Displaying items by tag: ipex

MountainTrue, a Western North Carolina conservation group, has orchestrated the cleanup of thousands of pounds of PVC pipe flushed into the river by Tropical Storm Helene in September 2024. MountainTrue "spent over 44,000 labor hours solely on removing IPEX’s pipe from the river. Despite being 20 months from the storm, in the last 3 months alone, we have removed over 20,000 pounds. And yet, there are thousands of more pipes out there," the group said on its website. MountainTrue

County officials warned company of flood-debris risk posed by product that polluted French Broad River at Woodfin

This story was originally published by Asheville Watchdog.

ASHEVILLE — Nearly two years after floodwaters from Tropical Storm Helene pulled thousands of PVC pipes into the French Broad River, creating an ongoing environmental crisis and safety hazard, the corporate owner of a riverside plastics manufacturer has emerged from a period of silence with promises to improve how it stores its goods.

At the same time, emails newly obtained by Asheville Watchdog confirm that a Buncombe County official warned the company of the risk — and attempted to impose measures that could have made the site more secure — more than two years before Helene.

Brad Burton, a retired county floodplain administrator, aired his concerns earlier this year, describing correspondence he’d had with an engineer seeking a development permit on behalf of Woodfin’s Silver-Line Plastics and its owner, IPEX. The actual emails, which the Watchdog received this month after a public records request, support his recollection: the threat of Silver-Line product washing away from its outdoor storage area “is quite real during ‘the big one,’” he wrote in 2022.