No Pipe Dream on the French Broad

Matt Cook cuts through the crisp December air, the throaty thrum of his jet boat reverberating over the French Broad River. The vessel is by far the loudest noise on the river’s remote Section 9, which winds through Pisgah National Forest between Marshall and Hot Springs in Western North Carolina. 

Beneath the clear surface, a school of brown fish flees before the bow. Belted kingfishers, red-shouldered hawks, and bald eagles patrol the skies above.

The French Broad runs shallow in the winter, and navigating it challenges even a seasoned captain like Cook, who pilots boats for the Asheville-based environmental nonprofit MountainTrue’s river cleanup program. 

His fluorescent yellow dry suit pops against the dormant trees on the riverbanks as he stands up to assess conditions, the wind rustling his formidable beard while he searches for a stretch of sufficient depth to speed his craft. River guides call this “reading the water,” as if the eddies and rapids were the curlicues of nature’s cursive.

Hurricane Helene wrote new stories into the river and its landscape—including one with a clear human co-author. The boat draws close to what Cook’s MountainTrue colleagues have christened “PVC Island.”

From the waterline up through a 25-foot-tall snarl of logs, black snakes of plastic tubing envelop the landmass. Thick white pipes strike through at random angles, and hints of green and blue conduit peek out from beneath. The chaotic mound dwarfs Cook as he wades into the frigid river for a closer look.

“I could spend every day at work for the next year working on this one pile, with a winch and a chainsaw and a crew of people, and probably not get through it,” Cook said. “And somebody’s probably going to break a leg or an arm or get hurt seriously.”

Writing on the pipes indicate their source: IPEX. In 2019, the Canadian company acquired Silver-Line Plastics, a PVC manufacturer that has operated on the banks of the French Broad in Woodfin since 1962. The factory just northwest of Asheville churns out tens of millions of dollars’ worth of plastic pipe each year, most of it stored outdoors but unsecured on its 38-acre property awaiting shipment. 

Flooding from Helene lifted countless bundles of pipe out of that storage yard and into the river. A video taken from Riverside Rhapsody Beer Company, just across the street, shows muddy water carrying away dozens of black coils like inner tubes on a lazy river ride. The facility’s lost plastic traveled as far as Douglas Lake in eastern Tennessee, about 75 miles downstream.

Nearly a year and a half after Helene struck Western North Carolina, Cook and his MountainTrue colleagues are still finding that pipe. Since launching a major campaign to clean up the French Broad in July, roughly 40% of the debris the nonprofit has pulled from the river and its banks downstream of Woodfin has been from IPEX. In sections close to the source, such as a stretch near Woodfin’s Silver-Line Park, the group puts that figure closer to 80%.

“It’s actually ramped up as we’ve increased our staffing levels,” said Jon Stamper, river cleanup operations manager for MountainTrue. “Directly below IPEX, all the way downstream basically to the Madison County line, those guys are out there every day. And almost everything they’re getting is pipe.”

Immediately following the storm, IPEX said it recognized its impact and pledged to help clean up. 

“We remain focused on the collection and secure containment of any scattered pipe and other materials that washed off-property,” company spokesperson Anastasia Georgakakos told the Asheville Watchdog in November 2024. 

“We have deployed both in-person teams and barges along the French Broad River to collect any materials, including pipes washed downstream.” 

But according to MountainTrue and others working on the French Broad, IPEX has done little beyond the immediate vicinity of the Silver-Line factory. After contracting with environmental consultants and spending months in negotiations with local groups, the company cut off communications in late spring. It also spent close to $37 million in repairing the facility and rebuilding inventory, according to a press release from IPEX’s parent company, and does not seem to have changed how its products are stored. 

Meanwhile, the pipe that remains in the wild continues to deteriorate. The longer PVC is exposed to sunlight, Stamper explains, the more likely it is to shatter into tiny pieces that can further degrade and enter the ecosystem as harmful microplastics.

Over the course of a month, The Assembly made repeated attempts to reach both Georgakakos and Kevin Frank, a manager at the Woodfin facility, by email and phone. Neither acknowledged any request for comment.

Environmental advocates say there are few ways to hold IPEX legally accountable for its pollution. And as climate change continues to make extreme weather like Helene more likely, they worry it’s just going to happen again.

IPEX Goes Dark

The afternoon after Helene hit the region, Fritz Johnson stood on a bridge over the French Broad in Madison County. The co-owner of Blue Heron Whitewater, a rafting outfitter in Marshall, she’s been reading the river for more than 30 years. 

Johnson watched its swollen flow sweep along trailers, vehicles, tires, parts of houses, rolls of printer paper—and coil after coil of black PVC from IPEX. She felt a question rise from the water: “Who in the hell is going to clean this up?” she recalled with an exasperated chuckle. 

In the storm’s immediate aftermath, Johnson said, the answer was no one. Residents were focused on basic survival. But by late October, she and others in the rafting community were able to get on the river and assess the situation. Much of the pipe had ended up on the banks, tangled among the trees and turning one of Western North Carolina’s most commercially important recreation areas into a junkyard. 

The outfitters had already lost their peak fall tourist season, but Johnson wanted to take action before customers started returning in the spring. So she made some calls, raised about $38,000 in private donations, and put river guides to work removing pipes and other debris.

Given the company’s contribution to the waste problem, Johnson and her friend Jay Hawthorne thought IPEX should be willing to support the cleanup. Hawthorne established contact with the firm’s North American headquarters in Ontario, and initial conversations seemed promising. 

“We know how much went down the river, and we’re going to have to account for how much we get back, and then we’re likely going to have to pay a fine,” Johnson recalled an IPEX representative telling her in early discussions.

Hawthorne said those talks continued even as IPEX hired Terracon, a Kansas-based environmental consulting firm with an Asheville-area office, to assess the situation last spring. Shortly after, the company posted multiple job openings for environmental engineers and cleanup workers in Western North Carolina. (Neither local nor national representatives of Terracon responded to multiple requests for comment.)

According to Anna Alsobrook, French Broad Riverkeeper for MountainTrue, the consultant asked her nonprofit to compile a proposal for helping to remove lost pipe as a subcontractor. In May, she said, MountainTrue submitted detailed information and estimated costs for the work. 

But then communications with IPEX and its consultant gradually went dark. Contacts stopped returning emails or shunted them to other, less responsive figures in the company’s corporate hierarchy. That change raised Hawthorne’s suspicions.

“I was talking to these people at least once every two weeks, sometimes three times a week. For a while, we felt like we were making progress,” he recalls. “But then you kind of got the feeling that, OK, there’s something else behind this.”

On June 19, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality inked a $10 million contract with MountainTrue, funded via a $524 million Helene relief package from the state legislature. The French Broad cleanup would happen—but it’d be North Carolina taxpayers, not IPEX, footing the bill. 

IPEX is part of Aliaxis, a Belgian conglomerate that sells “high-performance solutions for fluid and energy management.” In 2024, the last year for which financial information is publicly available, the company earned more than $4.6 billion in revenue, with a net profit of nearly $285 million. Funding the entire MountainTrue contract would’ve accounted for about 3.5% of those profits.

River advocates say IPEX has continued to avoid local engagement since the summer. Eric Bradford, director of operations for environmental nonprofit Asheville GreenWorks, said he became aware in October about a company initiative called iCARE, a “community investment and social impact program” that provides grants to nonprofits. When he emailed Georgakakos to explore potential partnerships, he received a firm no.

“At this time, our focus remains on completing the coordinated recovery and restoration efforts already in progress, in coordination with specialized vendors and local authorities,” the IPEX spokesperson wrote in the October 17 email. “While we’re not in a position to offer external funding or grant support at this stage, we truly value the dedication of organizations like yours and the role you play in advancing local recovery initiatives.” 

The message was different from what Georgakakos subsequently shared with Asheville Watchdog for a November 3 article. There she wrote that IPEX had made “significant progress in partnership with community and regional organizations” and would “continue to actively support local cleanup efforts.” She did not respond to repeated requests from The Assembly for clarification.

Bradford is frustrated by the difference he sees between IPEX’s words and its behavior. Besides GreenWorks, he said, the only groups he’s seen organizing coordinated cleanups on the French Broad have been MountainTrue and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Legal Pipeline

Although efforts at collaboration with IPEX have yielded little success, Western North Carolina’s environmental groups have yet to seek legal accountability for the company.

Gray Jerningan, MountainTrue’s general counsel and deputy director, said his nonprofit has held off thus far “in a spirit of recognition that everyone was impacted by Helene.” He confirmed that the organization is still exploring its legal options in partnership with the Southern Environmental Law Center, but declined to comment further.

However, existing legal frameworks at the state and local level aren’t designed to punish companies for the kind of debris IPEX lost during the storm. While North Carolina’s solid waste rules forbid intentional disposal into waterways, according to NCDEQ spokesperson Josh Kastrinsky, “they do not address an unforeseeable release due to force majeure.”

Laura Oleniacz, a spokesperson for NCDEQ’s Division of Water Resources, confirmed that state authorities are not requiring any private entities to remove Helene-related waste from local waterways. 

Although Kastrinsky noted that NCDEQ staff did visit the Silver-Line facility in Woodfin and downstream areas twice after the storm, they were primarily concerned with potential chemical discharges. No such issues were found, and IPEX hasn’t received any notices of violation for its handling or release of material.

State law also delegates most authority over development in floodplains, where Silver-Line is located, to local governments. Buncombe County didn’t put a flood damage prevention ordinance in place until 2009, and Woodfin delegated administration of its floodplain to the county from 2010 until last July.

Because those rules came into effect well after Silver-Line began operating and storing pipe outdoors, said Woodfin Town Manager Shannon Tuch, the new laws would not retroactively apply to IPEX. 

Both the town’s current and former flood regulations require materials to be anchored or removed if they’re buoyant enough to float during a 1-in-100-year flood event. Tuch said that water levels for a 100-year event wouldn’t be expected to displace IPEX material; according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, Helene was a 1,000-year event.

Floodplain regulations, noted Buncombe County Planning Director Nathan Pennington, are mostly concerned with protecting habitable structures. “In general, industrial uses and manufacturing facilities with outdoor storage components are supposed to keep product always moving on and off site,” he said.

Tuch said that Woodfin has been tweaking its rules with an eye toward future resilience on other properties in the floodplain. The town doubled the elevation buffer a building must have over projected flood levels from two feet to four.

Woodfin also recently closed a loophole that property owners could use to avoid building for better flood resistance. Property owners now must add up all improvements they make during a five-year period, rather than just the prior year. If the changes amount to at least 50% of the property’s overall value, the owners must follow the latest building standards. That change makes it more difficult to phase improvements over time and avoid regulatory compliance. 

It’s good timing for other local governments to enact similar changes, Tuch added, because the Federal Emergency Management Agency is currently revising its floodplain maps for Western North Carolina. Those maps are likely to expand the floodplains in recognition of greater climate-driven flood risks. When new properties are first classified as prone to flooding, they become regulated under the local rules then in place.

Woodfin is also considering incentives for IPEX to improve its materials storage. Town council member Ken Kahn has suggested the town apply for grants only available to local governments and pass the money to IPEX. He also floated guaranteeing that the company wouldn’t face new zoning mandates if it partnered with Woodfin. Tuch said the town has reached out to discuss those proposals with IPEX but that conversations were “still in the very early stages.”

Jernigan said MountainTrue is planning to advocate for more stringent floodplain laws when the General Assembly begins its next long session, its main legislative period, in 2027. He’d like to see lawmakers improve minimum standards around anchoring storage areas, as well as create financial liability for property owners who don’t secure materials. 

No other state has particularly strong language on those issues, he adds, so North Carolina has an opportunity to lead the nation.

‘This Hurts My Heart’

Back on the French Broad, Cook and his MountainTrue colleague Leslie Beninato walk downstream from PVC Island along the riverbank. The two consider the multitude of pipes still strewn across the ground, still where Helene deposited them. As they tug a dirty white tube out of a brush pile, the silt it accumulated during the storm many months ago comes pouring out.

Beninato, MountainTrue’s river cleanup logistics manager, tries to keep a positive attitude. She jokes that the debris “looks like the Jolly Green Giant walked by and dropped a bunch of straws.” 

At the cleanup headquarters she helps oversee in Weaverville, she recycled IPEX pipe into a skeletal Christmas tree, festooned with paper chains and a sparkly red cowboy hat with white stars on the top. She celebrates the more than 4 million pounds of trash her crews have collected, even in technically demanding whitewater areas, since starting their work.

But the sheer scale of the problem remains difficult for her to process. At one point, she walks away from Cook, taking a couple of minutes alone to collect her thoughts.

“Coming back out, it just reminds me,” Beninato explained. “It’s like, oh my God, this hurts my heart, because there’s still so much out here.”

She bristles at the way IPEX has talked about community support while failing to lend a meaningful hand in the cleanup. When she drives past the Silver-Line factory, neat stacks of white pipe have again risen on the same acres of land. A large sign near the entrance vows, “We Will Build Back Better, Stronger, Together.”

Beninato returns to the brush pile. She grabs another chunk of PVC, hefts it onto her shoulder, and carries it toward the shore.

Correction: This article has been corrected to say that Section 9 of the French Broad River winds through Pisgah National Forest between Marshall and Hot Springs.