How Response Crews Restored Western N.C.

By Chip Hutchens and Jim Forbes, Contributing Authors

Last September, the remnants of Hurricane Helene rampaged across Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

In North Carolina, 31 inches of rain fell in three days, causing widespread devastation and killing an estimated 108 people. The state’s Swannanoa River, where the flood stage is about 10 feet, crested at more than 26 feet. This storm damaged more infrastructure in Western North Carolina than any other in recorded history. Roads, bridges and homes were destroyed and swept away.

While North Carolina’s coastal or piedmont regions have experienced infrastructure damage from flooding and wind before, this storm dumped a massive amount of water in valleys and river floodplains. 

Roads in North Carolina that were impacted included multiple segments of Interstate 40, several sections of Interstate-26, U.S. Route 221, U.S. Route 321 and U.S 421, as well as U.S. Route 70 and U.S. Route 25 in Asheville. 

More than 6,900 sites were identified with road and or bridge damage that resulted in over 1,400 closures, including several on interstate facilities. 

Roadways collapsed after being undermined, power lines and transformers were entangled in debris, and poles leaning near or across roadways became obstacles almost everywhere for response teams.

At the height of destruction, over 1,700 cell towers in Western North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia had gone dark. Over a million people lost electricity. 

Asheville and many smaller municipalities in Western North Carolina were without functional water or sewer systems. Places to stay were in short supply, so response teams moved into the local North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) maintenance office as an around-the-clock base of operations.

The Team

To clear roadways of debris, never mind reopen them, demanded more than just outstanding teamwork. It took communication, camaraderie, a bit of humility, outright grit and maybe a little sleep deprivation. 

Team building was essential developing trust. The response team’s evening meetings to discuss the day’s events often lasted past midnight, and they were moving again before 5:00 a.m., when the maintenance crews showed up to start their day.

To respond to this historical event, the North Carolian Department of Transportation (NCDOT) formed a team of staffers from operations, maintenance and construction, along with numerous consultant partners from across the state. Many of these partners were already working on road and bridge projects with NCDOT prior to the storm and wanted to help, even if it meant relocating for weeks at a time.  

Many companies were represented in daily field assessments, project meetings and design team reviews. That teamwork continued throughout the response. It was crucial to advancing priority projects that returned a sense of normalcy to Western North Carolina.

The Work Begins

On Oct. 3, Keith Garry, NCDOT’s state utilities manager, issued a memorandum to any affected utilities that authorized emergency repairs as needed. The key points of the memorandum were as follows:

• Written permission was not required before beginning repairs
• Immeadiate work was authorized
• Utility construction was to be in conformity with the NCDOT Utility Accomodation Manual
• Safe and efficient traffic control was still required
• Post submission of appropriate paperwork was required if anything change between pre- and post-storm facilities

Furthermore, many existing NCDOT projects in the affected area were put on hold as the restoration of service and accessibility became the overarching goal, with power and fiber optics to cell towers being the priority.

Storm response was an “all-hands-on-deck” operation, with utility crews from many states descending upon the western part of the state. Since impacts were mostly in NCDOT Divisions 11, 13, and 14, crews from other NCDOT divisions were requested to assist.   

More than 2,000 NCDOT employees were involved in recovery, with more than 1,700 of those directly involved in recovery operations. The remainder were central support staff, 230 of whom were deployed from the less-impacted eastern and central divisions. Many divisions even rotated new teams in when others returned home, ensuring resources were always available.

NCDOT often had more crews in the field than the utility companies could efficiently utilize. Even though emergency utility location requests were called in by the dozen, in some cases utilities could not respond fast enough to such requests to relocate their poles and other infrastructure. This required that telephone and television lines, many of which were dead and, on the ground, be cut to avoid delays, further increasing the workload on many.

NCDOT and its utility partners were called upon to do things that they had not done before. Utility owners installed emergency fibers along the interstate under special approval. Temporary poles became the rule because there was not enough shoulder space to place the poles outside the clear zone, and conduit was dragged by hand through the new riverbed before new fiber could be connected to restore communication and internet network to the impacted communities.

To facilitate proper, effective and widespread safety compliance, safety meetings were held each morning. These meetings went a long way towards ensuring the awareness that conditions on the ground were constantly changing, and that hazardous debris would likely be found mixed in with organic matter.

Also, landslides, floods and cave-ins created by the storm made getting to many areas extremely difficult and created widespread safety issues that required uninterrupted communication with state and local law enforcement. That and other communication requirements were made even more difficult due to issues with the cell network. 

Any radio and face-to-face conversations required constant follow-ups. These limitations required close coordination with law enforcement to make sure the field teams were able to operate and assist in the impacted areas and not impact other recovery processes.

Access to many areas was deliberately limited to allow emergency crews the ability to operate as efficiently as possible. Fleets of dump trucks were filled with debris and moving constantly.

Effective Information Sharing

Early in the process, it became evident that providing contractors with information about the current status of the infrastructure was going to be critical. 

Tallying the combinations of existing and emergency replacement infrastructure and translating that to the design and construction teams saved a great deal of time as projects were developed and built. 

This process started with field teams walking the project sites from end to end, taking detailed notes and corresponding photographs that provided the necessary information to be mapped. 

Back in the office, other teams georeferenced the field photographs and created plan sets that consolidated and showed the information that was itemized in standard NCDOT format. 

Separate teams performed field verification using the created plan sets. Comments were noted and updates added to provide the contractors with current data once the project was awarded. 

Emergency contracts were allowed for several sections of road that called for accelerated design-build, along with expedited bridge replacement projects for over 30 bridges in Division 14 alone.  

To organize and prioritize the increasing volume of work, a project matrix was developed to help NCDOT track ongoing efforts. Work grew as projects were added and assigned to consultants, and then delivered to the utility companies to start their routing designs and encroachment processes. 

The matrix illustrated the processes that were delivered by the utility companies to keep the project on schedule, along with the status of agreements that were maintained throughout the life of the individual projects.

Life Begins to Return to Normal

Within a week of the initial response, power had been restored to thousands of customers. After two weeks, thousands more had utilities restored, with isolated communities still struggling with access. More than 600 roadways were reopened, creating 4,100 debris sites, many of which included hazardous materials from utilities and other infrastructure.  

At the three-week mark, fewer than 19,000 customers remained without power in western North Carolina, compared to approximately 1 million right after the storm. By the beginning of November, that number was down to about 1,500.

Road work continues and will be for some time in several remote areas. NCDOT’s stated goal of being 80% recovered within three years is looking more achievable than most thought possible in the days following the storm, thanks to the tireless efforts, strong planning and communication by the response teams. RB

Chip Hutchens, P.E., is the regional manager at Weston & Sampson, and Jim Forbes is a senior project manager at Weston & Sampson in Apex, N.C.