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A Volvo EC480EL loads the Bergmann crawler carrier.
The article below originally appeared in and is posted with permission from:
https://www.constructionequipmentguide.com
Ten months have now passed since Hurricane Helene ravaged much of Western North Carolina in fall 2024, but the task of rebuilding much of the region's infrastructure will likely continue for the next couple of years due to the scope of the storm's destruction.
In the hours and days after Helene's passage, the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) worked quickly to formulate a plan for the repairs to numerous bridges and hundreds of miles of broken roads in the largely mountainous region of the state. Road crews also were dispatched to the area as soon as possible.
Following damage assessments, cleanup activities got started as rocks, trees, crumpled pavement, bridge pieces and other debris needed to be cleared before heavy construction contractors could move in to make the actual repairs.
And while much of the transportation infrastructure has been fixed, there is still a great deal that needs to be done before NCDOT can consider its recovery efforts fully completed.
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One such project that has been going on since March 3 is the effort to rebuild portions of U.S. Highway 64/Chimney Rock Road around the tiny mountain hamlet of Bat Cave, located in the scenic and rugged Hickory Nut Gorge in Henderson County, 22 mi. southeast of Asheville.
There, floodwaters created by Helene's heavy rains engorged a series of creeks and the Rocky Broad River to wash out large portions of U.S. 64 southwest of the community. The highway, along with U.S. 74A, serves as a lifeline for Bat Cave's residents and business owners.
In fact, the entire gorge was scoured by the tropical storm late last September — bringing a cruel and quick end to the fall tourist season that area businesses depend on for much of their income.
Heavy destruction also was visited upon nearby Chimney Rock State Park and the towns of Chimney Rock and Lake Lure in Rutherford County, just a short drive south along U.S. 64/U.S. 74A. Repairs at the state park culminated in its reopening on June 27, exactly nine months after Helene caused millions of dollars in damage at the popular tourist destination.
And a separate $126 million road project recently began to repair 5 mi. of U.S. 74A from Bat Cave to north to the town of Gerton.
Bat Cave's Road Restoration to Last 18 Months
The current work on U.S. 64 in Bat Cave is being performed by Charlotte-based Blythe Construction Inc. The company's approximately $32 million contract with NCDOT is currently set to end Sept. 1, 2026, with the goal of fortifying the roadway next to Reedypatch Creek and restoring a two-lane traffic pattern to that section of U.S. 64.
Blythe also is contracted to have its seeding and reforestation efforts along the highway finished by June 30, 2027, according to Chuck Gallant, Blythe's senior project manager.
He said the stretch of highway that his crews are responsible for fixing begins at Slick Rock Road, south of Bat Cave, and continues approximately 2.3 mi. north to a point just short of the bridge over Rocky Broad River in the heart of the small community.
The decision as to how best to rebuild U.S. 64 and its underlying surface, as well as reinforce its slopes along both the creek and the river, was only reached after much consideration, Gallant said.
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"It's actually an interesting project in that unlike a typical bid-build project that's already got a full design in place," he said from the job site, "[NCDOT] came up with several repair possibilities, ranging from two different options for rockfill — one toed in where the stream bed was manageable and another with a micropile driven into rock with a reinforced concrete knee wall on top of that to protect the rockfill toe, which enhances stability and prevents erosion. Other possibilities were wire basket walls with a reinforced shotcrete soil wall in front."
In the end, the largest part of the repairs is being performed using rockfills made up of Class 7 rock, he said, "the upward size of which is three to four feet."
There were other places along the road corridor where the storm damage was not as severe, which led NCDOT to have Blythe use rock plating — 2-ft. rock that is required to stabilize slopes, Gallant added.
The final design from the transportation agency called for 75,000 tons of Class 7 rock, he said, "but it looks like we're going to be closer to around 30,000 tons. Part of that is because the debris from the storm was so extensive that it was impossible pre-bid to get any kind of a survey done as to where the existing ground remained."
"NCDOT had to take an educated guess at the possible quantities and with it being a FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] project, a conservative approach was taken to make sure they were covered by the quantities and, as it turns out, there will probably be some significant quantity underruns, meaning that on most items, we're using less than they originally estimated," Gallant said.
To do all the work needed at the U.S. 64 repair site, Blythe has continually hauled in the rock from a Vulcan Materials quarry in Hendersonville, a short drive southwest from Bat Cave via U.S. 64.
Blythe is applying grout into the rockfill to harden it and keep it in place, particularly in the areas where the washing and scouring effects from future storms would likely be the greatest.
"A NCDOT geotechnical engineer for the western half of the state came up with this process and had experimented with its use on some other projects before it was added to this contract by a supplemental agreement," according to Gallant.
"At this site, if you go up and down Reedypatch Creek and the Rocky Broad River, which this stream and several others dump into, you'll see boulders bigger than cars and trucks that were moved by the storm's floodwaters. So, the water's incredible amount of force was such that they were looking for a way to try to lock this rockfill together so it couldn't be moved."
Challenges Being Met in Hickory Nut Gorge
After Blythe and its subcontractors came on the scene in Bat Cave late last winter, the company's project mandate became clear: Temporarily repair and rebuild U.S. 64 so that the centerline is as close to the pre-storm location as possible. Essentially, their job was to rebuild it back the way it was to ensure as much reimbursement as possible from federal agencies.
The first major task ahead of the contractors was clearing the massive amount of rock and debris out of the roadway corridor.
"That debris was one thing that did have a significant overrun — more than double what they thought it would be," he said. "Also, a lot of that stuff was hard to reach. Our subcontractor, K&B Land Clearing [from Robbinsville, N.C.] did a great job of getting all that vegetative debris out of there."
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He added that building the rockfills proved to be challenging because the spaces where Blythe's crews need to work "are not wide enough to use a bulldozer to provide a good, high-production fill; it's all got to be built with excavators in a combination of working from the bottom and then eventually topping it out from above. Most of the washout areas were at least 20 feet above the stream bottom — with some as high as 30 to 40 feet — so that presented a big challenge as well."
In addition, the condition of the two-lane highway was such that in two places, Blythe had to perform emergency work just to hold together the one-lane road left behind by Helene.
Prior to the storm's rampage, the old highway surface rested on a concrete roadbed that had been there for more than 50 years.
"With the asphalt eventually having been extended 2 feet wider on either side, the original lanes were 10 feet wide, but later they were expanded to 12 feet with asphalt overlay, and crews were widening the stone beside the concrete," said Gallant. "Due to the hurricane, the stone that was under that widened portion was gone in quite a few places, but there were also places where the concrete failed as well. To make the roads safe for the public, NCDOT had little choice but to put a concrete barrier in the eastbound lane."
Blythe Superintendent Brings ‘Sense of Urgency' to Project
Blythe Construction's superintendent on the U.S. 64 repair project in Bat Cave is Mark Spradling, whom Gallant described as "the right guy for this job."
"Mark has years and years of construction experience. Like myself, he's getting gray hair and moving toward retirement age, but he's very knowledgeable, has a sense of urgency and is very smart about the work."
Besides the veteran leadership that he uses to shepherd the project along, Spradling also acts as a mentor for younger crew members like Arley Gonzalez, a Blythe field engineer. Gonzalez was recently promoted to the position to assist Spradling with tasks such as ordering materials or scheduling subcontractors, among other jobs.
He sees the rebuild of U.S. 64 as a rare chance to learn the proper way to work at a large disaster site.
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"I think this project is, at least for me, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because who knows when another 100-year flood might occur," Gonzalez said. "This is so different from what I'm used to and it's amazing how things change so quickly. Just a few short months ago when we came onto the site, this was all just rubble and debris out here and now we've made so much progress on getting this road back to normal."
When Spradling took CEG on a recent tour of the project's work site in Bat Cave, he said that despite all his years in the business, he, too, was taken aback when he first saw the amount of devastation that lay before him.
"There were trees everywhere and we had to get rid of all that just to have a spot down by the creek in which to work," he added. "I think we had our clearing subcontractor in here for nine weeks, so they had that amount of time to reach everything they could reach from the road, and they were hustling to finish it."
Work Has Been in Hard-To-Reach Places
Blythe's first day on the job saw the company begin to erect barrier walls for safety on the remaining parts of U.S. 64 to replace the warning lights and cones that NCDOT had earlier set up, as Spradling said, "to warn people about driving over a 40-foot cliff."
He periodically stopped his truck to describe the work being done and pointed out several key areas where heavy construction was under way.
From the original roadway's footprint, Spradling explained how Blythe's crews had to construct an access road to reach the bottom of the slope alongside Reedypatch Creek so as not to disrupt local traffic on the one lane of U.S. 64 that is currently available to area residents.
"That slope is 30 feet deep, and you can't do much from that high up, so we have to start from the bottom and build its way up with Class 7 rock," he said. "In some areas, we're having to build knee walls to hold back the rock. A truck can't back down there, so they dump rock from up on top and a track hoe moves it out of the way. And then, as we needed it, we started hauling rock around to build our access road."
The temporary road also was necessary, according to Spradling, because the geotechnical subcontractor, Axiom Foundations in Fort Mill, S.C., cannot build knee walls while in the creek, and, even if they could successfully place an excavator upon a large rock in the mountain stream, it would likely slide off into the water.
The knee walls going up along U.S. 64, he said, are installed "by drilling micropiles into the ground and pouring the walls to be about 4 feet tall. Then, we'll stack our rock against it to be able to make a slope for the rock to tie into the road."
At another slope between the creek and the roadbed, Spradling said that it would be strengthened with rock "up to a certain point, and then we may have to build a soil nail wall from there up. Plans call for Class 7 rock here, too, but it's so tight we can't get in the river and it's 40 feet deep. That is going to take some doing just to get people and equipment down there."
Helene also washed out or caused extensive damage to the drainage pipes under U.S. 64 that funneled torrential rainfall from the hillsides into Reedypatch Creek and other feeder streams. In future months, Spradling said Blythe will need to install a new drainage system along the broken highway corridor.
As he wrapped up his explanation of Blythe's highway restoration efforts along the corridor, Spradling reflected on the hardships that Bat Cave's local residents have suffered since last year's hurricane and stressed how important it is that the contracting company not let them down.
"The people up here have been dealing with this one-lane road and this big mess for almost a year now," he said. "They've been through a lot, so we are trying to get [U.S. 64] back to two lanes hopefully before the holidays."
Spradling noted that despite the hardships those folks have faced since last fall, "The people up here have been really appreciative and friendly to us. We enjoy being here and doing this work for them." CEG
Eric Olson
A writer and contributing editor for CEG since 2008, Eric Olson has worked in the news-gathering business for 45 years.
Olson grew up in the small town of Lenoir, N.C. in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he began covering sports for the local newspaper at age 18. He continued to do that for several other dailies in the area while in college at Appalachian State University. Following his graduation, he worked for, among other companies, the Winston-Salem Journal, where he wrote and edited the newspaper's real estate and special features sections for 10 years. Since 1999 he has worked as a corporate media liaison and freelance writer, in addition to his time at CEG.
He and his wife, Tara, have been happily married for almost 40 years and are the parents of two grown and successful daughters. He currently is in the employ of two dogs and three cats, a job that he dearly loves.
