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by Lucas Thomae, Carolina Public Press
May 20, 2025

When Tropical Storm Helene tore across North Carolina in September, it left behind more than just downed trees and flooded homes. It ripped open a hidden fault line in the state’s transportation system — one that has existed for the state’s roads, largely unquestioned, for nearly a century.

North Carolina is one of just a handful of states where counties don’t own any public roads. Instead, the state’s Department of Transportation oversees nearly three quarters of its roadways, from rural stretches to urban highways. Towns and cities do own and maintain some roads within their own boundaries, but counties aren’t even allowed to do so.

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This centralized system, born out of the Great Depression, was designed to relieve local governments of financial burdens they couldn’t shoulder. But with billions of dollars in storm damage, drawn out emergency repairs and mounting pressure on state resources, questions are resurfacing: Should counties have more control over their roads? And would they even want it?

A system unlike most

North Carolina boasts one of the largest state-maintained road systems in the United States, second only to Texas.

“State-maintained” is the key phrase there.

Although both North Carolina and Texas own and maintain just over 80,000 miles of highway, the Lone Star State has nearly triple the amount of public roads once you account for those owned by towns and counties.

That’s because North Carolina has no county roads, even though one third of its population lives in rural areas. The state is one of only eight in the United States that have no roads owned at the county level. (Five of those states are in New England, where municipal governments own most public roads.)

In fact, North Carolina is one of only four states that own a majority of their public roads. This system gives the state’s Department of Transportation a massive amount of control when it comes to planning, repairs and upkeep of roadways.

But it didn’t always used to be this way.

So how did we get here?

A brief history of NC roads

For 200 years, counties controlled the roads of North Carolina. (Although for much of that period the transportation of people and goods happened primarily on trails, waterways and, eventually, railroads.)

The emergence of the modern automobile challenged that system.

Cars greatly increased the mobility of North Carolinians, and with that desire for movement came a greater demand for better roads to handle that traffic. Many public roads in the state had fallen into disrepair during the economic turmoil brought on by the Civil War.

A nationwide call for good roads was born out of the Progressive era around the turn of the 20th century.

In 1899, the state’s first Good Roads Association was established by Asheville residents to call on Buncombe County to improve its roadways. Many other local chapters sprung up across the state, and in 1915 Gov. Locke Craig established a commission to build a state highway system that would connect all 100 counties.

Such a project would require more than just county-level planning, and in 1921 the State Highway Act certified that the highway system would be maintained exclusively by the state government.

Ten years later, the state assumed control of most other public roads as well as the Great Depression sunk county governments into a budgetary crisis. North Carolina counties have been absolved (or excluded) from owning and maintaining roadways ever since.

The state of our roads

North Carolina has sometimes referred to itself as “The Good Roads State,” a nickname born more out of the branding of the state’s Good Roads Association than any objective measure.

But does that title still stick, all these years later?

It depends on whom you ask.

The Reason Foundation – a libertarian think tank – declared North Carolina first in the nation for road condition and cost-effectiveness in its Annual Highway Report published in March. However, that methodology rewarded North Carolina for spending less money on its roads relative to other states.

A separate analysis published last month by Construction Coverage ranked North Carolina 24th among the states in terms of road quality. That study found that 49% of the state’s major roadways are in “good” condition, 41% are in “fair” condition and 10% are in “poor” condition.

Those classifications were determined using a metric called International Roughness Index, which is a measure of the “bumpiness” of roads, according to Construction Coverage lead data analyst Michael Stromberg.

Although useful for comparing roads across large geographic areas, the roughness index isn’t a perfect measurement.

“Roughness is the best measure we have, and it’s pretty good, but it’s not comprehensive,” Stromberg told Carolina Public Press.

It won’t pick up rutting and cracking of roads, for example.

The ambiguity of determining road condition can lead to vastly different conclusions about the quality of a state’s roads, as evidenced by North Carolina’s paradoxical placements in the two aforementioned studies.

It also raises questions about how much control states should exercise over their public roads and how much money they should be putting into that effort.

The five states who own a majority of their public roads rank no higher than 20th in Construction Coverage’s rankings of road condition. However, three of those states – North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia – were top five in the Reason Foundation’s rankings mostly because of their relatively low spending.

The states with the most powerful transportation departments have opted for centralized decision-making in pursuit of cost-efficiency and scale — but that hasn’t translated into smoother rides.

When disaster strikes

The question of whether counties could do a better job of maintaining their roads is an unanswered one. The current system has been in place for so long that not many officials on either the state or county levels have questioned whether it is truly working as intended.

Both the Department of Transportation and North Carolina Association of County Commissioners were reluctant to give an opinion on whether or not counties should have more autonomy in the process of road maintenance.

Although state governments have deeper pockets, the money they spend on road maintenance can quickly get stretched thin by a large road system.

County governments, having a more immediate and intimate knowledge of their jurisdiction, could potentially conduct repairs and maintenance quicker than the state and without having to rely on the General Assembly to allocate funding for those projects.

Some states, wanting to drop smaller roads from their highway network, have occasionally set up turnback programs to relinquish control of specific roads back to the towns and counties in which they are located.

Aaron Moody, a communications officer for the Department of Transportation, told CPP that North Carolina has not attempted such a program on a widespread level.

“We are occasionally petitioned to abandon roads from the state system on a case-by-case basis through a very formal and public process,” he said in an email.

That only happens at the municipal level. It would take an act by the state legislature to undo the 1931 law that abolished county roads and put them in control of the Department of Transportation.

But even if the time it takes to repair and maintain roads would be faster under county control, those local governments may not want to take on the financial burden of doing so.

The Great Depression showed that a strong state road system can be a safety net for when disaster strikes. Tropical Storm Helene is the latest example.

The September storm caused an estimated $6 billion in damage to state roads, $1.7 billion to municipal roads and $460 million to private roads and bridges.

Although FEMA’s Public Assistance program covered much of the state’s and local governments’ emergency repair bills, it won’t cover all of the longer term repairs and mitigation projects. The state legislature and the Federal Highway Administration have also allocated millions of dollars in emergency relief spending for both public and private roads.

Meanwhile, county governments continue to be sidelined when it comes to those spending decisions.

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Roads in NC mostly controlled by DOT, not typical of other states appeared first on carolinapublicpress.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This content presents a thorough and fact-based overview of North Carolina’s road ownership and maintenance system without endorsing a specific political agenda. It discusses historical context, practical implications, and different perspectives on centralized versus local control in a balanced manner. The article includes data from various sources and highlights the complexity of funding and infrastructure management, which appeals to a broad political spectrum rather than leaning left or right.

Today’s round of questions, my smart-aleck replies and the real answers:

Question: Here’s your chance to unmask the huge coverup by local officials regarding the widespread electrical outage Saturday in large parts of Henderson and Buncombe counties. While WLOS and the Citizen-Times reported extensively about the breadth and scope, there has been no mention (to my knowledge) of the cause. They are completely ignoring  (or covering up) the fact that the outage coincided with a geomagnetic storm created by solar flares that for some reason targeted only our neck of the woods. Could this be because there is an energy vortex here in our area that creates a vulnerability to magnetic pulses that local officials do not want anyone to know about? There’s obviously something sinister going on here. We depend on the Watchdog to figure these things out.

My answer: I’d like to get the truth out there about all of this, but I also don’t want to wake up bound, gagged and hooded in the back of a black government SUV taking me to the special government hideout under Black Mountain.

Real answer: Let’s get some facts out there first. We did have kind of a strange power outage here in the mountains on Saturday afternoon into Saturday night. Throughout the region, more than 25,000 people were without power.

I say the outage was strange because the areas without power were kind of disjointed, including Black Mountain and Fletcher, for instance, but not many of the areas in between. So, it was kind of spotty.

As I live in Fletcher, I started getting text notices from Duke Energy at 5:38 p.m. about the outage, saying they expected the power to come back on by 9:45 p.m. As more texts came in, the projected restoration time got later, then sooner. 

Ultimately, the power came back on about 10:30 p.m. at my house, just in time for the AC to knock out the humidity. Duke also mentioned in the latter texts that the outage was “caused by damage to major power lines.”

On Monday, I reached out to Duke Energy spokesperson Bill Norton, who offered a little more detail but not all that I asked for.

“Thankfully, nothing to do with solar flares or bad actors — simply a massive tree taking out a transmission line, which affects far more customers than a tree taking out a typical distribution line,” Norton told me via email.

Norton said he gives my reader an A plus for creativity.

“Another reporter asked if the outage was related to cicadas. That might be an even bigger stretch than solar flares,” Norton said. 

No, Bill, we know the cicadas and their racket are part of a clandestine alien invasion.

Norton said the outage was caused “simply by a tree blown over by heavy winds Saturday evening, taking out a major transmission line at 5:36 p.m.”

“But it was A) a massive tree in B) a critical location that C) was hard to reach,” Norton said. “So an unusually large number of customers were affected, and restoration was challenging.”

Norton said the tree in question took out a transmission line “that runs east from the Asheville natural gas plant in Arden toward Mills Gap, then jogs back northwest to Oakley, then parallels I-40 east toward Swannanoa.”

“Along the way it intersects with a number of substations, the energy ‘exit ramps’ that bring power down to voltages suitable for local businesses and homes,” Norton said. “Each of those exit ramps was effectively closed, leading to the ‘pockets’ of outages you referenced.”

Norton used the analogy of the electric grid being similar to our transportation system, with the high-voltage transmission lines akin to interstates, substations are like exit ramps, and distribution lines like neighborhood streets.

“When a transmission line is knocked out, it affects large numbers of customers — nearly 34,000 in this case,” Norton said. “Just as would be the case if a highway were closed, there are limited rerouting options to get around a major transmission outage, particularly when dealing with lines going through forested mountain terrain.”

Duke was able to reroute around the outage for certain customers, restoring power for a few thousand just before 8 p.m., and another 8,500 by 9:20 p.m.

“But that was the limit of the electric grid’s ‘back roads’ that could be used,” Norton said. “Power came back on for the rest once the transmission line was fixed. Power was restored to those customers by 10:59 p.m. Saturday evening.”

By the way, the tree that fell was just outside of Duke’s right of way, but it was still tall enough to hit the big transmission lines by the Porters Cove Road exit off I-40. Norton said because of the extreme terrain, “our lineworkers had to safely climb the steel transmission tower to restore power to our customers.”

Duke has been “aggressively” trimming a lot of trees since Helene hit the area Sept. 27, and inspecting hard-to-reach areas by helicopters. 

“Unfortunately, while some trees look healthy upon visual inspection, they aren’t healthy enough to withstand high winds. That was the case on Saturday evening,” Norton said. “We will continue with our systematic transmission corridor inspections to limit outages like this to the greatest extent possible.”

But I will note that my reader is correct about a geomagnetic storm occurring Saturday, according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.

“There were geomagnetic storm levels reached later on Friday evening into the Saturday morning hours,” Shawn Dahl, the center’s service coordinator, told me via email.

But these storm levels “were only G1-G2 levels of activity, meaning they were minor to moderate,” Dahl added.

“These levels of geomagnetic storm conditions are not normally enough to cause geomagnetic induced currents of concern on the high voltage transformers and into the large transformers controlling bulk transmission electrical flow,” Dahl said. “Even localized geomagnetic disturbance conditions near the area did not appear to reach anything beyond the G1-G2 equivalent. These types of GMD levels are normally quite easily managed by transmission operation centers.”

Dahl also noted that during the time frame of the power outages — late Saturday afternoon into the evening — the geomagnetic disturbance levels were back below G1 levels at that time.

“Bottom line: We would be very surprised if the power outage were due to anything other than what Duke Energy states,” Dahl said.

If big solar storms are coming, the Space Weather Prediction Center issues warnings. 

“We at SWPC notify the power grid of most of North America when G3 (strong) or greater levels are expected and/or reached because of the growing presence of geomagnetic induced currents onto the electrical transmission systems,” Dahl said. “(These are) still normally manageable by the reliability coordinators and transmission operation centers, thanks to the early notice and updates we provide as this level of storms develop and progress.”

I also checked in with the National Weather Service, but meteorologist Patrick Moore said the Space Weather folks are the experts on solar flares and geomagnetic storms. Moore did confirm that we had a fairly strong thunderstorm pass through the Asheville area in the early morning hours of Saturday, starting around 

That storm had a high wind gust of 37 mph, but that was at 2:24 in the morning, Moore said. “It didn’t gust any higher than that during the day,” he said.

The upshot is that the “energy vortex/geomagnetic storm” theory is taking a beating here today, and that makes me a little sad. But hey, I still have faith in the giant healing crystal beneath Mt. Pisgah.

Question: We found the Barnes & Noble at Biltmore Park closed without notice (Sunday), and a sign on the door that read, “closed for maintenance.”  It seems odd that a store that size would be closed for maintenance, suggesting there could be some public safety problem.

My answer: I suspect they’re just installing a geomagnetic storm shield. You’ll thank them when their power’s still on and everybody else is sitting in the dark.

Real answer: “It’s just repairs that we’re doing on the building,” a store manager told me Monday. “I’m not really at liberty to disclose anything, but we should be open (Tuesday) or the next day.”

The store, which has been closed since May 2, will reopen “without any public safety issue,” she said.

I also reached out to the Barnes & Noble corporate office, and Janine Flanigan, vice president of store planning and design, offered a little more detail.

“We had some maintenance issues in the ceiling and duct work that needed to be addressed,” Flanigan said via email late Monday afternoon. “It’s been fixed.  As of a few minutes ago we are happy to confirm we will be reopening (Tuesday).”

I did check on current construction or building permits on file with the City of Asheville’s Development Services portal but found none.

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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Got a question? Send it to John Boyle at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org or 828-337-0941. His Answer Man columns appear each Tuesday and Friday. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/

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Original article

The post Power outage caused by tree falling, or more ‘sinister’ geomagnetic storm? Barnes & Noble in Biltmore Park closed for “maintenance?” When will it reopen? • Asheville Watchdog appeared first on avlwatchdog.org

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This content adopts a neutral and fact-based approach, addressing a local issue about a power outage with a blend of light humor and investigative reporting. It provides explanations from official sources and debunks conspiracy theories without promoting a political agenda. The tone is pragmatic and community-focused, typical of local watchdog journalism aiming to inform the public without evident left- or right-leaning bias.