MARION, N.C. — Truck traffic is flowing once again to a critical factory that makes IV fluid bags after a bridge here was badly damaged by flooding in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
But transportation officials in Western North Carolina face a daunting task to restore this bridge, along with hundreds of other roads and structures that were washed out, leaving many residents and remote communities cut off.
“We're too early now to really have a good feel for how long it's going to take,” said Tim Anderson, an engineer with the North Carolina Department of Transportation. “But we've got a whole lot left to do.”
Two weeks after Helene made landfall, the devastation left in the storm’s wake is still hampering recovery efforts, making it harder to restore power and cell service to dozens of small communities.
The bridge serving the Baxter International plant is a top priority, Anderson said, because the site supplies about 60% of the nation’s IV fluids. The factory is still closed for cleanup after the storm.
For now, large trucks are able to get in and out using an emergency gravel bridge, while DOT construction crews from North Carolina and Florida work to build a temporary bridge to replace it.
Across Western North Carolina, the remnants of Helene washed out roads and bridges or buried them under mud and fallen trees. More than 600 roads are still closed, according to the state NCDOT, and hundreds of bridges may have been damaged.
Anderson says NCDOT crews and contractors have been working long hours to restore access to communities that have only been accessible by ATV or on foot.
“We're trying to get them at least one lane road,” Anderson said. “If we get it back to one lane, then we can get an ambulance in there to them. They can get to work, get to the hospital, things like that.”
Some roads are partially open, but badly damaged. That includes Highway Nine, a twisting two-lane road that winds through the mountains between Black Mountain and Bat Cave.
“That used to be Highway Nine,” says Babs Taylor, pointing to the spot near her home in Broad River Township where both lanes of pavement slid down into the water below. “We were horrified.”
For Taylor, a simple 30-minute trip to the grocery store now takes hours. Highway 9 is down to a single makeshift gravel lane here. In other spots, only part of the road has fallen away, giving drivers a clear and terrifying view straight down the hillside.
“We're blessed that we can make it down back roads to places where we can get supplies,” said Hal Smith of Broad River. But he fears the recovery will be slow.
“This is going to take years, I think, to recover road-wise and utility-wise,” Smith said.
The federal Department of Transportation has already given North Carolina $100 million in emergency funds. But that is just a fraction of what it will take to get the western part of the state moving again.
“There’ll be some roads that will take quite a while in order to repair,” Governor Roy Cooper acknowledged during a press conference on Monday. “If you’ve been to western North Carolina, you know that some roads are very rugged on a beautiful day with no storm.”
That means limited access for residents, and also for utility crews that are trying to restore power and cell service.
“In the mountain environment, once you get off those major roads, you’re into narrow and often twisting secondary roads,” said Elizabeth Shay, a professor of geography and regional planning at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. “So it doesn’t take much to cut off a community.”
Flooding from Helene knocked out roads of all sizes — including major interstates like I-40 and I-26 which both remain closed for the foreseeable future, cutting off two heavily-traveled routes between North Carolina and Tennessee.
“That's what happens when big roads fail,” said Shane Underwood, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at NC State University. “They can fail in big ways.”
“But even on the non large roadways, there will be effects for several years,” Underwood said.
Flooding from Helene triggered extensive mudslides, blocking countless dirt back roads that wind through valleys and up mountainsides.
“This whole side of the mountain came down,” said John Bromer, standing at the foot of a giant mudslide on a wooded hillside near Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Bromer lives with his wife Gail.
The dirt road to their house used to cross over a tiny creek. During the storm, Bromer says it turned into a raging river.
“It was 12, 15 feet wide and maybe a foot and a half deep and flowing fast,” he said.
The mudslides destroyed a house on the hillside above, he said, and buried the road in mud and debris. It took the neighborhood three days to clear a path through it.
Gail Bromer says some of their neighbors’ roads are even worse.
“I don't know how to repair that road,” she says, pointing to another dirt road up the steep hillside that’s still covered in fresh mud and debris.
These are private roads, like many of the small gravel and dirt roads in mountain communities, which means that their owners will have to pay to repair them.
Gail Bromer says they know it won’t be cheap.
“It's probably under a dozen people who live here full time,” she said. “So to afford a project that's a quarter to a half a million dollars, I don't know how that gets accomplished.”
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