ERWIN, Tenn. — Jerry and Sibrina Barrett haven’t spent a day without each other in 35 years. They worked long hours, never took vacations and enjoyed relaxing at home with their son. They had no idea a hurricane could reach them in the mountains of East Tennessee.
Living in Johnson City, they were hardly aware of it Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on September 26. The next day it rained heavily, so Sibrina arrived late for her once-a-week cleaning job at the Impact Plastics factory.
It was the last time they saw each other.
These days, Sibrina Barnett’s clothes are right where she left them: on her side of the bed. Her nail polish and shampoo are still in the bathroom. Her sweater still hangs on the back of a kitchen chair. Jerry knows he’ll have to move them one day, but not yet.
Helena causes catastrophic damagethe deadliest storm to hit the US mainland since Katrina in 2005. At least 221 people were killed. Many resembled Sibrina, who drowned in floods hundreds of miles inland. Behind each song was a person whose absence is painfully felt.
She was 17 and he was 20 when they met, and “35 years later we’ve never left each other’s sides,” Jerry said.
At first, they drove in Jerry’s Camaro and turned on the stereo, which “you could hear from a little ways away,” he jokes. They would “meet a group of friends or something, maybe park and hang out and talk” between her night shifts as a waitress.
‘We weren’t really wild people or anything. We were just a few young people trying to enjoy life a little,” he said.
A few years later she was pregnant. They married and built their future in a mobile home in the same community Jerry has known all his life.
“Me and her, growing up as kids, we didn’t really have much,” Jerry says. “We weren’t poor, but we didn’t wear Levi’s and Nikes and stuff either.”
They were both workaholics. He does HVAC repairs, but she took pride in being the main breadwinner. Six days a week she did cleaning work in the morning and in the evening she cleaned a private school. Customers loved her because she was meticulous; sometimes she would go through areas that had already been cleaned by another team until they met her standards.
“Work to make money, that’s how you get everything,” says Jerry. “She spoiled me and my son. That’s exactly what she did.”
Caimen is now 21, but the first thing visitors see in the home he shares with his father is a coffee table-sized resin model of characters from the anime show Dragonball Z. Dozens of smaller models fill a display case in the living room. There are more in the hallway. Sibrina ordered the figures and they would assemble them. Some came all the way from Japan and cost thousands of dollars.
“We decided to just enjoy it as we went, rather than trying to have a couple for retirement or old age,” Jerry said. Considering what happened, “I’m pretty glad we did that.”
Sibrina’s urn now stands in one of the display cases.
Sibrina hated driving in bad weather, so she went to Impact Plastics late on September 27. Rainwater often collected in the factory parking lot, but she called Jerry during her break to report that it was more than normal. Then she called again: the water had risen to the bottom of her car door. Jerry put away his tools and drove to get her, but the highway exit was blocked.
“Don’t worry if you even try to get in here,” she told him. “She said, ‘Just go home. Looks like I’m going to be here for a few hours.'”
What happened next, Jerry learned secondhand. As the water continued to rise, Sibrina and nine other employees retreated to the highest point: the bed of a tractor-trailer, loaded with giant rolls of plastic tubing. It wasn’t high enough. They called 911, but first responders were focused on another emergency: dozens of people trapped on the roof from a nearby hospital.
Then the truck overturned, sending the workers into the raging water. Some managed to float on the hose and were washed onto a pile of rubble. Sibrina was one of them six who died.
Many Americans have not considered the interior particularly vulnerable to severe weather, but places like Erwin, in a valley along the Nolichucky River, are. increasingly susceptible to disasters.
Jerry hung up the phone with Sibrina and went back to work. He had no idea how bad the flooding was and only learned she was missing hours later. He tried looking for clues in YouTube videos. Eight days passed before her body was found.
Jerry’s attorney, Luke Widener, said the workers relied on management to warn them of outdoor hazards because the factory had few windows. Some said they were not allowed to stop working until the power went out. The access road was then flooded.
Widener also represents Zinnia Adkins, who earned $11.50 an hour as a temporary worker at Impact Plastics. She is alive, she said, because a colleague held her tightly in the chest-deep water. She cannot swim and is terrified of spiders, which were everywhere on the surface of the water. Months later, she still sleeps on the couch because the bed feels too open and unsafe.
“A lot of good people lost their lives that day,” Adkins said. “It’s just a difficult memory for me to relive.”
The family of another employee, Johnny Peterson, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the company and its owner, Gerald O’Connor, saying the employees were fired with enough time to escape.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the state Office of Workplace Safety did just that investigations opened.