ERWIN, Tenn. — With shaking hands, Daniel Delgado kissed a photo of his wife, Monica Hernandez, before lighting a candle in a supermarket parking lot. Family members hugged photos printed on poster board, some collapsing in tears as search helicopters flew overhead toward the hills.
Days later, six workers at a plastics factory disappeared under rising water caused by Hurricane Heleneloved ones and supporters have gathered for vigils in front of churches, a high school and a supermarket to honor them.
Most evenings, prayers are said in Spanish over rosary beads: “Mary, mother of Jesus, intercede and help us find them.”
The storm that claimed his life at least 227 people spanning six states, quickly overwhelmed Erwin, an Appalachian town of about 6,000, on September 27 and resulted in the rescue of more than 50 people by helicopter from the roof of a submerged hospital.
The scar it left has been especially devastating within the small Latino community that makes up a disproportionate number of workers at the plant: Four of the six workers wiped out were Mexican American.
Two state investigations have been launched into Impact Plastics and into whether the company should have done more to protect workers as the danger grew.
The victims’ families say they still can’t comprehend the ferocity of the storm, or why their loved ones didn’t leave the factory sooner to avoid the raging floods.
“We ask: why? Why did she go to work? Why did she stay?” Hernandez’s sister Guadalupe Hernandez-Corona said through an interpreter after a vigil on Thursday evening. “We’re all still wondering.”
Impact Plastics president Gerald O’Connor has said that no workers were forced to stay on the job and that they were evacuated for at least 45 minutes before the massive force of the flood hit the industrial park.
“There was time to escape,” he said in a video statement, adding that he was one of the last to leave the factory after making sure everyone was gone. The National Guard rescued five employees by helicopter.
But surviving workers say the evacuation started too late. Some held on to the pipes of flatbed trucks for up to six hours as they frantically called 911 and said goodbye to loved ones. Some saw colleagues being carried away by the current.
Emergency officials said resources were scarce as a rescue operation was underway more than a mile downstream at Unicoi County Hospital.
Normally 2 feet (about 60 centimeters) deep, the Nolichucky River rose to a record height of 9.1 meters that day, at a rate of more than 5.3 million liters per second, which is twice as much as Niagara Falls.
The plastics factory was open even as local schools closed their doors. Robert Jarvis, who started his shift at 7 a.m., said employees continued to work while receiving telephone warnings about possible flooding. Many stayed even after management asked them to move cars because six inches of water had collected in the parking lot.
Workers were eventually told to evacuate after the power went out and the water rose about a foot high, he said. Jarvis said he only survived because he was pulled into the bed of someone’s lifted truck, which had to drive along an off-road road for three hours.
Jarvis said the six lost colleagues were “like family” and he feels a responsibility to them to share his experiences.
“They shouldn’t have been at work that day,” he said. “None of us should have to do that.”
Annabel Andrade, whose daughter Rosy Reynoso is still missing, said evacuation routes were insufficient. And O’Connor’s statement angered her: “He left safely. Why was he able to save himself and leave these other employees behind?
Alma Vazquez, a Catholic Charities case manager who met some of the lost workers decades ago after first moving into Erwin at a migrant farm camp, said the deaths were “completely preventable.”
“People didn’t have to die where they worked,” she said.
Many of the victims had close ties to Erwin. The country is more than 90% white, and according to Census Bureau figures, about 8% of the population, about 500 people, identifies as Hispanic in 2022, up from 3.8% a decade earlier.
Lidia Verdugo, Bertha Mendoza and Hernandez, all Mexican Americans, lived in the community for 20 years. Hernandez started working at Impact Plastics shortly after arriving, her sister said.
The most recent arrival at Erwin, eight years ago, was 29-year-old Rosy Reynoso. She and her husband had just moved into their own apartment after living with her mother, whom she still visited daily. Her 10-year-old son is in Mexico and she was working to bring him here, Andrade said.
Two white plastics workers, Sibrina Barnett and Johnny Peterson, were also swept away.
There was frustration within the Spanish-speaking community over state officials’ failure to immediately send translators to help disaster survivors, and families became even more upset when workers answering phone lines for missing person tips spoke only English.
When a director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency was asked why these resources were not available until well over a day after the search, he said they were not aware of the size of the area’s Spanish-speaking population.
“It was very heartbreaking for them to hear that,” said Ana Gutierrez, organizer of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, which helps families.
Gutierrez also said families felt their plight was overshadowed by the hospital rescue, which made news the day it happened while the factory workers did not.
Some solace has been found at nightly vigils, where people prayed in both Spanish and English and lit candles as the workers’ names were read aloud.
Erwin Mayor Glenn White said he was moved to see the crowd, a mix of Hispanic and white residents, coming together in solidarity and grief.
“We are one people. Our nation’s motto is, ‘Out of many, come one,'” White said.
At Saint Michael The Archangel, where the vast majority of the 225 parishioners are Hispanic, families gathered to comfort each other and eat Mexican pozole as donations of water, food and other supplies were delivered.
Andrade’s family was one of the first Spanish families to settle in Erwin in the 1980s. When her 19-year-old son died in 2017, she became the first in the community to lay a relative to rest here, in the cemetery next to St. Michael, rather than sending the body back to Mexico for burial.
Reynoso’s husband, who remains hopeful her body will be found, initially planned to bury her in Mexico but later decided that her body, if found, would remain in Tennessee. ‘You have built a life here; your family will be here,” Andrade told him. “This is your home.”
Engraved Spanish prayers adorn the cemetery’s headstones, which Andrade sees as a symbol of the life Spanish immigrants built in America.
“It’s a way to keep them with us,” she said.
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Associated Press journalists Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Tennessee, and Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia, contributed to this report.