LENOIR, N.C. – The remnants of Hurricane Helene still litter roadsides, riverbanks and yards in western North Carolina as crews continue collecting thousands of pounds of storm debris.
A few blocks from downtown Lenoir, a growing pile of tree debris sits in an empty lot.
It’s one of several sites in Caldwell County where crews are working from sunrise to sunset. Every day they drop off 90 to 100 truckloads of trees that were brought down during Helene.
“We’re looking at consistently having anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 cubic yards a day brought into our couple sites that we have,” Caldwell County Manager Donald Duncan said.
He says they’ve picked up about 275,000 cubic yards of tree debris since the storm.
“If you’re familiar with [Bank of America] stadium, and you made a giant bowl, [the debris] would overflow the stadium,” Duncan said. “That’s how much debris just in one county... that doesn’t count any of the stream debris, which is probably two or three times as much in every county.”
Duncan admits it’s been a slow process. He says they’re competing for resources, such as trucks and drivers, with four other states and with counties in western North Carolina.
“And because of our narrow roads, steep terrain, you can only use small trucks,” he said.
On top of that, they’re struggling to find more plots large enough to stack the tree trunks, branches and limbs.
“The problem is, we don’t have land that’s available, that’s flat, that can be accessed in all rain conditions or all weather conditions,” Duncan said. “How the taxpayers are going to fund that? If it’s a good piece of property and it’s not in a floodplain, it’s probably in use as a field or a factory.”
Duncan also worries snowy or icy conditions during winter could add to the challenges.
“A small winter storm could… exacerbate what we already have significantly,” he said. “It would delay debris pickup until we can get the roads clear again.”
Despite all of this, Duncan says they’re determined to remove every piece of tree debris from yards and along streams.
“And we’ll start mulching this up… and basically compacting it to a size where it’s more manageable,” he said. “And we can move that mulch and turn it into basically a product that we can use.”
He says some of the mulch will be used to stabilize slopes at the county landfill.
“A secondary use when we have a lot of nurseries here,” Duncan said. “A lot of growers of trees, shrubbery, and we’ll give that to them for free if they need to use it for the nurseries as well.”
As Caldwell and other western counties continue to pick up from Helene, he predicts they still have a long way to go before they’re ready to repurpose debris.
“We have more concerns about landslides that will happen in the future,” Duncan said.“We have more concerns about landslides that will happen in the future,” Duncan said. “We’ll be in debris management mode for a long, long time. And the streams, I think, are going to take much longer.”
Duncan thinks collection operations at the site near downtown Lenoir will continue for another six months. But he hopes to have most of the debris picked up by the end of the year.
They’re also expecting to open up four more collection sites, which Duncan says will help speed the cleanup, since more space will allow them to bring in more equipment for pickup.