Hurricane Helene and subsequent cleanup efforts have decimated North America’s most biodiverse waters
Inside Climate Change reports:
In Knoxville, Tennessee, there’s a minuscule warehouse tucked off the side of the road. Its tiny gravel parking lot is full. In the back of the cramped, wood-paneled building are dozens of aquarium tanks filled with endangered, threatened, imperiled, and at-risk fish species.
This is Conservation Fisheries Incorporated (CFI), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving Appalachian freshwater diversity. It began as a graduate school project in the 1980s and has grown into a conservation powerhouse.
One of the threatened species that CFI works with is the eastern hellbender, colloquially called the “snot otter,” which resides across Appalachia and the Midwest. Hellbenders have been at risk for decades, and were proposed for addition to the federal endangered list in 2024. Sedimentation, pollution and habitat disruption are some of the greatest threats to eastern hellbenders—and 2024’s Hurricane Helene exacerbated all of those issues.
In 2025, after the catastrophic damages of the hurricane, Southern Appalachian rivers were deemed the third most endangered waterways in America. Researchers said many of the creatures in and around those waterways—with territories stretching into the Midwest and Southwest—are threatened, endangered or imperiled.
This is a gigantic area. The streams and rivers of Appalachia span around 400,000 miles. In the Southeastern region of Appalachia, these are North America’s most biodiverse freshwaters, housing 300 species of fish not found anywhere else—and more species of salamander than anywhere else in the world.
Eastern hellbenders reside beneath flat “shelter rocks”; according to Bo Baxter, director—and electrician, plumber, accountant, and whatever-else-needs-to-get-done—at CFI, Helene’s historic flooding scoured many areas of streams and rivers down to bedrock and deposited massive amounts of sediment and wreckage into others, disrupting these habitats. And during Helene, anything that was beside the rivers—or even near them—ended up in the water. Propane tanks, toxic chemicals and entire septic systems washed into Appalachia’s freshwater. [Continue reading…]