While nearly all the Helene-damaged bridges in Buncombe County have been temporarily repaired, along with hundreds of roadbed washouts, permanent repairs on many of these sites may take years, cost millions of dollars and cause inconveniences in some cases for drivers.

The tropical storm, which hit the area Sept. 27, washed out 44 bridges in the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s seven-county Division 13, which includes Buncombe. By Jan. 28, the NCDOT and its contractors had 39 back in service.

“Most of them are temporary, one-lane structures,” said Jody Lawrence, assistant division construction engineer with the NCDOT, noting they were designed to foster quicker access to communities.

Chris Deyton, deputy division engineer with the NCDOT, said permanent bridge replacements are built for a 100-year lifespan and to withstand a 100-year storm event, “whereas these (temporary bridges) aren’t designed to that (standard).

“They can go in quicker, but they’re not designed to be there forever — they’re designed to be there for a few years till we can get the permanent one in,” Deyton said.

A spreadsheet the NCDOT provided of road damage sites in Division 13 shows 4,270 items. Of those, 428 involve bridge work or replacement. In Buncombe County, the spreadsheet shows 1,113 damage sites on tap, including 149 bridges.

“We have a lot more bridges in this part of the state than the rest of the state because of all the little streams and creeks that meander around through it,” Deyton said.

The NCDOT estimates Helene-related road repairs statewide will total about $5 billion, which includes $3.3 billion in Division 13 — about $200 million of that in Buncombe County.

Contracts coming soon for bridge work

Permanent work will start soon. 

Lawrence said the DOT is in the process of awarding contracts, and all should be granted by the end of February or the middle of March. Many are for smaller, two-lane bridges.

“A lot of these that were washed out were single-span, short bridges, so they can be built in 90 to 120 days,” Lawrence said. “That will be the time frame (on construction).”

Larger, multispan bridges will take 18-24 months to build, Lawrence said.

“But that’s construction,” Deyton said. “The design, that will take a year or so up to that, a lot of times.”

Division 13 has 10 multispan bridges, including one in Buncombe County, that need replacement.

The temporary bridges will remain in place during construction of the permanent ones, as the NCDOT tried to install the temporary bridges offline from the existing bridge structures. The permanent bridges will go back in the original alignment.

A lot of the smaller bridges are made of timber and are quicker to construct. 

“The majority of our bridges are timber bridges,” Deyton said. “In fact, our division has the most timber bridges in the state.”

On Jan. 24, President Donald Trump visited Swannanoa and promised to issue an executive order that day “slashing all red tape and bureaucratic barriers and permits to ensure the rapid reconstruction of the roads here in western North Carolina.”

“We’re going to go through a permitting process that’s called no permitting, just get it done. That’s the way they built them many years ago.”

Trump’s order directed the secretary of transportation and other agencies to “take all necessary and appropriate measures, including through direct assistance, loans, and other available means,” to expedite road rebuilding in the mountains, including the section of Interstate 40 that remains closed. There was no mention of eliminating road construction permitting.

In a statement, the NCDOT said it “will continue to work closely with our federal and state agency partners to ensure our processes align with the requirements of their agencies.”

Lots of road washouts to address

Besides bridges, the NCDOT continues to address thousands of road repairs and washouts in general. Division 13, based in Asheville, comprises Buncombe, Burke, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Rutherford, and Yancey counties.

“I think our division as a whole is like 4,500 sites, roundabout, that we have,” Deyton said. “And that doesn’t count our large project areas like Chimney Rock and the big, major areas of Yancey County that were just totally wiped out.”

In Buncombe, Deyton said, the NCDOT might typically see three or four serious washouts a year from heavy spring rains or other similar events.

“And now we’ve got that multiplied by hundreds,” Deyton said. “And it’s not just like small washouts, either. A lot of these are large and impactful on roadways and bridges.”

Exact figures for how much all of this is going to cost are not available yet, Deyton said, because so much work was done on an emergency basis, and accounting of extensive time sheets for every contractor is still being settled.

“When it’s all said and done, we’re gonna have between 15, 20 extra people — admin staff —  just working on this,” Deyton said, referring to the financial accounting. “That’s not counting our in-house DOT admin staff that’s working on all these stone tickets (quarried gravel).”

In Division 13, the NCDOT has been working with 110 contractors, with roughly 330 employees.

Deyton said the final costs for road work may come in lower than the initial $5 billion estimate the NCDOT provided, in part because that estimate assumed projects would be done through a typical bidding process. But a lot of the work was done with contractors working on federal hourly rate contracts, Deyton said, and they were often able to use onsite materials, such as fill rock, “and that made a huge difference.”

If they would have had to rely on quarries mining more rock and dump trucks delivering it, the time and costs involved would have skyrocketed, Deyton said.

With some projects, though, the fill and road bed gravel base is just gone. That’s the case in Chimney Rock.

Deyton said the NCDOT will have a full accounting, but it won’t know that in detail until every contractor and job is paid out. Rest assured, it’s going to be expensive.

Just in Buncombe County, four emergency repairs totaled more than $4 million:

• Old Fort Road/Chestnut Hill Road in the Garren Creek Community: $1.6 million.
• Moffitt Branch Road in Swannanoa: $1.3 million.
• U.S. 70 bridge near Patton Cove Road: $630,000.
• Warren Wilson Road and bridge near Asheville Christian Academy: $515,000.

In Yancey County on U.S. Highway 19 West, just for the crews doing the emergency repair work, costs came to about $15 million, Deyton said, and hauling, stone and inspections could double that.

New bridges, road work will be done to modern standards

Part of the reason bridge work will take so long is that the new bridges have to be built to modern flood standards. Deyton said some of the ruined bridges dated to the 1960s.

“The 18-inch pipe that was installed in 1962, when we run a new hydraulic analysis of it now, well, 84-inch pipe or a box culvert is what it calls for,” Deyton said, referring to standards to address higher predicted rainfall events. “And we’ve run into that a lot, because a lot of these pipes we had in have been in for decades.”

In some cases, floodwaters washed out so much riverbank that wider bridge spans will be needed. No two road repairs will be the same, the engineers say, so a “cookie cutter” approach doesn’t work.

For much of the bridge work, the contract will stipulate a timeframe for completion and it will be  up to the contractor to decide if overtime work or overnight shifts are necessary to meet the deadline.

For those clamoring for the quickest repairs possible, keep this in mind: “The shorter time frame we make it, the more expensive it gets,” Deyton said.

‘We’ve had 11 crews working since the day after the storm’

Tanya Ball, senior project manager with Wright Brothers Construction Co. Inc., said her company is handling the major road repairs in Chimney Rock and Gerton, where large parts of the roadway completely washed out. Like most road work companies, they handled a lot of emergency work immediately after the storm.

“We’ve had 11 crews working since the day after the storm,” Ball said. “I think we’re up to 17 temporary bridge repairs, and then various work in the roadways throughout Divisions 13 and 14 and 11.”

Division 14 covers Henderson County and others to the west, while Division 11 encompasses the Boone area and counties in that region. 

The Chimney Rock job, in Rutherford County, is simply enormous, as the Broad River carved a nearly 200-foot-wide gorge through the area where the river had been maybe 75 feet. In some places no sign of the roadway remained, and the dropoff to the new stream bank was nearly 80 feet.

Crews first had to push the river back to where it was, then build a temporary road to secure access for residents. Wright Brothers is running about 40 pieces of heavy equipment and 60 workers every day in Chimney Rock, and that doesn’t count the 40 to 60 dump trucks hauling fill into the area daily, Ball said.

“That’s been quite a task on the local quarry system, just to provide that rock and trucking,” Ball said.

As the river scoured out all the road fill, Ball said, they’re having to bring in about 350,000 cubic yards of rock and fill. A typical dump truck holds about 15 cubic yards, so that’s more than 23,000 loads.

Ball said the NCDOT has a target date of two years for projects to be done, a “tall order” for Chimney Rock.

“But with that said, they’re designing and approaching it in a way to try to do that,” Ball said. 

Wright Brothers also is working on rebuilding N.C. 9 in the Gerton area in Henderson County. That two-lane road is winding and steep in places, so the fix is going to be complex.

“Essentially there are 18 different failure locations from the Gerton Fire Department down to the intersection of N.C. 9, ranging from 200 foot to 3,000 foot,” Ball said. “They’re all different shapes and sizes, but that portion of road was really highly damaged.”

In Chimney Rock and Gerton, the NCDOT seeks to install better safeguards to boost resilience to future flooding. 

Although the road in Chimney Rock will be located “very similar to where it was before,” Ball said, it will have new protective features.

“While the road will look the same in the end, it’ll have measures down by the creek beds to protect that from hopefully washing away again,” Ball said. “There’ll be wall systems in place. There’ll be larger rip-rap features — all sorts of ideas are in the process of trying to figure out what keeps the resiliency of this road.

“Because if you look back over the last 20 years, there’s been portions of this road that’s been damaged in a major way like three different times, with this being the most damage ever — and that we hope we never, ever see again.”

Ball said they’re working on pre-construction contracts as the NCDOT works through the final budget for the projects.

While the goal is to keep the roadways open during permanent construction, drivers are going to encounter wait times, Ball said.

“While we do have single lanes through a lot of those places, we don’t have the two lanes to be able to flag the traffic around and move the people during the operations with as little delay as they normally would on a construction site,” Ball said. “There will be sections of these roads that will have to do planned shutdowns, to do some of that. And that’s always a lot more difficult.”

They accommodate fire and emergency vehicles, and Wright Brothers’ workers try to keep in mind the school bus system and parents taking kids to school. 

“We definitely don’t want to make mom mad going to school,” Ball said with a laugh. 

Ball emphasized that Wright Brothers is a local company — she lives near Marshall in Madison County — and its workers live here. So she asks drivers to have patience.

“We want to help,” Ball said. “It feels soulful to us, if that makes sense. Just know when they’re seeing the people alongside the road and the workers, that those are their people, too. Just remember, that’s your neighbors out there.”

Deyton and Lawrence know local residents are going to get a little irritated with all the upcoming road work, especially after enduring Helene and its aftermath of inconveniences, debris piles and increased traffic. So they, too, ask folks to be patient.

“They’re going to see a lot of construction over the next several years,” Deyton said, noting that in some areas people will likely think the work is already done, but it still has to be addressed with permanent repairs. “We needed it up for a short time frame, but now they’re having to come back and do the long-term fix, the fix that should last for decades.”

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s local 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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