2024 A Look Back: Continuous groan award
Damage to Interstate 40 in Haywood County has become a focal point of Hurricane Helene’s destructiveness. Cory Vaillancourt photo
The fallout immediately following the disaster wrought by Hurricane Helene was tragic and traumatizing, but as time has gone on and debris piles slowly disappear, certain secondary woes are being fully realized.
Chief among those may be Interstate 40, which goes through Haywood County from Buncombe and north up to the Tennessee state line. From the state line back to around the four-mile marker, the eastbound lane is in various states of existence. Sometimes, the road seems stable, in some places it’s crumbling and in some places, it simply isn’t there anymore.
Once the North Carolina Department of Transportation was able to get in and assess the damage, a timeline began to emerge for when some kind of traffic might be able to flow along the vital corridor.
That wasn’t all. Also visiting the most fractured bit of roadway was United States Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Thom Tillis, Gov. Roy Cooper, and North Carolina Transportation Secretary Joey Hopkins, who all promised they’d fight for resources and expedite the repairs necessary to open up two lanes for traffic, and eventually, the whole highway. The group of officials promised to “build back better.”
“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.
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“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.
NCDOT encouraged anyone and everyone with an idea to let their thoughts be known, and recommendations flooded in. While the NCDOT hasn’t tipped its hand, people seem to be most excited about a potential viaduct that would result in a large roadway built on a series of massive support structures built over the Pigeon River.
But not so fast. First comes restoring two-lane traffic.
To stabilize the earth under the westbound lanes to the degree that traffic could pass over the road, contractors drilled giant soil nails into the side of the embankment over the river.
While things seemed to be going well and two-way traffic was supposed to open up sometime this month, Mother Nature, as she is wont to do, laughed at the propensity of humans to feel certain about, well, anything.
Only a couple of weeks ago, as the date for opening two lanes neared, another large landslide occurred that compromised a whole new section of the highway, meaning more soil nails and more time.
It hasn’t yet been announced when the highway may reopen.
