Margie Huggins has spent her retirement tending her parents’ farm in Transylvania County, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She grew up there, and has tried to give back to the land by planting native shrubs and flowers. She’s intensified her work since Hurricane Helene tore through the region almost one year ago, in hopes that it could mitigate future flooding.

“We had 12 feet of water in some of these pastures,” Huggins said as she walked to the bank of the Little River behind her property. “If we can understand how we need to take care of the water system, which also will benefit the animals and the creatures that live there, it’s only going to help us all.”

Helene brought extreme flooding and landslides to southern Appalachia, killing 108 people and causing $60 billion in damage in Western North Carolina alone. It also reshaped rivers and landscapes, littering them with everything from garbage and trees to cars and homes. The water inundated some of Huggins’ land but spared her house. She’s been working with biologists at the local nonprofit Conserving Carolina to replant the area.

But in the spring, her careful work was disturbed by a crew sent to clean up the river abutting her property months after the storm. “They brought in their big heavy equipment and started coming up Little River to remove debris,” Huggins said. The workers, granted access to the river by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, simply arrived one day in March. Before Huggins knew what to do, they had driven through the river, leaving crushed mussels and a flattened riverbed in their wake and, she said, taking healthy trees with them.

It’s often that way with the sprawling, messy business of disaster cleanup. In the aftermath of hurricanes, wildfires, and the like, a nesting doll of contractors and subcontractors, officials at every level of government, and an alphabet soup of agencies are needed to clear debris and set things right.

Local governments can tackle the job by hiring contractors, working with the state, and having the Federal Emergency Management Agency reimburse the costs. But counties usually hand the work over to the feds. In that case, FEMA coordinates the effort through federal agencies like the Army Corps and pays the firms they hire. The goal is quickly clearing roads, houses, and waterways of everything from windblown branches to the wreckage of homes washed away by the inundation. The scope of this work encompasses anything the agency deems “in the public interest,” a potential hazard, and directly related to a declared disaster. Cleanup on private land can operate through a similar system, or be left to homeowners.

Because contractors are paid by the weight of waste removed or by the linear foot of ground covered, there can be a struggle to balance expediency and ecological care. Compounding the challenge, there is little oversight. The Army Corps of Engineers is supposed to coordinate with wildlife agencies, but government scientists who spoke with Grist say the Corps failed to do so after Helene, and they worry it’s too late to reverse the resulting damage.

There is a staggering amount of stuff to remove from the region’s waterways — some 7.3 million cubic yards of trees, limbs, and other detritus, by one estimate. That’s enough to load 609,000 dump trucks. No one denies the need to clean up, but the process has sparked arguments about what constitutes debris, what ought to be cleared, and what might be better left alone.

Surveying the stumps and erosion the crew left behind, Huggins wondered if there was a better way. “I’m all for doing what we need to to help humans,” she said, “but we have to balance it.”

Transylvania County was spared the worst of Helene’s wrath. Nonetheless, the Army Corps earmarked some $66 million for debris removal there. All told, contractors throughout North Carolina had removed 12 million cubic yards of material from roads and waterways by the end of May, with more costly work ahead. As of the end of July, Governor Josh Stein’s request for Washington to provide $11 billion in additional aid had gone unanswered, even as the state has granted an additional $2 billion in cleanup funds. Federal emergency dollars have reimbursed just 6 percent of the cost of the disaster, estimated at $60 billion.

Before any dig-out starts, FEMA consults environmental entities like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state wildlife agencies to identify sensitive habitats. Scientists evaluate an ecosystem before, during, and after debris removal to ensure endangered species and historically significant sites are protected. But this process depends on the cooperation of the Army Corps and contractors — and the scientists can only offer guidance, not stop work. “When the dust settles and they have identified and tracked their impacts, we kind of just come behind and check their work,” said Gary Peeples, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Even when people like Hans Lohmeyer, a biologist with Conserving Carolina, try to help, they’re often rebuffed. He said the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission sent the Corps a list of best practices and maps of high-quality habitat throughout the region, to no apparent avail. He showed Grist photographs of riverbanks littered with crushed elktoe mussels, which are endangered, and stumps of what he said were healthy trees. 

Others who work for state environmental agencies and requested anonymity for fear of reprisal shared similar photos. “They just wrecked it,” one state government scientist said of a stream in Mitchell County. “They nuked it.” He added that “we have documented way, way, way too many” instances in which contractors, paid by the volume of material they remove, felled live trees from locations that were not impacted by the flood.

Nathan Turpin, who was part of a debris removal crew working in Mitchell County, was so disgusted by what he saw while working 12 hour days that he quit. “It’s disheartening to see,” Turpin said. “I was there to help my community.” Although he hoped the job would help him weather tough times, he felt he couldn’t stay. “Ultimately I walked away,” he said. “It’s not something I want to be a part of.”

Bobby Petty, a spokesperson for the Army Corps, told Grist the agencies working in the region are coordinating with one another to ensure they don’t threaten wildlife, and he defended the contractors’ efforts. “Leaving large-scale treefall or otherwise compromised trees in populated or wildfire-prone areas is a recipe for disaster,” he said in an email to Grist. “Western North Carolina creeks and rivers serve as natural firebreaks. Tree removal may seem haphazard to some folks, but it’s not — and the debris left behind by a once-in-2,000-year flood event like Hurricane Helene is considerable!”

One of the Corps’ primary contractors for Helene cleanup is AshBritt. The Florida-based company has been awarded $1.3 billion this year, with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for Helene-related work in multiple counties. It received $6.2 million in Transylvania County, for example, and $121 million for private property debris removal in Buncombe County, where the city of Asheville is located. Neither the company nor the Army Corps responded to a request for information on how much AshBritt received for every ton of debris removed, but it netted $210 per ton cleaning up after devastating floods in Kentucky. 

AshBritt, which has contributed millions to Republicans and Democrats alike over the years, employs subcontractors, which often are not from the communities they’re sent into. Brian Thomason, the company’s president of disaster response, insisted that AshBritt and the firms it hires protect sensitive habitats singled out by FEMA. He said the company and its subcontractors follow Army Corps guidance when prioritizing locations and removing debris. 

Still, the company has a spotty record. AshBritt worked in eastern Kentucky after the 2022 flood, and a Louisville Public Media investigation found its subcontractors removed people’s personal belongings in the rush to finish the job. After wildfires in Santa Rosa, California in 2018, homeowners accused the company of removing excessive soil and ground cover, damaging homes, septic systems, and roads. Frustrations with AshBritt and accusations of inflated pricing from local debris contractors date to hurricanes Sandy and Katrina.

Grist followed up with Thomason, seeking comment on these reports, but received no response. FEMA declined an interview request, but in a statement, the agency insisted that any sensitive areas identified through environmental and historic assessments are respected and that any work, whether directed by state, local, or federal entities, must heed federal environmental law. 

Even when things go relatively smoothly, county officials can find the lack of communication frustrating. “The county has not had a role in directing the contractors’ work, assessing regulatory compliance or how they go about their work because that falls to [the Army Corps],” Transylvania County Manager Jamie Laughter said in an email.

Huggins approached the cleanup workers when she saw them, hoping to convey her desire to work with them in a way that respected the landscape and landowners. “It’s not that there can’t be debris removed,” she said. It’s that they needed to work with biologists and the available information about endangered and threatened wildlife. She wanted to see them work with a scalpel. “It was just a shotgun approach — ‘Here we go. We’re taking everything out.’”

Even as Western North Carolina grapples with overzealous crews, Northern Michigan is struggling with the overwhelming quantity of debris left by an ice storm and questions about who will pay to clean it all up. It wasn’t until almost four months after the storm, on July 22, that President Donald Trump declared a disaster and committed $50 million for recovery, which local governments and nonprofits must now apply for. 

When the once-in-a-generation storm hit Michigan in March, Ryan Philipp rushed to help. He owns PineCo, a mulching and chipping operation that sells wood chips to the lawn product company Scotts Miracle-Gro. As communities around Northern Michigan began digging out, Philipp started grinding downed limbs and such for free. It isn’t cheap — the big machines burn 63 gallons of fuel an hour — but he figured the government would cover the cost eventually.

“We continued that for about three months, working seven days a week from sun up to sun down. And then enough was kind of enough,” he said. According to Philipp, the company has sunk close to $400,000 into the effort. It has sold some of its chipped wood to a local biomass energy producer, but not enough to recover its labor costs and other expenses. The lack of county or state assistance and the painfully slow federal response has PineCo, and other operations, holding the bill.

The crippling freeze walloped Northern Michigan. Trees and power lines snapped under the weight of more than an inch of ice, knocking out electricity for days, even weeks. It closed roads and damaged homes, but the region’s vast forests took the brunt of it, with damage spread over more than 900,000 acres of state forest alone. “It was complete destruction in many, many places,” said Brian Weir, an environmental quality analyst with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency for 12 counties (later increased to 13) and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. That enabled state teams to begin digging out with help from the Michigan National Guard. The Department of Natural Resources led the effort on state land, “working at max capacity,” Weir said. “They had crews out cutting trees. There were private contractors out cutting trees. It was a massive undertaking.”

Local agencies, along with teams with the natural resources and transportation departments, focused on roads and public areas, leaving downed trees and tangles of limbs in remote stretches of forest untouched. “Since it is all natural debris, it will decompose over time and benefit soil fertility for other plants and trees,” Kerry Heckman, a spokesperson with the Department of Natural Resources, said in an email.

Local, county, and tribal officials are largely responsible for coordinating cleanup efforts and hiring contractors on roads and public areas like right-of-ways. But many have struggled, given the scale of the task. “There’s such a sheer volume of debris, and nobody wants to take responsibility for it,” Jon Deming, emergency manager for hard-hit Otsego County, said. 

Whitmer requested a presidential emergency declaration after meeting with Trump in April. It went unanswered for months and was denied in June, although FEMA workers did come through in April to assess the situation. State and federal authorities estimate the storm caused $137 million in damage. Whitmer sought a major disaster declaration from Trump in May, which led to his releasing funds in July. State legislation authorizing $100 million in assistance has stalled in a Senate committee. 

The political uncertainty left everyone scrambling to pay the bills — or in some cases, opting out of doing anything further. “We don’t have the money to do that type of debris management,” Otsego County’s Deming said. 

Compounding the challenge is coordinating the volunteers, contractors, and disposal sites needed to set things right. “Trying to manage that is just a plain nightmare,” Deming said. 

And then there’s the wood. So much wood. Several counties sold as much as they could to NorthStar Clean Energy, which burns biomass at its two Northern Michigan plants to generate electricity. But one of the facilities now has more than it can handle and stopped accepting deliveries in June. The timber and lumber industries couldn’t absorb the surplus, either. Simply put, there is “no debris plan for this much debris,” Deming said.

As if that weren’t enough of a hassle, state law prohibits sending organic debris to landfills, so officials must figure out different ways to dispose of it. “All this wood has to go somewhere,” Weir said. There has been change; a 2022 tornado near the city of Gaylord produced woody debris contaminated by household waste, which they excluded from debris drop-off sites this time around. And in other parts of Michigan, organizations are also trying to better plan for debris; the state recently highlighted two entities in southeast Michigan working to establish a regional debris management plan. For now, in Northern Michigan, much debris remains piled high in lots and yards or scattered across forests where, some worry, it could fuel fires or help spread diseases and pests.

Philipp would like to help, but just can’t afford it any longer. “We haven’t received a penny from anybody” to make up for the gap, he said. When PineCo agreed to grind debris, it expected to take a couple hundred loads of wood. “We’re at almost 600 right now,” Philipp said in mid-July.

“I can’t take in 20 loads a day of material and process it and have nowhere to go with it, and then go further in debt,” he said. “That’s a bad business model.”

Back in Transylvania County, North Carolina, Margie Huggins did manage to reduce the impact of debris removal. She did this mostly by running out to speak with contractors as they set to work. 

“It’s not that anybody’s saying, ‘Oh my gosh, you couldn’t come and do some work that was needed in the river.’ It just needed to be balanced and with care for everything in the river that needs to be protected,” Huggins said.

Scientists and conservationists like Hans Lohmeyer, the biologist at Conserving Carolina, have done their best to support her and other landowners, attending meetings to talk with politicians like Representative Chuck Edwards to find solutions. 

Lohmeyer also has seen a marked difference in the counties where local officials led the way, and in cases where contractors were paid by distance traveled rather than weight removed — which hints at how debris removal might be reformed. 

He and Huggins hope their experiences can help other communities make informed choices, though it may be too late for many Western North Carolina rivers and creeks, which need more time than the debris removal business might allow. “Efficiency is, unfortunately, not always a friend of the environment,” Lohmeyer said.

Just a little more time might have helped.