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Jerry and Sibrina Barrett never spent a day apart in over 35 years. They worked long hours, never went on vacation, and liked to relax with their son at home. They had no idea that a hurricane could hit them in the mountains of East Tennessee.
Living in Johnson City, they were barely aware that Hurricane Helene had made landfall Florida September 26. The next day it was raining heavily, so Sibrina left late for her weekly cleaning job at the Impact Plastics factory.
It was the last time they saw each other.
Today, Sibrine Barnett’s clothes are right 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 the kitchen chair. Jerry knows he’ll have to move them one day, but not yet.
Helene caused catastrophic damage, the deadliest storm to hit the US mainland since Katrina in 2005. At least 221 people died. Many were like Sibrina, drowning in floods hundreds of miles inland. Behind each number stood a person whose absence is strongly felt.
‘I’m just trying to enjoy life’
She was 17 and he was 20 when they met, and “35 years later, we’ve never left each other’s side,” Jerry said.
At first, they’d cruise around in Jerry’s Camaro and crank up the stereo, which “could be heard from a little way down the road,” he jokes. They would “grab a group of friends or something, maybe park and sit and talk” between her night shifts as a waitress.
“We weren’t really wild people or anything like that. “We were just a couple of young people trying to enjoy life a little,” he said.
A few years later, she was pregnant. They married and created their future, in a mobile home in the same community that Jerry has known all his life.
“Me and her, both of us growing up as kids, we didn’t have a lot,” says Jerry. “We weren’t poor, but we weren’t wearing Levi’s and Nikes and stuff.”
Both were workaholics. He does air conditioning repair, but she was proud to be the main breadwinner. Six days a week she would do morning cleaning work and then clean a private school in the evening. Clients loved her for being meticulous – sometimes she would go back over areas that had already been cleaned by another crew until they met her standards.
“Work to make money, that way you’ll have everything,” says Jerry. “She spoiled me and my son. She just did it.”
Caimen is now 21 years old, 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 the living room showcase. Even more queue in the corridor. Sibrina ordered the figures and they will assemble them. Some came all the way from Japan and cost thousands of dollars.
“We decided to just enjoy it while we were gone, instead of trying to have a bunch for retirement or our senior years,” Jerry said. Given what happened, “I’m kind of glad we did.”
One from the glass case, he now holds Sibrina’s urn.
Flood
Sibrina hated driving in bad weather, so she went to Impact Plastics late on September 27th. Rainwater would often accumulate in the factory parking lot, but she called Jerry on a break to report that it was heavier than usual. Then she called again – the water had risen to the bottom of her car door. Jerry put down his tools and drove to get her, but the exit from the interstate was blocked.
“Don’t even bother trying to get in here,” she told him. “She said, ‘Just go home. Looks like I’ll be here for a few hours.'”
What happened next, Jerry learned secondhand. As the water continued to rise, Sibrina and nine other workers retreated to the highest point – the platform of a tractor-trailer loaded with huge coils of plastic pipes. It wasn’t high enough. They called an ambulance, but the first responders were focused on another emergency: dozens of people trapped on the roof of a nearby hospital.
Then the truck overturned, sending the workers into the raging water. Some managed to float on the tubes and were washed up on the waste heap. Sibrina was one of the six killed.
Many Americans didn’t think inland areas were particularly vulnerable to severe weather, but places like Erwin, in the Nolichucky River Valley, are increasingly prone to disasters.
Jerry broke up with Sibrina and went back to work. He had no idea how big the flood was, and only found out that it was gone a few hours later. He tried looking for clues in YouTube videos. Eight days passed before her body was found.
Litigation
Jerry’s lawyer, Luke Widener, said workers relied on management to warn them of the dangers outside because the factory had few windows. Some said they were not allowed to stop working until the power went out. By then the access road was under water.
Widener is also representing Zinija Adkins, who earned $11.50 an hour as a temporary employee at Impact Plastics. She is alive, she said, because her colleague held her firmly in the water up to her chest. He can’t swim and is mortally afraid of spiders that were all over the surface of the water. Months later, she still sleeps on the couch because her bed is too open and unsafe.
“A lot of good people lost their lives that day,” Adkins said. “It’s just 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 fired with enough time to escape.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the state Office of Workplace Safety have opened investigations.