ERWIN, Tenn. — Jerry and Sibrina Barrett never spent a day apart over 35 years. They worked long hours, never took vacations, and liked to relax with their son at home. They had no idea that a hurricane could reach them in the mountains of East Tennessee.
Living in Johnson City, they were barely aware that Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on September 26. The next day it was raining heavily, so Sibrina went in late to her once-a-week cleaning job at the Impact Plastics factory.
It was the last time they saw each other.
Today, Sibrina Barnett’s clothes are just where she left them, on her side of the bed. Her nail polish and shampoo are still in the bathroom. Her sweater still hangs from the back of a kitchen chair. Jerry knows he will have to move them one day, but not yet.
Helene caused catastrophic damage, the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland since Katrina in 2005. At least 221 people were killed. Many were like Sibrina, drowning in floods hundreds of miles inland. Behind every number was a person whose absence is sorely felt.
She was 17 and he was 20 when they met, and “35 years later, we never left each other’s side,” Jerry said.
At first they would cruise in Jerry’s Camaro and blast the stereo, which “you could hear from a little way,” he jokes. They would “catch a group of friends or something, maybe park and sit around and talk” between her night shifts as a waitress.
“We wasn’t really wild people or anything. We was just a couple young people trying to enjoy life a little bit,” he said.
A few years later, she was pregnant. They got married and made their future, in a mobile home in the same community Jerry has known all his life.
“Me and her, both, growing up as kids, didn’t really have a lot,” Jerry says. “We wasn’t poor, but we wasn’t wearing Levi’s and Nikes and stuff either.”
They were both workaholics. He does HVAC repair, but she was proud to be the main breadwinner. Six days a week, she’d handle a morning cleaning job, then clean a private school in the evening. Clients loved her for being meticulous — she’d sometimes go back over areas already cleaned by a different crew until they met her standards.
“Work making money, that’s how you’re going to have anything,” Jerry says. “She spoiled me and my son. That’s exactly what she did.”
Caimen is 21 now, but the first thing visitors see in the home he shares with his dad is a coffee-table-sized resin model of characters from the Dragonball Z anime show. Dozens of smaller models fill a living room display case. Still more line the hallway. Sibrina ordered the figures and they would assemble them together. Some came all the way from Japan and cost thousands of dollars.
“We decided to kind of just enjoy it as we went, instead of trying to have a bunch for retirement or our older age,” Jerry said. Given what happened, “I’m kind of glad we did.”
One of the display cases now holds Sibrina’s urn.
Sibrina hated driving in bad weather, so she went in late to Impact Plastics on Sept. 27. Rainwater would often pool on the factory parking lot, but she called Jerry on her break to report it was higher than usual. Then she called again — the water had risen to the bottom of her car door. Jerry put his tools away and drove to get her, but the exit off the interstate was blocked.
“Don’t worry about even trying to get down in here,” she told him. “She said, ‘Just go home. It looks like I’m going to be here for a few hours.’”
What happened next, Jerry learned second-hand. As the water kept rising, Sibrina and nine other workers retreated to the highest point — the flatbed of a tractor-trailer loaded with giant coils of plastic tubing. It wasn’t high enough. They called 911, but first responders were focused on a different emergency: Dozens of people were trapped on the roof of a nearby hospital.
Then the truck flipped over, sending the workers into the raging water. Some managed to float on the tubing and were washed onto a pile of debris. Sibrina was one of six who died.
Many Americans haven’t thought of inland areas as being particularly vulnerable to severe weather, but places like Erwin, in a valley alongside the Nolichucky River, are increasingly prone to disasters.
Jerry hung up with Sibrina and went back to work. He had no idea how bad the flooding was, and didn’t learn she was missing until hours later. He tried searching for clues in YouTube videos. Eight days passed before her body was recovered.
Jerry’s lawyer, Luke Widener, said the workers relied on management to warn them of dangers outside because the factory had few windows. Some said they weren’t allowed to stop work until the power went out. By then the access road was under water.
Widener also represents Zinnia Adkins, who earned $11.50 an hour as a temporary employee at Impact Plastics. She’s alive, she said, because a co-worker gripped her tightly in the chest-deep water. She can’t swim and is deathly afraid of spiders, which were all over the water’s surface. 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 it’s a hard memory for me to relive.”
The family of another employee, Johnny Peterson, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the company and its owner, Gerald O’Connor, who said the workers were dismissed with enough time to escape.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the state’s workplace safety office have opened investigations.