We're in the Mills River.

This is a debris pile left behind by Hurricane Helene that's slated to be removed soon.

And we're looking for endangered mussels because there's a patch of them here and we want to relocate them before this debris is removed.

Hurricane Helene left debris in waterways across western North Carolina.

Anything that could be picked up by the floodwaters was washed into rivers and streams and left behind when the water receded.

People don't realize how bad it actually is.

Western North Carolina as a whole, just everywhere, got hammered really hard.

There's a lot of work.

It's going to be a long process.

Part of that process is removing debris from waterways.

Cameron is part of the team of contractors working in Henderson County, North Carolina, clearing debris from rivers and streams to mitigate the potential for property and infrastructure damage in future floods.

When you have this amount of debris in a waterway, it restricts flow on a large scale.

Other homes can get damaged.

Farmers' fields can get damaged.

Where it can be a major issue is when it starts accumulating and catching and making large debris piles that can either end up damming the river and causing problems that way or putting infrastructure at risk, especially bridges.

But for aquatic biologists like Luke, who spent the last nine years protecting species in Western North Carolina, not all woody debris is created equal.

Normally, stable woody debris plays an important role in riverbed structure.

When you get stable woody debris, it basically gets embedded in the substrate or it's anchored in the bank and it really slows down the flow.

If you take away everything that slows down flow or stabilizes substrate, nothing's going to be able to stabilize and accumulate.

That's not good for most species.

Among the river residents that benefit from stability are freshwater mussels, which are critical for water quality in the mills and downstream.

One of their major roles is they filter water.

It's kind of the foundation of the water quality of the French Broad River in Henderson County.

Across Western North Carolina, debris removal has been happening, but not always with this need to leave stable structure in place at the forefront.

I've had a front row seat living on the Swannanoa River.

I've seen a lot of very extensive debris removal.

There's been a lot of cases where there's nothing that's left.

After the storm, Luke and his colleagues realized that debris removal was more widespread than they expected.

Even in places that we weren't quite prepared for there to be any debris removals at all.

So we kind of shifted and that's been near 100% of my focus since then.

Trying to see what we can do to make sure we don't have further damage of our rivers and make sure they can bounce back.

Not just the rivers, but the species in them.

Because contractors in Henderson County are paid by linear foot of stream cleared, rather than by volume of debris removed, more selective debris removal and protection of what has been identified as high quality habitat has been possible in rivers like the mills.

It was in our contract of high quality water habitat.

We had to do a certain protocol.

We reached out to Luke.

He met us that morning.

It's been open arms ever since.

Luckily we know a lot of these places really well and like I can tell you, individual trees have been there for 5, 10 plus years.

It's good to keep that good stable habitat in place and sometimes it's not always easy for a contractor to make that judgment call.

What we're trying to do with Cam and them is kind of help speed up that process for them and maximize how much we can protect in the process.

Communication's key for sure.

He doesn't hold us up.

They're there to help.

It takes one phone call.

Cameron and his team also have to work closely with landowners to gain access to the river, which often runs through private property.

By having stream bank access for entry and exit and debris collection, they can minimize how much machinery is driving back and forth in the riverbed.

A lot of this stuff's so big you can't do it by hand.

We're minimizing the erosion because we're coming in, we're doing a section, then we're getting out and we're not running that one route way too much.

It's a lot easier to repair a stream bank versus a riverbed.

So we try to navigate in between like openings on the riverbank so we're not tearing trees down on the riverbank.

The landowner's working with us, the farmers are working with us.

It's a big help to minimize the eco damage.

I knew there was mussels in the mills.

I didn't know how important they were.

The Mills River is home to the slipper shell mussel.

It's a state endangered mussel.

Mills River is really the only place that we have them in any good number.

We're about to go into the Mills River and try and find some slipper shell mussels so we can move them out of harm's way.

The debris pile we were visiting illustrated how complicated it is to remove storm-related woody debris while leaving behind stable trees and branches.

The orange marks are marks for things we want to keep there if possible.

There's clearly debris piling up there and it didn't look like that three weeks ago.

So I'm trying to see what we can do to cut down on that kind of thing happening while also protecting that bank and also protecting the in-stream habitat.

Luke swam into the debris pile to locate the slipper shells.

There's at least a couple mussels right here.

Oh, cool.

They just kind of look like another kind of rock on the bottom of the river.

Mike Perkins always describes them as rocks that suck.

A cheeky reference to their filtering abilities.

We started collecting the mussels Luke had spotted and quickly noticed they were tagged.

This is the originally mussel that we took and held at the hatchery and then put it back and still have it.

I watched as Luke spotted mussels amongst similar looking rocks on the riverbed and looked down and noticed one that had been stirred up out of the sand.

I did my part.

There you go.

I spotted one.

20% increase.

I mean, he came all the way to the surface.

That was way easier to spot than the first ones we got.

This is the only good population we have for the species in the state, the Mills River.

This is like one of the only places that you can find any at all, let alone several.

After collecting all of the slipper shells we could find, we headed downstream to a spot where debris removal had already happened to relocate our haul in a spot where Luke found a wild slipper shell already happily embedded in the sand.

And just like that, our transplants had a new home.

Being able to relocate mussels like these and protect river habitat creates hope for future populations of species important to the health of the river.

But still, the debris removal process is not always straightforward.

There's an impossible amount of considerations when you're talking about what to protect and what to take.

There's a lot of situations where stable woody debris even has a new tree on it that's collecting debris and with the heavy machine that's required for some of this, it's like really hard to just pick and choose.

So there's just a lot of challenges trying to make sure that we protect what we can but also do what needs to be done to meet in the middle, protect people, protect property, protect the animals.

Every situation is different but that's why it's really important for me to get really involved with Cameron, L&S, and all those folks.

And they've been really good about understanding and listening to my concerns while still trying to get the job done.

For Cameron and a lot of his crew, the future of rivers like the Mills hits close to home.

I mean I grew up fishing this river.

Born and raised here.

Everybody loves this river.

A lot of people fish it, float it, snorkel in it.

They do a little bit of everything.

It's something that we need to protect and we need to be cautious of how we do the cleanup.

[upbeat music] ♪