I'm guessing emergency managers are looking intently for lessons they can draw from the Hurricane Helene-related flash flooding that claimed six lives at Impact Plastics on Sept. 27.
NBC News published a detailed story Oct. 18 looking at events at the Erwin, Tenn., factory the morning of the flood, including trying to reconstruct the situation faced by more than 10 people, including many Impact employees, who tried to escape the flood on a semitruck trailer before the rushing waters overturned it.
Some of the harrowing details track a lawsuit we wrote about, filed by the family of one employee who drowned in the flooding.
Some factories in the same industrial park along the Nolichucky River closed that day, while others opened but then closed earlier than Impact, the story said. One nearby factory closed both Sept. 26 and Sept. 27, the first time in its 15-year history it closed because of weather.
The story includes the goodbye messages from employees who later perished, as well as comments from those who were swept off the trailer but survived.
Like the lawsuit, the NBC article talked about the emergency alerts employees were getting on their cellphones that morning, as they worked in the injection molding plant. It noted that weather conditions were so bad the county hospital about a mile from the Impact plant had to have several dozen people airlifted from its roof in a dangerous rescue.
One Tennessee coalition of community, labor and faith groups said the disaster shows that workplace safety laws need to be updated to give workers more protection if they want to follow emergency weather notices.