The long road ahead: NCDOT begins process toward massive I-40 repairs following Helene
Massive soil nails are being drilled into the earth to shore up the westbound lanes of I-40. NCDOT photo
As the rain from Hurricane Helene mercifully subsided around noon on Sept. 27, smaller creeks in Haywood County receded fairly quickly, the extra water from each flowing into larger tributaries before combining into the Pigeon River as it heads through a narrow gorge into Tennessee.
But as residents in some flooded areas breathed a sigh of relief, the nightmare was just beginning for motorists on I-40, which runs right alongside the Pigeon River for the last four miles or so before reaching Tennessee.
As the waters in the gorge raged, several parts of the crucial artery for interstate commerce fell off the steep ledge, leading to an emergency effort from N.C. Highway Patrol and NCDOT to get all motorists to safety. Miraculously, there were no deaths on that road, but now, anyone looking into the Pigeon River from the edge of the gorge will see chunks of asphalt and massive steel netting once tasked with holding the slope in place strewn about the gorge below.
While emergency responders had used both westbound lanes for the first week or so after the flood, on Oct. 3 word came down that the left-hand west bound lane — the lane closer to the river — was compromised, and now there is only one safe lane of travel through parts of that four-mile stretch, making I-40 the top priority out of thousands of necessary repairs required across Western North Carolina.
“Damage estimates from what we have been able to assess to this point are up to several billion dollars, and we’re not done,” said state Transportation Secretary Joey Hopkins. “The damage to our roads and bridges is like nothing we’ve ever seen after any storm, and this will be a long-term recovery operation. But we will be here until Western North Carolina can get back on its feet.”
Officials estimate the share of that expense that will be directed to the I-40 project will be well over $1 billion.
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The massive task that lies ahead for NCDOT when fixing I-40 received the notice of folks at the highest levels of the state and federal government. Last week Hopkins, Gov. Roy Cooper, Sen. Thom Tillis and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg all paid a visit to Haywood County and took questions from members of the media right in front of the largest washout the highway suffered.
“It’s one thing to see a photo; it’s another to stand here and look at just the shocking destructive power of this storm,” Buttigieg said. “It’s almost impossible to believe that water and wind alone could have torn apart rock and asphalt and the literal ground near where we’re standing right now.”
The section of I-40 through the gorge has long been a problem due to its steep walls, as explained by NCDOT engineer Wanda Payne, who works in the state’s 10 westernmost counties. Payne, who’s been in her current role four years now, said that in previous years, engineers and other NCDOT decisionmakers compared any weather event in the region to the previous high-water mark left in the wake of Hurricanes Frances and Ivan. She said the damage done from Helene is much more severe.
“We had all that rainfall leading up to the Friday event, so a lot of creeks were already high,” she said. “It made the river higher than it normally runs, and we saw a 1,000-year flood and in some river basins a 2,000-year flood.”
With Helene, once the Pigeon River started rising and rushing, erosion began.
“The water in the gorge couldn’t find a place to go, and it was such a high volume,” Payne said. “Once water gets into a weak place on a slope, it just keeps eroding.”
The first step in the repair process will be to stabilize the two westbound lanes. NCDOT has already signed an $8 million contract with Wright Brothers Construction out of Tennessee to stabilize those lanes by drilling soil nails deep into the earth. NCDOT hopes that process will be completed in January 2025.
While that shoring up will likely open the westbound lanes, in its current state, that doesn’t equate to opening up a westbound and eastbound lane of travel because one of those lanes would essentially turn into a construction zone. While there is a shoulder on the highway, Payne noted that it isn’t built to sustain a regular flow of traffic. However, she said they are looking at different solutions and that establishing traffic flow in both directions is the immediate priority.
Next comes the big fix. In the past — like following a 2009 landslide that shut the highway down for seven months — these repairs were relatively quick. This time, entire sections of the slope on which the highway sits have been washed away and won’t be easily replaced.
Payne said no one is certain what the ultimate fix will be for the highway. In fact, NCDOT put out a call for engineers far and wide to pitch potential solutions. There has been plenty of speculation of multiple kinds of solutions. While Payne said she and other engineers aren’t attaching themselves to any one idea, the prevailing theory among amateurs is that a viaduct is most likely. Payne said it’s certainly being considered.
One viaduct spanning a river that could be looked at as an example is the Hanging Lake Viaduct that carries I-70 along the Colorado River through a steep, narrow portion of Glenwood Canyon.
NCDOT hired the design firm RK&K, which began working Monday to first figure out how to safely get two-way traffic back on I-40.
“I would hope by the end of this year we’ll have an idea of when we could open up,” Payne said, adding that the firm is also considering what the big fix might be.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that the process to bring I-40 back in whatever form or fashion will be long — and expensive. At this point, it’s clear the federal government, which has already put $100 million toward initial road repairs in the region, will play a crucial role.
“The timeline has to be dictated by safety and led by engineering, but our role will be, above all to make sure that funding is not a barrier toward arriving at that answer for the future,” Buttigieg said.
When it comes to funding, Tillis is hoping his colleagues in Washington, D.C., refill the coffers that have been emptied by the initial response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton sooner than later. A letter signed by Tillis; fellow North Carolina Republican Sen. Tedd Budd; Georgia Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof; and Virgina Democratic Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine urges the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to submit a detailed supplemental appropriations request that considers the full cost of recovering from the disasters so Congress could expedite the supplemental appropriations needed.
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency will require significant additional funding to ensure it has the resources it needs for Hurricane Helene and Milton recovery, and additional federal funding will be required to support states and federal agencies’ emergency response efforts,” the letter reads.
In Haywood County, the visiting officials also talked about the need to build back in a more resilient way in the face of climate change. Experts predict there will be more severe storms every year considering warmer weather in the Gulf of Mexico causes hurricanes to pick up more moisture before making landfall.
From left, NCDOT Secretary Joey Hopkins, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Gov. Roy Cooper surveyed the damage along I-40 and took some questions from the press. Cory Vaillancourt photo
“I’d say it’s clear that to do right for the 2030s and 40s and 50s, we can’t have the same assumptions that led us in the 1950s,” Buttigieg said. “I hope and pray that nothing like this is visited upon this community ever again. But the reality is, the United States is in for more frequent and extreme weather events.”
Cooper and Tillis both agreed.
“We’ve got to stop this nonsense of trying to weaken building codes and understand that we are living in an environment influenced by climate change, where these storms are going to be more ferocious and more frequent,” Cooper said.
“We may need to rethink how we build those back for more resiliency in the future, versus just assuming we’re pushing dirt back into the existing roadbeds and putting bridge structures back where they once were if it no longer makes sense and it’s not in the long-term best interest of the communities,” Tillis said.
Once challenge no matter how I-40 is rebuilt will be prioritizing resources and manpower for that crucial repair against other necessary fixes that will allow access to communities that are isolated due to storm damage.
“That’s a significant amount of damage, and so even though it’s a top priority of ours, it will take a long time to fix that,” said Joey Hopkins of the N.C. Department of Transportation on Oct. 1. “We’re probably talking months at best. We’ve still got to evaluate that and do some assessments out there before we can determine what that solution is.”
Last week, Hopkins said that there are over 500 bridges damaged across the region with about 100 in need of replacement.
“We will prioritize those based on things like traffic volume, singular access, access to communities, and we will work in a priority to do that, because there’s not enough resources to do all that at one time,” he said.
Payne said that a challenge when prioritizing repairs is that, because of how widespread the damage was, there may be material scarcities when it comes to things like rocks, boulders, gravel and asphalt and even pipes.
“We even talked about going to South Carolina or Tennessee, but we haven’t gotten to that level yet,” Payne said.
Meanwhile, communities built around a tourism economy wait nervously. A 2010 report from the Appalachian Regional Commission outlined the economic impact of the closure of I-40 due to the 2009 landslide, which included hotel and motel revenue dropping by 50% to 80%.
“The negative economic effect of the rockslides is measurable for the communities in closest proximity to the rockslide site. Business revenue has decreased, employees have been laid off, and businesses are experiencing transportation cost increases,” the report reads.
In that report, it’s noted that business owners interviewed were “thankful” that the slide occurred after leaf season and the repairs occurred during winter, which is the slowest time for the tourism economy. That’s not the case this time around, and this situation is expected to take far longer to recover from — on the order of years, not months.
And the detrimental impact on industry is already being felt. Following the closure of I-40 and I-26 after Helene, Premier Magnesia, now Haywood County’s fifth largest employer, reported its transportation costs have risen between $90,000 and $100,000.
It’s true the stakes are high, but that didn’t seem lost on the bipartisan delegation that visited I-40 last week.
“We want everybody in impacted communities to know that we are in it for the long haul, that there is an entire family of federal agencies working to keep President Biden’s promise that we’re going to be here every step of the way,” Buttigieg said. “We know that’s not going to happen overnight. We’re working to do the things that have to happen immediately, advancing the funding for that … Other parts of this will take billions of dollars and months, if not years, but we’re already underway on that. We won’t rest until that new normal is available and stable for the people in these communities who had their lives upended through no fault of their own.”
