Some travel routes will be changed forever in Helene’s aftermath

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — As of Tuesday evening, NCDOT has reported it has hundreds of crew members in Western North Carolina who have continued to dig whole neighborhood roads out of the dirt left behind by Tropical Storm Helene.

According to DriveNC.gov , there has continued to be a large spread of when some of these locations will be cleared enough for traffic, with some areas in a state of limbo such as dozens of miles of Interstate 40.

When these roads do become open again, however, they could look entirely different and may include completely different routes than what people remember.

“It’s not so much the damage it did to one road itself, it’s the whole network,” explained Dr. Stephanie Pilkington.

She is a professor at UNC Charlotte and studies Civil and Environmental Engineering .

She is also a part of the StEER network , which consists of a group of individuals who study natural disaster impacts on the current infrastructure of these locations.

This typically includes buildings and roads, and has led to a deeper understanding of what construction approaches have been working; both from the past and the present.

While she has not directly visited locations in Western North Carolina, she shared her insight with Queen City News on how some of these roadways could be fixed.

“You have to start from the outside and work your way in,” she explained in regards to the overall approach. “NCDOT is having to assess what is the most amount of people [we] can help all at once.”

This is why resources were quicker to respond to Asheville when compared to the mountain communities.

When asked about the reconstruction of Interstate 40, Dr. Pilkington was able to provide context for a single section, which has also shed light on a potential approach for the whole roadway.

From her professional opinion, she explained that the approach will depend on how much erosion was caused by the water, and how much soil was moved underneath some of the structure that remained.

“It’s hard to see from the picture,” she said. “But the water might have gotten behind the [wall].”

The options she sees are to either “bring in dirt, and soil, and backfill what was eroded.” Crews could then rebuild the retraining wall and pave in the same path that existed before the collapse.

That, however, will depend on how much was eroded.

Another viable option would be to build a bridge over the new path of the river.

A third, and more expensive option, would involve “blasting” the mountain.

“Blasting on the other side of the river to expand the highway that way,” Dr. Pilkington explained.

This type of work, however, became more tricky the further up the mountain you go.

In the more rural parts impacted, or those along heavy tree-covered areas, crews will have to assess how much vegetation they can safely clear to rebuild with the number of crews it will take to do so.

According to Dr. Pilkington’s research, North Carolina’s, “dense vegetation is critical to maintaining stability of the slopes. So vegetation, so trees,  bushes,  what have you, their roots. Whereas they dig down into the soil and actually provide stability to the slopes. And so you don’t want to remove those . . . That’s kind of keeping everything in place.”

She also stressed that if too much is removed then “the soil can become looser and flow easier.”

Out of the images that have come out of Western North Carolina, she stressed that the photos and videos which depict a river’s path completely change, worry her the most.

That is because the river, in some cases, flows into where the road used to be.

“Meandering rivers change their paths over time. This storm accelerated it by several years,” she explained.

This will make it more difficult to fix, and in some cases, a completely new route will need to be paved.

“You could make a little bridge over, but you really don’t want to fight it’s new flow pattern. That could make issues later on down the road.”

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