Reliability under water: How Baxter Healthcare rebuilt an essential supply chain after Hurricane Helene

When Hurricane Helene roared through the mountains of western North Carolina, it didn’t just take down trees and bridges—it nearly took down a lifeline for U.S. hospitals.

At Baxter Healthcare’s North Cove facility, mud and floodwater swallowed production floors, silenced machines, and threatened the nation’s critical supply of IV bags. The team at Baxter Healthcare learned that resilience isn’t just a plant metric—it’s a human one. And still, in the middle of that chaos, reliability principles quietly proved their worth, reminding everyone what reliability really means when everything breaks at once.

In October at the Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP) annual conference, Robert (Bobby Lee) Gilliam, reliability engineering superintendent at Baxter Healthcare, recounted his personal and professional experience of Hurricane Helene, which devastated the manufacturing facility where he works in Marion, NC.

The Baxter Healthcare facility was built in 1972 and is around 1.4 million square feet total (about 32 acres) with 1 million square feet of manufacturing space. It fills, packages, sterilizes, and ships IV bags. “We mix our own solution there. We pull 1.8 million gallons of water a day from the ground there,” he said.

Baxter supplies the U.S. with 70% of the country’s IV bags. “When this stock got hit and we went down, there was an IV bag shortage due to this facility going down,” Gilliam said. The facility, depending on uptime, produces around 1.8 million units a day. One other interesting side note about the IV bags is that Nike uses the same machinery to make its Nike Air bags. “If you wear Nike Airs, the same machine is used to make an IV bag,” Gilliam said.

Hurricane Helene tests the limits of maintenance and reliability

Last fall, it rained for a week straight leading up to Hurricane Helene, and the storm dropped 40 trillion gallons of water in western North Carolina through the night on September 27, 2024. “This is enough water to fill up the Cowboys Stadium 51,000 times. That's how much water fell on our area. Also, there was no warning of this. We didn't know that it was going to be this bad. No one was prepared for it. We didn't have fuel stored up. We didn't have food stored up, so it was amazing to see how the community came together,” he said.

Western North Carolina is a mountainous area, where the terrain added to the flood damage. “If you've never been to the mountains, the mountains have valleys. We call them hollers, where I'm from, so you've got the hollers and the water just funnels down into streams and creeks,” Gilliam said. The water created more than 2,000 mudslides, also destroying about 2,000 bridges.

“There are back roads that you can take to get to places, but if you don't know those back roads, it was really hard to get to where you needed to go,” Gilliam said. Some bridges still haven’t been replaced. The Baxter Healthcare facility got a temporary bridge rather quickly after the storm, and they only recently opened the new replacement bridge about a year after the storm.

During Hurricane Helene wind speeds on Mount Mitchell were recorded at 140 mph, which started taking down trees. In total, about 821,000 acres were damaged from flooding and downed trees. During the storm Gilliam was on the phone with his father-in-law who was noting each tree as it went down around and on the house. "He had to cut over 100 trees to get from his house to the main road, and his driveway isn't very long," Gilliam said.

At the North Carolina Baxter facility, along with the main bridge, the damage inside and out was like nothing they had ever seen, Gilliam recalled. The cooling ponds outside of the facility were completely filled with sand and debris, and the concrete foundation was busted. The facility inside was entirely covered with mud. The building layout is basically a straight line, and the flooding came in through the back of the facility and ran all the way throughout, covering everything in mud and water.

“While I was in there doing assessments on equipment, I actually found a salamander in some of the drains, and there were fish that were found as well throughout the facility. So it was definitely different times,” he added.

After the storm, 170,000 home and businesses in the area were without power, and 108 people lost their lives, including one Baxter employee.

“Some people were without power for months. It wasn't just a little power outage. I was very fortunate. I live on the main road, and I got power back within a couple of days. When that happened, I had neighbors come over. They set up a supply station at our house, and we fed people. My neighbors were cooking and smoking ribs and pork butts, and we fed over 54 people one day just from my front yard. My mom came and stayed and was doing people's laundry, and I'd go to work all day and come back and there would be 10 people in the house needing to take showers. It was a great moment to see how community truly comes together in a disaster home,” Gilliam said.

During his free time, Gilliam likes to fish, and he showed a picture of the first trout he caught after the story. “I remember catching that fish. This is going to sound crazy, but I almost cried because I didn't think there was going to be trout in the water. All the banks have been stripped of the laurel bushes, we call them, and all the moss has been stripped off the rocks. Everything was just different. These mudslides would come down stream beds, and they would cause a huge log jam. It would dam up the creek, and then all that would release and then everybody below it just felt the wrath of the water that was coming.”

Monumental clean up restores the country’s IV bag supply

While Gilliam was helping his family and community, he was also working long hours at Baxter to repair and restore production. Production in one area was restored within a month, but it took incredible investment and manhours. “It took a lot of money to make this happen,” he added. The production line for one-liter IV bags, which were the biggest demand, was the initial focus.

Gilliam has a strong background in maintenance, where he started at Baxter. This has helped him as reliability supervisor and also proved useful in the throes of disaster. “In that moment of disaster recovery, it wasn't time for me to be preaching reliability engineer. It was time for me to take on new incentives to help the company get up and start producing product quicker,” Gilliam said.

More than 2.5 million hours of labor went into the cleaning effort. Gilliam said that included 26,000 maintenance hours in three months, and the number is probably higher because not everything was documented. “There was a long time there we were working without any power,” Gilliam said.

Employees were working excruciating hours, six to seven, 12-hour days straight, and also trying to do repairs and put their lives back together at home. Gilliam finally convinced his boss to do a split schedule. “We were killing our people. These people also have a life outside of Baxter, so now we’ve got to try to balance the business and their personal life,” Gilliam said. The staff split on a Tuesday through Saturday and Sunday through Thursday, 10-hour a day schedule.

The facility also had 5,000 additional helpers to clean the site, including local help and third-party contractors. “People running shovels. People using toothbrushes,” Gilliam said. “If it looked muddy, by golly, you scrubbed it.”

Process air remediation was a huge rebuilding project. At the facility, anything that comes in contact with product is cleaned with processed air. “Now we had areas in our plant that were 36 inches underwater. We have filtration systems that this goes through, and those were underwater, so we had to rebuild 60 assets in six weeks,” Gilliam said. There was no way to calculate or pull from the CMMS exactly how much pneumatic tubing needed to be replaced.

“We ordered miles of tubing. I'm not kidding. It was a lot of pneumatic tubing that we ordered, and we had to learn a new process,” Gilliam said. “I'm in reliability engineering. It's not necessarily my job to rebuild things, but this is what the business needed. So we took on the challenge, we rose above and we did the impossible.”

The reliability department invested more than 2,000 labor hours into rebuilding the air system. “There were moments where, gosh, one day I think I worked 18-19 hours to try to get some stuff done and things in place, things that needed to happen,” Gilliam said. “Maintenance did a fantastic job at rebuilding these assets.”

Gilliam said one thing to remember in disaster recovery is don't let pride get in your way. “Pride is a luxury that sometimes you can't afford. I'm a reliability engineering superintendent, but it wasn't time for me to flex that muscle. It was time for me to pick up the broom and sweep. It was time for me to jump in with mechanics and work with them and snatch chains out or cylinders, run new cables,” Gilliam said.

To learn how reliability process management helped restore production after the storm, check back on Thursday for part two of this article series.