In North Carolina, hurricane cleanup drags on

Bracing himself against the current in waist-deep water, Clancy Loorham wrestles a broken length of PVC pipe from the rocky bottom of the French Broad River and peers inside.

- BY ALLEN G. BREED AND BRITTANY PETERSON

LESLIE Beninato, a cleanup worker, moves a pipe from the French Broad River.

"I got a catfish in the pipe," the 27-year-old with wispy beard and mustache shouted to fellow cleanup workers floating nearby in rafts, canoes and kayaks piled with plastic pipe and other human-made detritus. "He's right here. I'm looking him in the eyes!"

It has been just a year since floodwaters from the remnants of Hurricane Helene washed these pipes out of a nearby factory with such force that some pieces ended up in Douglas Lake, about 90 miles away in Tennessee. But they're already slick with algae and filled with river silt - and creatures.

Helene killed more than 250 people and caused nearly $80 billion in damage from Florida to the Carolinas. In the North Carolina mountains, rains of up to 30 inches turned gentle streams into torrents that swept away trees, boulders, homes and vehicles, shattered century-old flood records, and in some places carved out new channels.

In the haste to rescue people and restore their lives to some semblance of normalcy, some fear the recovery efforts compounded Helene's impact on the ecosystem. Contractors hired to remove vehicles, shipping containers, shattered houses and other large debris from waterways sometimes damaged sensitive habitat.

"They were using the river almost as a highway in some situations," said Peter Raabe, southeast regional director for the conservation group American Rivers.

Conservationists found instances of contractors cutting down healthy trees and removing live root balls, said Jon Stamper, river cleanup coordinator for MountainTrue, the North Carolina-based nonprofit conducting the French Broad work.

"Those trees kind of create fish habitats," he said. "They slow the flow of water down. They're an important part of a river system, and we've seen kind of a disregard for that."