado outbreak, six people died in an Amazon distribution center in Illinois when a tornado hit. Employees there said they were not given the opportunity to seek safer shelter when tornado warnings blared.

In that same tornado, an Amazon driver said she was told by supervisors to keep driving instead of taking shelter despite the fact a tornado warning was in effect.

Also, legislators in Texas and Florida prevented municipalities from enacting ordinances that would have mandated water and rest breaks for outdoor workers toiling in those states' excessive summer heat. 

Which proves that lawmakers and Florida and Texas, and too many corporations, regard especially low wage workers that to them, it's no big deal if a worker dies because of dangerous weather. To them, these workers are not human beings. Just machines to replace when they are "defective" and break down in rough weather conditions. 

I really hope those responsible for the deaths at Impact Plastics are held accountable.