The hurricane took away the love of his life after 35 years of never separating

ERWIN, Tenn. (AP) — Jerry and Sibrina Barrett never spent a day apart for 35 years. They worked long hours, never took vacations, and liked to relax at home with their son. They had no idea a hurricane could hit them in the mountains of East Tennessee.

At their home in Johnson City, they just learned that Hurricane Helene had made landfall in Florida on September 26. The next day it was raining heavily, so Sibrina was late for her weekly cleaning job at the Impact plastics factory.

It was the last time they saw each other.

Today, Sibrina 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 over the back of a kitchen chair. Jerry knows that someday he will have to remove them, but not yet.

Helene, the deadliest storm to hit the continental United States since Katrina in 2005, caused catastrophic damage. At least 221 people died. Many, like Sibrina, drowned in floods hundreds of miles inland. Behind every number is a person whose absence is deeply felt.

“We were just trying to enjoy life.”

She was 17 and he was 20 when they met, and “35 years later, we were never apart,” Jerry said.

At first, they would ride around in Jerry’s Camaro and turn up the volume on the stereo, which “you could hear from a distance,” he jokes. They were “with a group of friends or something, maybe we would park and sit and chat” between her night shifts as a waitress.

“We weren’t really wild or anything. “We were just a couple of young people trying to enjoy life a little,” he said.

A few years later, she became pregnant. They got married and built their future, in a mobile home in the same community where Jerry has lived his entire life.

“Neither she nor I had much when we were kids,” Jerry says. “We weren’t poor, but we also didn’t wear Levi’s or Nikes and stuff.”

They were both workaholics. He repairs ventilation, heating and air conditioning systems, but she was proud to be the main breadwinner in the family. Six days a week, he did a morning cleaning job, and then cleaned a private school in the afternoon. Clients loved her for her thoroughness, sometimes going over areas that another team had already cleaned until they were satisfied.

“Working making money, that’s how you’re going to have something,” Jerry says. “She spoiled me and my son. That’s exactly what he did.”

Caimen is now 21 years old, but the first thing visitors see in the house he shares with his father is a coffee table-sized resin model of characters from the anime Dragonball Z. Dozens of smaller models fill a display case in the living room. Even more adorn the hallway. Sibrina ordered the figures and they assembled them together. Some came from Japan and cost thousands of dollars.

“We decided to enjoy it as we went along, instead of trying to have a ton of money for retirement or for our old age,” Jerry said. Given what happened, “I’m pretty glad I did it.”

One of the display cases now contains Sibrina’s urn.

The flood

Sibrina hated driving in bad weather, so she arrived late to Impact Plastics on September 27. Water used to pool in the factory parking lot, but he called Jerry on his break to let him know it was higher than usual. Then he knocked again: the water had risen to the bottom of his car door. Jerry put away his tools and drove to pick her up, but the highway exit was blocked.

“Don’t worry about trying to get here,” she told him. “He told me, ‘Go home. Looks like I’m going to be here for a few hours.’”

Jerry learned from other people what happened next. As the water continued to rise, Sibrina and nine other workers took shelter at the highest point: the bed of a trailer loaded with huge coils of plastic pipe. It wasn’t tall enough. They called 911, but rescuers were busy with another emergency: dozens of people were trapped on the roof of a nearby hospital.

The truck then overturned, causing the workers to fall into the water. Some managed to float in the pipe and were swept into a pile of rubble. Sibrina was one of the six who died.

Few Americans think that inland areas are particularly vulnerable to severe weather, but places like Erwin, in a valley along the Nolichucky River, are increasingly prone to disasters.

Jerry ended the call with Sibrina and returned to work. He had no idea how bad the flooding was and only found out she was missing until several hours later. He tried looking for clues in YouTube videos. Eight days passed before his body was recovered.

The lawsuit

Jerry’s attorney, Luke Widener, said workers depended on management to learn about outside dangers 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 already under water.

Widener also represents Zinnia Adkins, who earned $11.50 an hour as a temporary employee at Impact Plastics. She is alive, he said, because a co-worker held her firmly under the water, which was up to her chest. He doesn’t know how to swim and is deathly afraid of spiders, which were all over the surface of the water. Months later, he still sleeps on the couch because the bed seems too open and unsafe.

“A lot of good people lost their lives that day,” Adkins said. “It’s just a memory that I have a hard time reliving.”

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 allowed to stop working with enough time to escape.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the state workplace safety office have already opened investigations.