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Buckthrill Kill, a retired service member from Fayetteville,
has been in Creston for more than a week,
helping clean up efforts.
Debris, trees, everything, and it's under the water.
Any little single piece of rebar sticking up
will catch any and everything that comes by.
He and other volunteers in canoes, excavators, and waiters
have been pulling out items blocking waterways.
Those things are redirecting water in new directions.
The springtime when it thaws, all of this flooding
is going to happen all over again.
The locals know it.
The third part of this report is
going to be a little different as it concerns
something that goes far beyond a hurricane,
flooding the mountains of Western North Carolina
and Eastern Tennessee.
But I just wanted to say up front
that it's already starting to dip
below freezing temperatures there,
and there are people who are sleeping outside
of their destroyed homes and tents right now.
We have been getting messages from people
who are extremely concerned about the toxicity
of the water and mud that has now moved
through Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee.
But they don't have water to do the cleanup process with.
So they're moving mud by hand.
They're picking up equipment.
They've been warned that some of what's inside
may in fact even be toxic.
So they're doing the best they have
with some of the supplies they have.
But many of the people behind me here,
these are not experts in this kind of cleanup.
They are the artists, the business owners themselves
doing the best with what they have.
He says a horse from a farm next to this bridge
has died from drinking this contaminated water
and eating hay bales that were sitting in the flood.
There's cattle lifestyles up here.
People raising beef, horses.
Every bit of hay you'll drive down the road
to see round bales of hay go, they're good to go.
No, it's no good.
It can't be used.
Even Madison County Chamber of Commerce
has now put up a warning on their official website
that the mud in Marshall, North Carolina,
just for one example, is absolutely toxic,
that they have hazardous material protocols now in effect.
Downtown Marshall, North Carolina
was swallowed by catastrophic flooding.
Now what remains is covered in a thick coat of mud and debris
that's considered hazardous.
Some of the volunteers that are starting to come in here
are having to wear hazmat suits because all of the mud
and all the debris is now considered to be hazardous.
And that everyone should be using caution anywhere
where there is mud or water.
It says an abundance of solvents or caustic chemicals
is eating people's clothing
and that people are getting chemical burns
from coming into contact with this mud.
And that it's contaminated with household chemicals,
fuel oils, gas, animal and human waste, trash.
They're saying there's syringes in there,
garden chemicals, all kinds of stuff is now in this mud.
And they're saying PPE is now mandated for working with it,
including respirators.
Don't go in the mud, use caution
and avoid floodwater and mud unless absolutely vital.
So there's a secondary issue that is now developing here
and it's also making people ill.
I have people writing me who know people
that are working in Lake Lure that are getting sick.
There are messages being posted on Facebook groups
about people coming down with respiratory illnesses
and pneumonia-like illnesses that are not pneumonia
and they're having lung pain.
I just, I don't think people realize how toxic,
how absolutely toxified this area is.
And you can see how deep it is to the altar.
For 24 hours, four to five feet of water flow
through the church before receding.
I'm sick, but I'm not.
I mean, I have some allergies going on
and I have some internal stuff.
Like I felt like I had food poisoning,
but it's been long enough
that if I had food poisoning, it'd be passed
and my husband's the same way and I'm convinced
we got bacteria or something from somewhere.
I've been sick since it started.
Like with an infection, lymph nodes and stuff,
it wouldn't go away.
I mean, but like you drive down the road,
it's like, just want to know in old four.
I mean, it's a dust bowl.
It's a dust bowl and they think,
how many of those homes have asbestos in them?
Yeah.
The insulation.
There's potentially a huge environmental disaster
happening in Ashefield, North Carolina
and everyone downriver.
This is reportedly the IPEX plastic PVC factory.
Everything looks to be destroyed
and chemicals have been leaked into the French Broad River.
It's probably the PVC, the powder form.
This is the only, the only disaster I've ever worked
and I've been doing this since Hurricane Katrina.
It's the only one I've ever worked
that the federal government is actively working
against recovery.
This one is completely different.
They're actively working against the recovery process
which tells me they've got something to hide.
And Bear from the internet,
he's from Grindstone Ministries.
They were one of the links I put for people to donate
in the pinned comment under this series of videos.
He did an interview with Billy Bond
who's a permaculture guy just a couple of days ago.
And I think everybody just needs to hear
what this man is saying about what is going on
with this mud in this area.
And I believe that they do have something to hide
because we're already getting reports,
firsthand reports of cadaver dogs that are dying,
that we're walking through these areas,
walking especially in your neck of the woods,
I'm walking through the silt, walking through the muck,
even going through de-con afterwards,
being decontaminated, you know,
I've got reports, one guy had 10 dogs there
and four of his dogs are already dead
and the other six are dying.
Got another woman firsthand account
that was rescuing horses,
was leading horses through the muck and the mud in the river.
And the horses are so incredibly sick
that they started doing blood tests on the horses.
And the tests that have been coming back
are in their words, literally off the charts.
They've never seen anything like this before.
Citizens, the last report I got in your area
it was 50 to 60 people in Western North Carolina
that are already inexplicably sick.
And by inexplicably, I mean,
they don't know what's wrong with them.
And the reason for that is all kinds of shit
has washed into that river,
literal human feces from septic tanks that were ruptured,
wastewater treatment plants, thousands of cadavers,
even though the official reporting is that,
no, it's only 213 dead.
Well, that conflicts with one corner
that I personally spoke with that had 1200 people
in reefer trailers.
Then you've got dead animals,
NFS, Nuclear Fuel Services that lost,
well, the official reporting is they lost training barrels.
Well, we spoke to the former training manager at NFS
who said, nope, those aren't training barrels,
those are live barrels.
And officially the number was,
well, it's just one live barrel.
And it was five live barrels.
And it was a semi load, 250, 55 gallon drums.
And we know because the semi was found and documented
under 10 foot of mud.
So you've got nuclear fuel or waste fuels.
You also have the facility at NFS.
They said they lost a pole barn in the flooding.
They didn't, they lost a 10,000 square foot
decontamination unit and all the decontaminated parts
and all the decontamination equipment
washed into the river.
Then you've got a PVC plant.
You've got multiple concrete plants,
all of which washed into the river.
There are hundreds of homes that should be condemned.
And I'm not for the government condemning people's homes.
These people do not need to be mucking out their homes.
They don't need to be pulling out the insulation
in the drywall down to bare studs
and airing it out and starting over again
because the silt is deadly.
The silt will kill you.
And FEMA has been slow rolling this
in conjunction with local and state emergency management
has been slow rolling the announcement
that, hey, the silt will kill you
because they want to cover up
what will likely be a massive conglomeration
of giant lawsuits.
So I need to interject here
because I just think some of the stories
that are coming out right now
in the wake of this hurricane are so odd.
Like immediately they're telling everyone
everything is fine.
And I don't know how they could really know that.
Case in point, you heard him talk
about nuclear fuel services.
Nuclear fuel services is a company
that sits basically 0.2 miles away
from the Nola Chucky River.
It's like right there in Irwin, Tennessee on the river.
It's a major supplier of fuel
for the US Navy's nuclear powered fleet.
And it has been since the 1960s.
However, back in 2021,
they received a $57.5 million grant
to reprocess weapons grade uranium
into nuclear reactor fuel.
So that's what's been going on
right there on the Nola Chucky River
in Irwin, Tennessee for several years now.
And apparently 13 days ago
somebody in the r slash radiation subreddit
posted this picture of a barrel reportedly found
in the French Broad River in Asheville, North Carolina.
And the barrel says B&W Y12 LLC Oak Ridge, Tennessee
radioactive material on it.
And so a week ago you have this story
coming out of WBIR TV Knoxville.
No, this barrel reportedly found in an Asheville River
did not contain radioactive waste.
Although at one time it technically actually did
just not supposedly at the time
that it went into this river.
So what this debunking story claims
is that yes, this actually is a barrel
that originated in the Y12 National Security Complex
in the Oak Ridge, Tennessee facilities that process uranium.
And yes, some of these barrels did end up
in Irwin at nuclear fuel services.
And yes, they were kept in a warehouse offsite
that was actually heavily damaged in the floods
resulting in some NFS property being carried away
by floodwater, but it's just empty clean containers
and training equipment and protective equipment.
And even though it says
fissile radioactive material on this barrel,
this barrel's empty and clean.
And so it's fine.
It's basically what it says.
It's basically this yes, yes, but no, it's fine.
And everything's fine, don't worry about it.
And I just think it's interesting
how quickly they were saying everything is totally fine
with this facility.
So the timeline on this storm
in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee
is that it moved inland
degenerated into a post-tropical cyclone
over Tennessee on September 27th.
It stalled out there and sat there all day on the 28th
and didn't dissipate until the following day
on the 29th.
But somehow by 5.25 p.m. on Saturday the 28th
while the storm is still stalled out over Tennessee
for the rest of that day
and part of the next day before it dissipated.
On that day, nuclear fuel services
located right next to the Nolichucky River
is already telling everyone
their nuclear materials are safe.
It's all safe following the flooding
that was presumably still ongoing at that time.
You see what I'm saying?
You see why that comes off as just a little bit odd.
It has changed forever.
So it's not gonna go back to how it was.
And I did a little digging
and this area on record had numerous EPA superfund sites
in it, including a former electroplating facility
called CTS in Asheville
that contaminated the groundwater
with a toxic carcinogen called trichloroethylene
that was found to be in the water
more than 4,000 times the safe standard.
And they're still in the process
of trying to clean that up and monitor that.
And then on top of that,
you have the former Chemtronic site
which was disposing of things from Northrop Grumman
and Chemtronics where they were producing CS tear gas,
Mark 24 flares and the top secret BZ
which is a powerful hallucinogen
that was created to take out enemy populations.
They were making all this stuff on that site
back in the Cold War era.
And the disposal methods of these things are horrifying.
You had drums of BZ and CS just being buried on the site.
You had liquid chemicals being dumped down the drains
and fed into nearby streams
and explosives being incinerated on site
and what the EPA referred to in documents
as the acid pit area.
And in 2016, it was reported that the Chemtronic site,
it will take at least 30 more years
before the groundwater is safe to drink there.
And that was in 2016.
So these are places that were also flooded.
The EPA did put a message up on their website
about CTS that simply reads that the EPA has evaluated it
and determined that there were no storm impacts
from Hulene, but these are just the officially designated
EPA superfund sites.
According to Mountain Express of Asheville,
there are also at least 50 hazardous sites
just in Buncombe County alone.
And the majority of these sites have not been dealt with yet.
So you have things like PCBs, DDT,
paint thinners, pesticides, all kinds of stuff.
And they've just been kind of fenced in.
They just put a fence around some of these areas
and they're just sitting there.
They have not been cleaned up yet.
The water coming from,
where all this kind of started in Tennessee,
that was already, people were already getting sick
because of chemicals being dumped there.
There's actual nuclear stuff, all kinds of things.
And now you're adding to it.
Like you said, there's mildew, there's literal death,
animals, human beings, there's sewage,
there's more chemicals that were dumped
whether purposely or not in Asheville
where you can, as nasty as it is,
you see like soap bubbles almost on top.
So people are having to, if they're gonna bathe,
that's the water they have.
Or if you're drinking water,
I don't think Old Fort has public water yet.
But if you have a well,
I mean, obviously this is what you're getting.
Right.
And there have been a couple of documentaries
that have come out now
about the already toxified waterways in North Carolina
that tests have been done all over the entire state
and have found forever chemicals, PFAS,
and things like that in the water.
This map shows PFAS contamination across the U.S.
and many communities have yet to be tested.
So there's some serious problems already
with water contamination in North Carolina.
It's an issue.
It was an issue before this happened.
Discharge from local companies
bubbling up to the surface in the water there.
At first glance, the discharge looks unnatural
and suspicious, but this process is totally legal
of Tennessee and more importantly, this is safe.
And even just a quick search on the internet
will show you that Tennessee had a lot of water issues
going on prior to this event as well.
But the Tennessee Department of Environment
and Conservation put out a temporary water contact advisory
for East Tennessee areas affected by the flooding
on October 2nd.
And it says here they're advising the public
to avoid all contact with water bodies
affected by the extreme flooding in East Tennessee,
which applies to surface waters in the Nolichucky,
French Broad, Pigeon, Doe, and Wataga River watersheds,
as well as any other waters
that were affected by this flooding.
And it says here in the aftermath of unprecedented flooding
caused by Hurricane Helene,
several wastewater treatment plants have been compromised
and are temporarily unable to completely treat effluent
before it enters receiving waters.
In addition, sewer line crossings
may have been severed or damaged,
allowing raw sewage to enter streams
and individual septic systems
may be compromised across their region.
And they're saying it's issued out of an abundance of caution.
They don't have any specific data,
and I don't think they would by October 2nd,
but they also have not updated this since then,
which means that this advisory is still in effect
and has been in effect this entire time.
And it's also been reported
one of the main wastewater treatment plants
that services Spruce Pine North Carolina
and Mitchell County was completely destroyed.
Wastewater treatment plant located just north of Main Street
is entirely out of operation,
which serves several thousand people in Spruce Pine
along with multiple Mitchell County schools
and some county residents.
And they're trying to do an education campaign right now
to tell people not to flush
because whatever they're flushing down the toilet
is likely ending up directly in rivers and streams.
And it says that two of the buildings,
two of the buildings that were here,
floated away and the remaining treatment tanks
have taken on a gangrenous green color.
And this facility was built directly on the river.
So all of that stuff just went right into the water.
And it says in this article once again
that residents should take heed
when approaching or working in water and streams
that could be contaminated by this flood.
North Carolina State Senator Ralph Hies
gave a press conference apparently last week
and he said that treatment plant is gone.
He said that it does not exist.
It is completely unsalvageable
and that it's gonna likely take four years
to build a new one.
So all of those, there was 15,000 people in Spruce Pine
and thousands of people now are gonna be
without wastewater treatment facilities for years now.
I don't know what's going on in that well water
at this point,
but I just think an abundance of caution
is an understatement.
And at least somebody was talking about this.
US News put out this article on September 30th,
just pretty much right after this happened,
reminding everyone of a basic fact
that is a known fact in this country.
Flooded industrial sites,
toxic chemicals post silent threats after a hurricane.
In disasters like Haleen,
residents may not hear about releases
of toxic chemicals into water or air
until weeks later, if they do at all.
Hundreds of industrial facilities
with toxic pollutants were in the path of Haleen
and near the coast and into Georgia, for example,
it swept over paper mills, fertilizer factories,
oil and gas storage facilities.
And it mentions here that paper mills
are some of the most polluting industries on the planet.
In Florida, a retired nuclear power plant
was hit with a 12 foot storm surge,
which inundated not only the buildings
but an industrial wastewater pond
and there's spent nuclear fuel stored at that site,
which was also flooded during another hurricane
in 2023.
What Bloomberg reported, it's believed to be secure.
Well, believed to be secure and secure
is just not really the same exact thing, is it?
And then it goes on to say
that more rain was dumped on industrial sites
in the Carolinas in Tennessee,
some near waterways that quickly flooded
was runoff into the mountains.
In disasters like these,
the industrial damage can unfold over days
and residents may not hear about releases
of toxic chemicals into the water or air
until days or weeks later,
if they find out at all,
yet pollution releases are common.
So I was getting told that I'm fear-mongering
for warning people about the potential toxicity
of this water and this mud
and what might happen
if you come into too much contact with it.
And it's not fear-mongering,
it's common sense to protect people
if you're going into these areas to protect yourself
because we don't know
and we won't know for a while how safe
that water and that mud is,
but the stories that are coming out
and the messages that people have written me
and the things that I'm seeing on social media,
there are a lot of people that are talking about
being very concerned about this.
I'm telling you,
and this is part of why Grindstone is not mucking houses.
I don't want our people in these houses.
We don't want them in the silt.
We have pallets of PPE for anybody
that has to go anywhere near it.
There is bad stuff in the water.
There is bad stuff in the silt.
So it only makes sense to be safe and protect yourself.
It's not fear-mongering to have this conversation.
This is a conversation that should be had.
And I just think it's sad
that years and years of these events happening,
we have years and years and years.
I'm an American, okay?
I've been here for four decades.
And if you've been even paying
even the slightest bit of attention at all,
then you know how this works.
There's always this immediate, everything's fine.
Don't worry about it.
And then later, stuff starts coming out.
The idea that anyone could just trust
automatic reassurances of safety
that are based on literally nothing
just because somebody in a position of authority
got on TV and said it,
I don't understand how that still works on people
at all, at all at this point.
I really don't.
You wanna know what we'll never forget?
We'll never forget how the head of the EPA
the two days after 9-11 happened,
got on TV and said it's fine.
The air is fine to breathe.
There's no asbestos, it's great.
Just two days after the attacks,
EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman
reassured New Yorkers about the air.
Well, if there's any good news out of all this,
it's that everything we've tested for,
which includes asbestos lead and VOCs
have been below any level of concern
for the general public health.
Was it though?
No, it absolutely was not.
And two years later in 2003,
the Inspector General for the EPA came out and said
there was no basis for those claims.
So why'd she say it?
Why do they always say it?
That's a question no one ever asks themselves,
but maybe they should.
After Hurricane Katrina,
the EPA took 400,000 laboratory samples
of soil and flood sediment.
Later, an analysis was done of that data,
the policy frameworks that guided the collection
and organization of it,
and the agency's subsequent claims
about the relative absence of risk,
which is another nice way of just saying the safety
of people returning to the city,
residents going back to the city, right?
This analysis revealed, quote,
some of the ways in which risk assessment
in the U.S. Environmental Regulatory System
is deeply structured by the production
and reproduction of ignorance.
In short, it is set up to fail.
It is literally built to not do the thing
it's supposed to do.