Answer Man: Fires, fields and gardens: What to do with the giant mulch piles from Helene debris?

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23-05-2025

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Question: What are the plans for the mountains of wood chips left over from (post-Helene) cleanup efforts? I drove by Mills River Park just today and the wood chip piles look to cover acres. Are there plans to sell the wood chips, use them on state and county projects, give them to residents to control erosion or for other projects? Collecting the debris is only part of the effort, disposal is the next step.
Answer: As anyone in Western North Carolina is aware, Tropical Storm Helene uprooted and toppled countless trees last fall with its catastrophic flooding and severe high winds, sometimes topping 100 mph according to the National Weather Service.
Local governments have been making steady progress toward cleaning up the pervasive debris, from brush to entire trees that fell on cars and houses. After it's collected it's often fed through woodchippers to reduce its volume and more efficiently store it.
The Times-News spoke with Henderson County Engineer Marcus Jones, who's in charge of the debris removal effort. He had updates on how that massive, 'unprecedented' undertaking is moving along and offered some answers to what will happen to all the material from the county's three debris removal programs: removing debris from the roadside, from waterways and from private property.
He said the county has handled more than 750,000 cubic yards of debris, much of which has been chipped. There's around 5% left to be collected and processed, he said, 'but that's 5% of a whole lot, there's not (just) a few sticks out there.'
The Asheville Citizen Times reported in April that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had removed 4.12 million cubic yards of Helene debris in Western North Carolina.
Most of that, 2.1 million cubic yards, was removed from waterways in Polk, Buncombe and McDowell counties, the towns of Chimney Rock and Lake Lure and the City of Asheville by disaster remediation contractor Ash Britt.
Another 1.9 million cubic yards were collected from the sides of roadways as part of the Army Corps of Engineers' right-of-way debris removal program.
Asheville and Buncombe's private property debris removal program ended April 15, the Citizen Times reported.
The towns of Woodfin and Weaverville had their own independent debris removal programs, which wrapped up their application process in March and April.
There is 'many times more than the normal routine appetite for (mulch) in this region,' Jones said, so some will need to be shipped somewhere else.
'We're finding a home for it,' slowly but surely, he said. 'The only problem we're having is finding enough people to haul it.'
One issue that the county's been dealing with is maintaining the woodchip piles once they're mounded up. Jones said that there have been several fires from spontaneous combustion — when moist, decomposing wood generates heat, like a compost pile, to the point that it catches on fire.
'You should be concerned about big mulch piles catching on fire,' he said. 'It does ignite' of its own accord.
But, he said, those fires are manageable with the same heavy equipment used to process and mound the chips, which can also be used to put it out.
Jones said that, as far as environmental impact, the piles aren't perfect, but that they're all permitted by the Department of Environmental Quality and are a strictly temporary measure.
FEMA contractor Southern Disaster Recovery is tasked with collecting and disposing of Henderson County's debris.
To answer one seemingly obvious solution: no, the material can't simply be sent to a landfill as garbage.
'Wood chips are banned from landfills,' Jones said. That said, they can be used in a landfill as 'daily cover,' or the layer, usually of dirt, that landfills are required to bury a day's deposit of garbage under.
That's only making a dent, though.
Jones said the county was burning mulch, using a method called air curtain burning where wood is burned in a metal container or a pit and air is blown onto it with a 'huge' fan. This makes the wood burn hotter and produce much less smoke that open burning. It 'eliminates a good bit of the pollutants,' Jones said.
Still, the county shut that operation down after neighbors of the Edneyville-area site raised concerns about the still-significant amount of smoke.
Some of the woodchips will be sold to wholesalers, who will turn it into your normal, garden-variety landscaping mulch.
The county's also giving loads of mulch to farmers 'for rehabilitating their fields that … lost topsoil from the storm.'
Clearing the backstock of woodchips could take 'months and months,' Jones said, but said that he's been happy to be wrong about that kind of estimate before.
'I thought we would be doing the roadside debris program for 12 months, and it's turned out to be seven, eight.'
May 1 was the deadline to put debris out along the roadside for pickup, but the county is still in the thick of picking up all of it. Jones said in a May 21 Board of Commissioners Meeting that he hopes to finish that process by the end of June.
More: 4.2 million cubic yards of Helene debris has been removed. What to know about debris deadlines
More: Henderson County shares storm debris update, spending concerns, at Board meeting
Citizen Times reporter Will Hoffman contributed to this report.
George Fabe Russell is the Henderson County Reporter for the Hendersonville Times-News. Tips, questions, comments? Email him at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Hendersonville Times-News: Answer Man: Where is Hurricane Helene debris going?