The Long Road to Rebuilding

In the three weeks since Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina, 677 roads have been reopened. But another 582 remained closed as of October 15, and state Department of Transportation officials and engineers alike have a hard time saying when they might be restored.

“There is no time frame right now because the damage is so devastating,” said David Uchiyama, a communications officer for the NCDOT. “It’s in so many different locations, and it’s in so many different forms.”

Uchiyama said the department has identified more than 7,000 different sites of road damage. That includes 654 bridges, and at least 100 of them will require replacement—a number the department anticipates will increase. 

It’s difficult to determine a timeline for those repairs, Uchiyama said, because some locations are remote and the nature of the damage varies. 

Rebuilding will also take several billion dollars, said Aaron Moody, assistant director of communications for NCDOT. If each bridge costs $1 million to address—which he said is an extremely low-balled estimate—the bridges alone would cost $100 million. Whether that money comes from the state or federal level depends on what kind of road is being repaired and what entity owns it.

Much of the money from the federal level used to repair highways and other federal-funded infrastructure will come in the form of reimbursement after repairs have started or finished being made. The $273 million Helene relief bill passed last week did not include funding for such repairs; state Sen. Timothy Moffitt, a Republican who represents Polk, Rutherford, and Henderson counties, told The Assembly that he expects that will be part of additional funding measures as needs become more clear.

Triage and Transformation

Engineering experts say fixing the roads is a matter of assessing each individual area of destruction. Tara Cavalline, a civil engineering technology and construction management professor at UNC-Charlotte, emphasized that rebuilding isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and the ultimate goal is to get the infrastructure to work as well as it once did, if not better.

In the short-term, Shane Underwood, a civil, construction, and environmental engineering professor at N.C. State University, said the NCDOT’s triage process in the immediate aftermath of a disaster typically includes patching up roads so they are simply passable. 

Roads with more severe damage could be filled with gravel and compacted to make up for the lost ground that rain and standing water have eroded. While embankments and side slopes are often the first to erode, severe cases saw the roadway itself being washed away. 

Another challenge: Regular rain in the future could continue the erosion.

“They’ll just try to patch that and stop it from continuing because we’ve had this major hurricane, but there’s still going to be rain in the area,” Underwood said. “If you’ve got a shoulder or a ditch that’s been damaged, they don’t want the regular rain events to exacerbate that, so they’re going to try to get something that will stabilize and make it safe.”

The department will eventually return to make more substantive repairs, but Underwood said that process could take up to three years. Areas that were already due for significant repairs may receive attention sooner rather than later, but roads that weren’t already scheduled for repairs for five to 10 years could wait longer.

In severe cases, mountainous areas like Western North Carolina have seen entire mountainsides destroyed, including those that once harbored a roadway. In such cases, Cavalline said engineers have to consider what earth stability issues are at play before planning how to rebuild.

“If you had a landslide and it wiped out the road, a bridge may not be a feasible solution because you don’t know how far that earth is unstable,” Cavalline said. “You have to really assess each location and figure out what is currently capable of supporting your engineered solution. I don’t think, especially with those landslide areas, that you have a one-size-fits-all solution.”

Uchiyama said the number one priority of the NCDOT is ensuring residents can get out of areas impacted by Helene. As temporary repairs begin, the focus will be on allowing people to resume their day-to-day activities. 

“We know that lives are forever changed, but by connecting people to their homes, to their jobs, we can return at least some sense of normalcy with those temporary repairs,” Uchiyama said.

As those steps are taken, Uchiyama said engineers and designers will be planning permanent repairs designed to withstand large storms and, hopefully, last for decades.

Repairs often entail more than just the roads themselves. Underwood said it’s not uncommon to discover that infrastructure is outdated and needs to be replaced. He pointed to culverts—the drainage pipes that run perpendicular under roads so water can flow from one side of the street to the other—as an example.

“In some cases, they may have predated formal design procedures for the state,” Underwood said. “From there, just checking the design could have a substantial effect on the west. I don’t know what the consequences are going to be because I haven’t seen the failures, but it’s got to be related to the velocity of the water that’s going through.”

Uchiyama said NCDOT has discovered 688 damaged culvert sites. 

Damaged roadways and damaged culverts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Cavalline said there could be scenarios where the roadway is destroyed but the culvert is intact. However, that doesn’t mean those culverts are still desirable. Engineers might still elect to replace them in favor of a larger size with a higher capacity for water flow.

“It depends on what each site looks like and funds available,” Cavalline said. “That’s one piece—what is an economically feasible solution for each location that gives them best odds of getting back the service and meeting their own design standards and construction standards. If engineers would like to enhance the resilience of a roadway a bit more, that’s always an option, but it comes at additional costs that must be considered.”

Underwood said secondary roads—like local roads that connect to major highways—are more likely to have this outdated infrastructure and experience issues because of a lack of quality control. For example, engineers without formal experience might have made recommendations that worked for the last 50 years, but buckle under the pressure of a catastrophic event like Helene.

Alternative Routes

In the aftermath of disasters, building new infrastructure like a bridge or a bypass could aid an area’s ability to recover, but it could also result in further disruption and higher costs—especially given the sudden nature of a natural disaster.

“Building a bypass at the last minute is like trying to get your toilet repaired at 2 a.m.,” Underwood said. “It’s going to cost a lot more, you’re going to have to make certain allowances, and you’re going to probably have to do away with certain desires and the robustness of that design, and it may end up costing you more.”

Underwood invoked a 2013 landslide on Arizona’s Route 89 caused by seismic activity as an example of when a new bypass was the appropriate solution. The highway connected Flagstaff to Page, which is near the Glen Canyon Dam—a key water storage site for the western part of the country.

Route 89 was the sole main road in the area, and the alternative route was six hours longer. While the building of the bypass ultimately resulted in more efficient travel, it was an expensive and timely process that closed the road for two years.

In North Carolina’s case, the state already has an abundance of redundancy, or multiple routes between two points. Underwood said despite the closures along I-40, which primarily continue to affect the eastbound lanes near mile marker 3 in Haywood County, people can still move between Raleigh and Nashville—just not as efficiently. 

“There will be discussions about whether we need to provide a bypass or alternative routes, and does that give you sufficient redundancy to actually improve mobility?” Underwood said. “I don’t think that’s going to be the nature of where those discussions go. It’s possible, but I don’t think that’s going to be the nature.”

Additionally, in areas like I-40 where landslides have wiped out entire lanes and made the ground unstable, additional infrastructure might do more harm than good when the land is already in a vulnerable state.

Underwood said disasters of this magnitude make the public anxious to see repairs made and infrastructure improved—people want it done, and they want it done fast.

“People depend on infrastructure to do a lot, including protecting them from natural events,” Underwood said. “When the public sees the fragility and the consequences of that, it has an impact.”

Moody said the best thing residents and travelers can do is avoid using roads in high-damage areas as crews work on repairs. Closed and damaged roads can be found on the North Carolina Traffic and Travel website, and most navigation apps offer detour routes.

Kate Denning is a student at N.C. State University studying communication and religious studies. She currently serves as the editor-in-chief of the student-run newspaper, Technician.