The Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration has released its findings from an investigation into Impact Plastics, Inc., a Unicoi County business that saw multiple employees die in flooding from Helene.

TOSHA says the management at Impact Plastics gave employees sufficient time to leave the facility safely and that the deaths of employees were not work-related.

According to the report, after flash flood warnings were issued for Unicoi County on September 27th, employees were told to move their cars to higher ground at 10 a.m. By 10:39 a.m., the facility lost power, and by 10:51 a.m., employees were reportedly told they could leave.

Just after noon, TOSHA says the last known evacuees left and flooding rapidly intensified, resulting in cars floating away. By almost 2 p.m., the semi-truck and trailer hit a tree, resulting in the large spools of pipe to be dislodged and people clinging to them as they were swept away.

Six of those people were rescued about a half-mile downstream, while six others, five Impact Plastics employees and an independent contractor, died.

In the days that followed, TOSHA went to the work site and found that there was no evidence that employees were threatened with termination or forced to work beyond a safe evacuation point.

As a result, TOSHA did not recommend any citations against Impact Plastics but did recommend taking steps to minimize the possibility of a similar event happening. These include a site-specific severe weather emergency plan, training employees and management to recognize potential hazards of severe weather and to provide weather emergency training.