Just off Gerton Highway, Donovan Green and her crew of eight are cleaning up debris from Hickory Creek. They work for the environmental group MountainTrue.
The creek runs through the nearby town of Gerton and a small portion of Bat Cave. Both towns were devastated by Hurricane Helene more than a year ago.
It's a beautiful, sunny, fall Wednesday in November. Each person is equipped with shovels, crowbars, gloves, boots, buckets, trash cans and other hand tools.
Green, who used to work as a regional program coordinator for REI’s outdoor guided program, has led this team since August.
She said that although Hurricane Helene happened more than a year ago, debris cleanup is far from over.
“Folks think because it's been a year, there must have been so much cleaning done, but in reality that’s not the case,” Green said.
Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers removed more than four million cubic yards of debris across Western North Carolina, MountainTrue officials say its eight teams across Western North Carolina are pulling out about 10,000 pounds of trash everyday from waterways.
Each day looks a little different for Green and her crew. When they arrive on site, they start with a team meeting. Green lays out the game plan, including what areas to target and who will take each spot.
Crew members use their tools to dig debris out of the ground and pick out each piece of trash by hand. They fill a bucket to the brim, haul it up the creek bank and toss the debris into a nearby dumpster then head back down to do it all again. This goes on for eight hours a day.
Green said her crews are finding home furniture, metal sheets, tin roofs and plenty of PVC pipe. She said that sometimes she is surprised at how debris can show up anywhere along the riverbanks.
“We looked up and there was a big, beautiful tree and some other things that were just being held up by a lip of tires that were still embedded in the riverbank because that’s how they built it in the first place,” Green said. “Now we have to pause because we don’t want these tires to be here. But if we continue to remove this, that is going to greatly impact something that is already here.”
In mid-July, MountainTrue received a $10 million grant from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. That was followed by $750,000 in late October from the WNC Recovery and Resiliency Fund grant through the Center for Disaster Philanthropy’s Trust Foundation. The money has allowed the group to expand its regional debris cleanup and river restoration work.
The environmental nonprofit work includes selecting cleanup sites, training crews on safety and coordinating volunteers. Funding from the NCDEQ has allowed the organization to employ 79 workers.
One of the new hires is Jenni Brown. She used to work as a hairstylist but felt that profession wasn’t calling to her anymore. Helping remove debris seemed like a better fit.
“It just really spoke to me to, one, help clean up nature because she had so many scars from all of that,” Brown said. “And then, helping the community because so many people were put out.”
She started volunteering with the group a year ago and has been working for them officially since the end of August.
“I really like it, but it is very physically taxing,” Brown said. “It can also be very emotional sometimes.”
The emotional side of debris cleanup is something fellow crew member Matt Willing shares. He previously worked for a tree company in Hendersonville before joining MountainTrue in August.
“Those first few days, you kind of hate to say it, but you get a little numb to the devastation,” Willing said. “But every now and then you’ll find something, a little trinket or something that belonged to somebody, and that’s when it sinks in what we’re really doing.”
Throughout the day, crew members remove debris while making sure to avoid injuring themselves or harming the environment.
Other environmental groups have raised concerns about how cleanup is done, according to the Citizen Times. The concerns have made it a delicate balance in deciding what debris should be removed or left in the waterways, according to Green.
She remembers having to make a difficult decision to remove a colony of mice that had made a piece of debris their home.
“We’ve found little mouse houses, which is really cute, and they scatter everywhere,” Green said. “You feel bad, but you don’t want this huge air mattress wrapped around three trees to be a home for a bunch of things because it’s just going to contribute to the microplastics that are leaking into our waterways.”
Green and her crew removed about 3,800 pounds of trash from the site in Gerton over the span of close to two weeks. They’re now working their way upstream to clean up additional areas, and they plan to keep going until the grant money runs out.
