The floodwaters rose so fast at Thanh Bui’s house the morning of Sept. 27, she had to swim to safety.
Bui, 55, and her 30-year-old son, Quintin Ho, had been up much of the night, monitoring the howling winds and rainfall of Tropical Storm Helene. Ho periodically checked the yard of their home on Asheville Road, just off U.S. 70 in Swannanoa.
“At 6 a.m., I came out, and the water was already past a point of saving some of the cars,” Ho said. “At that point, we waited. It was like 8 a.m., and it was to the steps at the house, and we’re like, ‘OK, we gotta go! We started packing up, and then pretty much, while we’re coming out, it’s almost to our chest.”
Ho stands about 6 feet tall, so he was able to make it through vigorous wading, but his mom is about a foot shorter. Bui said she literally swam through her submerged front yard.
Thanh Bui, left, and her son Quintin Ho had to swim to safety from their home on Asheville Road in Swannanoa when it flooded up to the eaves. They’re trying to figure out their next steps. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
They made it to the Dunkin’ Donuts about 50 yards away and just high enough to be dry. They had moved one car there and were able to drive to Dollar General.
“We sat there for a little bit to figure out what we can do, because we was all wet and stuff,” Bui said. “For three days, we slept in wet clothes. No food for three days.”
Many wonder why Swannanoa, an unincorporated community of about 5,000 people 10 miles to the east of Asheville, was hit so hard by Helene.
Ringed by mountains, the town sits in a deep, narrow valley. The town’s location and topography, along with its development and the sheer amount of rainfall – more than 13 inches – created what county and city officials have referred to as Helene’s “ground zero,” with widespread destruction and a death toll that remains unknown more than three weeks later.
Residents are grappling with the devastation, which remains not only along the main commercial corridor of U.S. 70, but also in the modest cottages of the former Beacon Mill village and the higher-end neighborhoods along the usually placid Swannanoa River. People there are still trying to figure out how to navigate an uncertain future.
A self-described “lunch lady” at Black Mountain Elementary School, Bui bought her one-story Swannanoa home 22 years ago for $89,000 and raised her son and daughter, Quinho, 22, there.
“This hasn’t happened in the area like this, I heard, since 1916,” Ho said. “So no one expected it at all. And you see what happened. Nobody was prepared.”
His mother, wearing rubber boots, gloves and a facemask while taking a break from searching the brick ranch house for family photos, said the Swannanoa River is relatively far away, on the other side of U.S. 70.
But that distance didn’t stop the water from reaching up to the eaves of her home, leaving the inside a shambles and depositing other people’s cars in the backyard.
“It’s never happened this way. Never,” Bui said. “That’s why everybody was in shock. Twenty two years I lived here, it’s never been like this.”
Swannanoa Valley has a huge drainage area
The Swannanoa River, which runs from east to west from Black Mountain to Asheville, reached historic levels Sept. 27. It peaked at 27.33 feet at 3:45 p.m., according to U.S. Geological Survey gauge data. Four days earlier, it was flowing at 1.44 feet.
Philip Prince, a professional geologist and adjunct professor at Virginia Tech University, has been studying Helene’s effects in western North Carolina. He noted that the Swannanoa Valley is about 4.5 miles long and “not much over one mile wide in the area that flooded badly.”
In all, about 60 square miles drain to the portion of Swannanoa that flooded so destructively, Prince said, noting that the valley is ringed by big mountains.
“On the south side of Swannanoa, you’ve got the Swannanoa Mountains, which the top of them is 4,200 feet above sea level, which is about 2,000 feet higher than the rest of the Blue Ridge,” Prince said. “And then on the north side of Swannanoa, you go all the way up to about 6,000 feet.”
This means the valley became the receptacle for all of the rainfall hitting the area, which according to the National Weather Service, was 13.21 inches from Sept. 25 through Sept. 27.
Water from the river and the dozens of creeks that crease the mountains and the City of Asheville’s North Fork reservoir’s two spillways in Black Mountain ended up in the highly developed valley.
A map from a September 2007 Asheville-Buncombe County Flood Damage Reduction Task Force report shows the Swannanoa watershed’s location and risks of runoff and flooding.
“The water was obviously extremely forceful when it was fully out of the channel of the river,” Prince said. “You go across 70 and there’s still houses that are pushed and smashed up, and that is a striking feature to me.”
The torrent washed out bridges and the city’s water distribution line. It crossed over the five-lane U.S. 70 and eroded businesses’ foundations, causing them to collapse.
“I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I don’t know how to put that into context,” Prince said. “It’s not something that I ever really envisioned seeing in a place like this.”
The river’s rate of flow also boggles the mind of Jeff Wilcox, a hydrogeologist and UNC Asheville professor of environmental science. He pointed out that this flood and stream flow rates eclipsed the previous benchmark, the flood of 1916.
“I study this stuff, and I was blown out of the water,” Wilcox said.
‘This will be what everything is compared to’
The National Weather Service notes that besides the 13.21 inches of rain recorded for the Swannanoa station, which is 2.8 miles north of Swannanoa, Black Mountain’s creeks, as well as part of the Mount Mitchell watershed, drain into the valley.
Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi River, stands at 6,684 feet and drains in several directions, including into the Swannanoa River Valley. The mountain received 11.22 inches of rain from Sept. 25-27.
David Easterling, director of the National Climate Assessment Technical Support Unit, part of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, noted Helene did not “stall” over western North Carolina, or Swannanoa in particular. That has been the case with previous tropical storms that caused severe flooding.
“Helene was a dynamic, moving storm,” Easterling said. “It’s just the setup ahead of it, and then the storm itself was ideal for huge amounts of rain.”
Most areas near the escarpment received excessive amounts of rain due to “orographic lift,” Easterling said. That is an upsloping motion as the southerly flow hits the mountain escarpment and is forced to rise.
The Black Mountain area probably got additional rain from the same orographic lift from the Black Mountains, Easterling said. He said the precursor rain event of Sept. 25 did stall over the Swannanoa area, dropping at least an inch or two.
“This front provided a focusing mechanism so that when Helene got close enough, but still in the Gulf, the flow around Helene (counter clockwise) provided a conveyor belt-like setup, with moisture from the Gulf streaming directly at us,” Easterling said. “Then, as Helene moved north on a path to the west of Asheville, all the areas to the east of the eye continued to get huge amounts of rain and wind, and the upsloping provided more enhancement to the rainfall.”
This home used to sit on the east side of Park Street at the corner of U.S. 70. The floodwaters moved it to the west side of Park, Swannanoa Valley Fire & Rescue Chief Anthony Penland said. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
As Asheville Watchdog previously reported, Helene has broken all records for rainfall and river flow rates. Easterling pointed out that Connestee Falls, a station near Brevard, got more than 30 inches of rain for the four days before and during Helene.
The City of Asheville has two reservoirs in the area, North Fork and Bee Tree. North Fork has two spillways and Bee Tree one, and they were flowing the morning of Sept. 27.
Swannanoa Valley Fire & Rescue Chief Anthony Penland said the dam systems performed as designed, protecting nearly all of Swannanoa from annihilation, a point reinforced by Clay Chandler, spokesperson for the Asheville Water Resources Department.
“The dams, and spillways, at Bee Tree and North Fork functioned exactly as they were designed,” Chandler said. He noted that North Fork’s auxiliary spillway has eight concrete “buckets” that are designed to tip once the water level reaches a certain point.
With the huge amount of rain that fell, the auxiliary spillway, which was completed in 2021, played a crucial role in protecting the valley below.
“Without the new spillway to release pressure, it is very likely North Fork’s dam would have failed,” Chandler said. “If that had happened, 6 billion gallons of water would have caused catastrophic loss of life and property.”
The flood’s force was jaw-dropping to Wilcox, the hydrogeologist, because it swept away buildings and homes that were designed to withstand a 100-year flood.
“It’s one thing to flood the Swannanoa RIver and you have to dig it out and wash it off,” Wilcox said. “But it’s another thing to just break it into pieces.”
Wilcox, who lives in east Asheville, said it’s painful to even talk about Swannanoa’s damage, and pointing out the geological history of the area remains difficult.
“So thinking about it geologically, the Swannanoa River Valley is there because of events like this,” Wilcox said. “If this was a 1,000-year rainfall event, that means that in the last million years, it’s actually happened 1,000 times. This has happened in the geologic past.”
Mill spurred development of cottages
The difference is that in many of the previous floods, not much was there.
Penland, who said he knew several of the local people who’ve been killed in the floodwaters and a landslide that hit the Grovemont area, was born and raised in Swannanoa. He did not have an official fatality count for the town, noting that the state is handling that tally.
Swannanoa Valley Fire & Rescue Chief Anthony Penland, a native of the town, holds a phone photo of Bee Tree Christian Church, where he and his wife, Cindy, got married. The church was destroyed in Helene’s floods. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
As of Oct. 18, Buncombe County’s official count stood at 42 fatalities.
Asked why so much commercial and residential development was in harm’s way, Penland offered a short history lesson.
“Those buildings, that village right there, those houses were built in the 1920s,” Penland said, gesturing toward the mill village. “When Beacon Manufacturing came here in 1928, those were the original mill houses.”
Penland explained how the mill, Beacon Blankets, which closed in 2001, built two housing areas for its workers, the upper village to the east and the lower to the west.
Arson destroyed the plant, which took up more than a city block, in 2003. The homes remain, housing locals, including descendants of workers.
“I never thought in a million years that it would have got into this lower village right down here,” Penland said. “And I’m not saying it got into it — those houses were underwater, up to the rooftops.”
For millennia, humans have settled along waterways, as we need the water sources, and the land tends to be flatter.
A debris pile reaches almost to the roof of a home in Swannanoa. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
“Living riverside like that in Appalachia — like a Chandler tire, like some of those shopping centers across from Ingles and stuff like that — that’s pretty typical,” Prince said, referring to prominent businesses in Swannanoa.
In the Appalachians, we don’t have a classic rainy or monsoon season. Rainfalls ebb and flow, and flooding events can be a few years apart or 50.
“You get an event like this as a one off,” Prince said. “It’s kind of variables that intersect with each other and make things go crazy. And it might not happen once in 100 years or more. It might happen a couple times within a short time span, and then you wouldn’t see it for hundreds of years.”
Penland said he and his firefighters started issuing warnings to residents in low-lying areas two days before Helene hit but after the precursor rains had caused minor flooding. They continued issuing warnings Thursday.
Firefighters and police drove throughout the Swannanoa area Friday morning, playing a message recorded in English and Spanish urging evacuation. That was around 4:45 to 5 a.m. — “to the point where the water was starting to come above the tires of the trucks,” Penland said.
They had to evacuate the main fire station, but were able to conduct 40 rescues that day, Penland said.
Some people heeded the warnings, which were also issued by the county and the National Weather Service. Some didn’t. One man said the storm likely wouldn’t be any worse than the 2004 flood that brought knee-deep water into his house, Penland said.
Usually tame streams turned into violent cascades. Places that flooded but survived the 2004 event no longer exist.
“We have a place off of Riverwood; it was called Opal Lane,” Penland said. “There may have been six, eight trailers in there. They’re gone.”
‘Nobody knew they were in harm’s way’
One of the original mill houses belonged to Karla Gay. Standing on Edwards Street last week, Gay was surrounded by 10-foot piles of flooring, wallboard and other debris lining both sides of the street, the remnants of 24 flooded single-story cottages gutted to the studs by residents and volunteers.
“My grandparents bought that house directly from Beacon Village in the ‘20s or so, and it’s been in our family since then,” Gay said. “My mother grew up in the house.”
When her grandparents bought the house, U.S. 70 wasn’t there.
“The property went all the way to the river,” Gay said. “It never flooded.”
Karla Gay stands in the Swannanoa home her family bought the home in Beacon Village in the 1920s. She plans to refurbish it. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
The duplexes were one bedroom, with a living room, kitchen and bath. Monthly rent was $575 for one of her long-term tenants.
Gay, 58, owns a company that manages nonprofits that don’t have their own staff. She’s partnered with a resident of Edwards Avenue, Tissica Schoch, a vice president of finance for a consulting firm, to form savebeaconvillage.org, a nonprofit that will help residents rebuild their homes.
Schoch lives on the upper part of Edwards, just high enough to avoid flooding. She rode out the storm in an upstairs garage with her partner and their neighbors.
“All I could do was watch the river come over,” said Schoch, the project manager for savebeaconvillage.org.
Schoch said she was up all night before the storm, in part checking the 500-year floodplain.
“And my house and the house next to me, 122, should have been safe, even with that 500-year flood plain,” Schoch said. “And she got two or three inches of mud in her house at 122.”
Jared Riske, owner of Gone Fixin’ Home Improvement in New Bern, said a “tidal wave” of water hit Beacon Village. The damage is worse than anything he’s seen from hurricanes on the coast, he said. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
Schoch and Gay said Edwards Avenue residents lacked flood insurance, and that’s why they’re fundraising.
“I would say, nobody knew they were in harm’s way,” Gay said. “The biggest flood in our lifetimes has been the one from 2004, and the water didn’t get close to these houses.”
Jared Riske, who owns Gone Fixin’ Home Improvement in New Bern, spent the week on Edwards Avenue with two of his teenage sons and a work crew, helping gut houses. He was paying his crew but not charging residents.
A couple of the houses were under water and lifted off their foundations, leaving them uninhabitable, Riske said.
“This is way worse than anything I’ve seen on the coast for a hurricane, and mainly it’s just because this was like a tidal wave hitting a town in the mountains,” Riske said.
Written warnings that structures are unsafe are a common sight in Swannanoa. // Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego
Hoping to save family memories
Thanh Bui and Quintin Ho are unsure what they’ll do next.
Bui said she had no flood insurance. FEMA will pay for a hotel through early November, but the agency offered just $4,000 in assistance. She plans to talk to Samaritan’s Purse about assistance.
Ho said his mom is strong, but it’s hard to comprehend their situation.
“I’ve been trying to rack my brain on it, and honestly, I’m not too sure,” Ho said when asked about trying to rebuild their home. “I think she wants to. I mean, we don’t have many other options.”
Bui said that after the flood she found a man in the house trying to steal her bankbook and imitation gold silverware. She previously had no worries about living in her home.
Bui feels tied to the community. She’s seen kids from Black Mountain Elementary grow up and go off to college. They share their fond memories of her laughter and kindness in the lunchroom.
Now, she’s trying to salvage her own family’s memories.
“Mainly, I just worry about the pictures we lost,” Bui said. “That’s what I’m trying to get.”
Before she left the house and swam to Dunkin’ Donuts, Bui put her daughter’s college diploma up high inside the house. It got a little wet, but she’s hopeful it’ll dry out.
“The photos and stuff, it’s just…” she said, pausing. “That’s the main thing.”
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. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.
The I-40 route through the Pigeon River Gorge is notoriously dangerous, prone to steep curves, rockslides, and landslides. Tropical Storm Helene in September caused severe erosion, closing the road for five months. Despite reopening, heavy rains caused further rockslides, forcing additional closures. The route was chosen in the mid-20th century amid political and business pressures, favoring Haywood County over Madison County despite known geological instability. Both the Pigeon River Gorge and alternative French Broad River routes presented difficult geology. Over decades, numerous slides have shut the highway, and repair costs exceed $1 billion. Experts warn instability will persist without major reconstruction.
If you’re like me, you avoid driving I-40 through the Pigeon River Gorge like warm beer on a hot summer day.
Hey, if I have to circle through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas to enter Tennessee from the west and then drive east back to Knoxville, I’ll do it. Perhaps I exaggerate, but that drive through the gorge to Knoxville has always been one of white knuckles, clinched orifices and prayers that speeding semis don’t topple over on you in a curve.
It’s a terrible road — windy, steep in places and remarkably prone to rockslides and landslides, as we’ve seen over the past 10 months.
Last September, Tropical Storm Helene caused the Pigeon River to swell into a raging torrent, which undermined the interstate’s lanes and caused it to shut down for five months. The NCDOT noted that the storm “washed away about 3 million cubic yards of dirt, rock and material from the side of I-40.”
It reopened with one lane in each direction March 1, but that was short-lived. Heavy rain June 18 caused a rockslide near the North Carolina-Tennessee line, and the road was closed until June 27.
The rain-swollen Pigeon River eroded the base of I-40 lanes through the Pigeon River Gorge during Tropical Storm Helene last September. The NCDOT and its contractors have had to rebuild the embankment to get travel lanes back open. // Photo provided by the NCDOT
These slides conjured memories for a regular correspondent of mine, who emailed me this:
“I’ve always heard that I-40 through the gorge from North Carolina to Tennessee was originally planned for a different location, but that business people in Waynesville urged that it go where it is today — despite geo-engineers concluding that route was not optimal and potentially dangerous. Is that version true, or a myth that’s seeped into local lore? Please help us all with the history and backstory of the current route, one that is creating so much consternation and harm to the region. Did it have to be designed this way?”
It’s a salient point, mainly because in the 30 years I’ve been here, slides in the gorge have been about as commonplace as someone firing up a spliff on an Asheville sidewalk.
Neither gorge nor French Broad River routes were great
Not surprisingly, much has been written about all of this, including a 2009 story I wrote for the Citizen Times in which I quoted several sources who said the Pigeon River Gorge posed known geologic problems and was prone to sliding even during construction. Jody Kuhne, a state engineering geologist with the NCDOT, provided a particularly colorful interview.
In 2009, John Boyle wrote a Citizen Times article about I-40 in which he quoted several sources who said the Pigeon River Gorge posed known geologic problems and was prone to sliding even during construction.
“Lots of people these days will say highway decisions are all politics — well, hell yes, they are,’” Kuehne said. “Back at that time, Haywood County had a large paper mill, major railroad access and other industry, and Madison County just didn’t have that, except some in Hot Springs. So sure, they out-politicked Madison. The road went where the action was.”
Ever since North Carolina had passed a law in 1921 stating that all counties should have a road that connects their county seat to neighboring county seats, people in Haywood had pushed for a road to the next county west, in Tennessee. Initially, the proposal was for a two-lane road, but that changed when Dwight Eisenhower became president in the 1950s and pushed for the interstate program we have today.
Haywood business leaders and politicians wanted the interstate to come their way; leaders and politicians in Buncombe and Madison counties wanted the road to follow the French Broad River where 25/70 runs today.
While many have assailed the Pigeon River Gorge as a terrible choice because of its geology, Kuehne told me in 2009 that neither route presented a good option.
“The Hot Springs-French Broad River route has crazy geologic (stuff) you can’t even wrap your mind around,” he said, explaining that it has rounded quartz rock.
It also has just as much low-to medium-grade metamorphic rock — which is more prone to slides — as the Pigeon River Gorge. In fact, 25-70 also has been prone to slides, but they don’t get noticed as much because of its lower traffic volume, Kuehne said.
I also interviewed retired NCDOT District Engineer Stan Hyatt for that story.
“I would say today, if we had no road through Haywood, with the advances in geotechnology, we would never try to build an interstate type road down there, unless there was just no place else to put it,” Hyatt said. “It’s just an area that’s full of nothing but fractured rock waiting to fall off.”
An October 1968 Raleigh News & Observer article about the imminent “conquest” of the Pigeon River Gorge described the 23-mile portion of I-40 from near Dellwood to the North Carolina-Tennessee state line as “one of the most expensive stretches of highway ever built in the eastern United States.”
This was well known during construction and in 1968 when I-40 opened. An October 1968 Citizen-Times article quoted a Tennessee engineer who said, “It seemed like the rock and dirt had been oiled. We would blast it out, level it, ditch it, and then it would slide almost before we could get the machinery out of the way.”
The reporter noted presciently, “Engineers from both Tennessee and North Carolina said that slides would probably be a major problem along the route for many years.”
And they have been. The area has seen dozens of slides over the years, including some that shut I-40 down for months.
Was it political? Yes, no, maybe, probably…
Sussing out the politics of all this is more difficult, as they go back to the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.
Adam Prince, who runs the blog Gribblenation, wrote a fine, well-footnoted piece about the gorge and I-40’s troubled history a month after Helene. He noted that, “I-40’s route through the Pigeon River Gorge dates to local political squabbles in the 1940s and a state highway law written in 1921.”
Prince wrote:
“A small note appeared in the July 28, 1945, Asheville Times. It read that the North Carolina State Highway Commission had authorized a feasibility study of a ‘…water-level road down [the] Pigeon River to the Tennessee line.’”
Prince found that a Pigeon River Gorge study, “along with a study on improving the existing US 25/70 corridor through Madison County via a water-level route along the French Broad River, was completed in late 1948.”
“The French Broad Route of US 25/70 through Marshall and Hot Springs had been the long-established travel route between Asheville and Eastern Tennessee,” Prince wrote. “Confusion on whether or not the two studies were related to each other was amplified when in December of that year, outgoing North Carolina Governor R. Gregg Cherry awarded $450,000 in surplus highway funding for the construction of the Pigeon River route.”
Construction did not follow, though, because as Prince pointed out, “it was also unknown how the route would be built.” Summer 1951 was a turning point, Prince states, as in that June “a public hearing in Asheville was held to discuss the two corridors. It was questioned if a survey of the French Broad River corridor had occurred, and the backers of that route requested another.”
In July, Gov. W. Kerr Scott awarded $500,000 toward the construction of the Pigeon River Route.
“The award cemented the eventuality of a Waynesville-to-Tennessee highway,” Prince writes. “Yet, French Broad River backers continued to push for an improved water-level US 25/70 route along that corridor.”
Two years later, the first construction project in the gorge was awarded, $1.3 million to grade 6.5 miles of “eventual roadway from the Tennessee line to Cold Springs Creek Road (Exit 7 on today’s I-40).”
Next came Eisenhower’s interstate system and lots of federal money — and more squabbling. Tennessee wanted the Haywood route, too. Prince writes:
“In 1954, Harry E. Buchanan, commissioner of the 14th Highway Division, met with Tennessee officials on how best to link the two states between the French Broad and Pigeon River routes. At a meeting of the Southeastern Association of Highway Officials in Nashville, Buchanan met with Tennessee officials — who wanted to shift the proposed Asheville-Knoxville Interstate Corridor to follow the Pigeon River.”
Tennessee officials urged the North Carolina Highway Commission to propose the changed corridor to the Bureau of Public Roads.
“The announcement immediately sparked the ire of Madison and Buncombe Counties and City of Asheville officials. The published 1947 map of proposed Interstate corridors had the Asheville-Knoxville link follow the existing US 25/70 French Broad River route.”
But, as Prince reported, “by April 1955, the North Carolina State Highway Commission had ‘tentatively confirmed’ the Pigeon River route for the new Interstate; backers of the French Broad Route then successfully delayed the final decision by urging the commission to undertake a complete study of the French Broad River corridor. The reprieve did not last long.”
Asheville engineer T.M. Howerton completed a study of two possible French Broad routes, but in June 1956 the State Highway Commission voted for the Pigeon River route. Prince states:
“While Howerton’s study pointed to a lower cost for the French Broad route by 50 percent ($15 million vs. $30 million), SHC officials estimated that the financials were the reverse, with the Pigeon River route being less expensive. They also stated the French Broad Route ‘was not feasible.’ Suspicions rose throughout the state about the Highway Commission’s decision to award without a fully sanctioned study completed.”
The NCDOT got I-40 in the Pigeon River Gorge reopened in early March, with one travel lane in each direction, but heavy rains and an ensuing rockslide in June shut it down again for much of the month. // Photo provided by NCDOT
Ultimately, the Pigeon River route cost $33 million, Prince notes.
The road opened in October 1968. The first rockslide that would close the interstate occurred Feb. 12, 1969.
With all the maneuvering and machinations of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, it’s no surprise the notion lingered that the route choice was all political. But I haven’t found anything suggesting anything particularly nefarious or illegal transpired, although I’d suspect some smoke-filled, back-room shenanigans came into play.
Prince told me via email that he’s “pretty much in general agreement with (me) that most of this was out in the open,” although he did note that he had received a few “very adamant” comments that Canton’s Champion paper mill exerted strong influence.
“However, I have yet to find any information about Champion Papers publicly or privately lobbying for I-40 through the Pigeon River Gorge,” Prince said.
Mark Barrett, who worked for the Citizen Times for more than three decades, covering both the state house as well as local growth and development, also delved into the I-40 politics-at-play issue, particularly in a 1989 article.
Barrett quoted the late Zeno Ponder, a Democratic political kingpin in Madison County for decades, who said the I-40 decision revolved around political allegiances, particularly those of former Democratic Gov. Cherry.
“Madison County was really a Republican county…and all the counties from Haywood west were solidly Democrat. And Gregg Cherry had put up the money for the surveys,” Ponder said.
Barrett said he’s heard rumblings about outsized influence of a governor or two over the years, but nothing that screamed “scandal.”
“Was it a political decision? Maybe, maybe not,” Barrett told me last week. “There was a political battle over it at the time, but it’s hard to tell from this distance whether one side was more influential than the other, or if engineers just decided on technical grounds.”
The headline on a Citizen Times article from Mark Barrett reads as though it could have been written the day after Tropical Storm Helene.
When I wrote that 2009 story, I noted that “at least 10 landslides have shut down the highway since 1972.”
Barrett wrote another story in July 1997 that listed 20 between 1969 and 1997, including one that involved a fatality in 1977.
NCDOT’s Helene repair project page states the estimated cost of the fix to I-40 after Helene over a 12-mile stretch at the gorge at $1 billion.
Does the future hold more slides?
The state has spent plenty of money over the years battling these slides. Barrett’s 1997 article mentioned that the NCDOT spent $14 million in 1982 on stabilizing slopes, erecting barriers and shifting portions of travel lanes farther from slopes on the four miles of I-40 closest to the Tennessee state line.
Periodic projects have recurred since.
Last October, after Helene, the NCDOT issued a brief geologic synopsis of the I-40 area from the Tennessee line to mile marker 5 in North Carolina. It first notes that the I-40 corridor through the gorge “has had a troubled history.”
“The terrain and geology of the area have proved difficult barriers to developing a resilient roadway facility, causing problems that have persisted from construction to today,” the report states. “The steep, sometimes vertical, narrow valley provides little area to establish a sound embankment, and the geology underlying the slopes proves too complex to develop stable tall, rock cuts.
“Detrimental rockfall is a common occurrence in the study area and is exacerbated by the geographically and proprietarily constricted facility corridor,” it continues. It also mentions the fixes, which have included rock anchors, rock nets, expanded catchment areas, retaining walls and scaling of loose and unstable material.
Still, unstable slopes have led to large rock falls at mile markers .4, 2.5, and 4.5, “with many smaller ones occurring over the same length of highway at differing times or the same time,” according to the report.
Part of a travel lane on I-40 in the Pigeon River Gorge collapsed last December as work was ongoing to rebuild the highway. // Photo provided by NCDOT
It gets even more dire.
“Adding to the difficulty of unstable slopes is the limited area on which the supporting embankment has as a foundation,” the report states. “Embankment with steep slopes is oftentimes founded directly on bedrock which commonly has a steeply sloping surface. Channel morphology of the Pigeon River has also played a large part in the instability of certain sections of the embankment.”
In other words, it’s a river gorge with rocks that formed in an unstable way, and they’re prone to sliding.
“Erosion is accelerated in areas where the channel bends sharply against the east side of the gorge, flowing directly into the foundation of the I-40 facility,” the report states.
In that 2009 story, I mentioned that a 1997 study found 49 places along I-40 near Tennessee that were potential slide problems. Workers had installed rock bolts to stabilize the slopes, but another retired engineer said they knew at the time the bolts were not a permanent solution.
“There’s only one way to fix it so it won’t slide, and that’s to just flatten the slope out,” the engineer said. “And you might have to blast all the way to Tennessee to do that.”
In the meantime, keep an eye out when you travel through the gorge.
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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 focuses on the history, geology, and political factors surrounding the construction and ongoing challenges of Interstate 40 through the Pigeon River Gorge. It provides a detailed, fact-based exploration of infrastructure issues, political decision-making, and local economic interests without endorsing a particular political viewpoint or ideological position. The tone is investigative and neutral, highlighting both the practical difficulties and the political considerations in a balanced way, typical of centrist or nonpartisan reporting.
Sharkfest 2025 returns with over 25 hours of thrilling, shark-focused programming on Disney Plus and Hulu. This year’s festival offers new footage, stories, and perspectives, including the six-part series Investigation Shark Attack, which examines shark behavior from the predator’s viewpoint rather than humans. Experts Dr. Mike Whitehouse and Candace Fields highlight how sharks use their mouths to explore, sometimes leading to attacks. Sharkfest combines excitement with education, featuring top scientists who study shark behavior and promote coexistence. The event fosters collaboration among researchers to share the latest insights, reinforcing the importance of sharks in marine ecosystems and the need to protect them.
It’s a social media feed-ing frenzy as comedians and experts dive into the fun of the world’s most viral shark videos.
Supersized Sharks
Norfolk Island is home to the largest tiger sharks on Earth, but why are they so big? Suspecting an unusual diet of discarded beef, scientists investigate.
Baby Sharks in the City
For the first time shark biologists uncover the secret life of baby great whites off the coast of New York City.
Attack of the Red Sea Sharks
Three people are killed near resorts in the Red Sea in less than a year. Are these attacks part of a growing trend becoming more common worldwide?
Shark vs. Ross Edgley
In four challenges, ultra-athlete Ross Edgley takes on the ocean’s ultimate athletes including the mako tiger, hammerhead and great white sharks.
www.thecentersquare.com – By David Beasley | The Center Square contributor – (The Center Square – ) 2025-07-14 09:01:00
Dan Apple left college in 1990, halfway through his degree at UNC Greensboro, believing he could succeed without finishing. After building a career in business and family responsibilities, he regretted not completing his education. Today, at age 55, Apple has reenrolled through the UNC System’s partnership with ReUp Education, a program helping about 1 million North Carolinians who left college to return. Ten UNC universities participate, offering easy reentry and financial aid. Apple appreciates the modern online learning environment and is more committed now. Since 2023, over 600 students have earned degrees via ReUp, reflecting strong institutional support for adult learners.
(The Center Square) – In 1990, Dan Apple was more than halfway through his undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro when he decided to leave school for the workforce.
“I mistakenly thought that I knew everything and would be fine without finishing college,” Apple told The Center Square. “It didn’t take long to figure out that it wasn’t true. But by that time, I’ve had a wife, I had a kid, responsibilities. House payments.”
Apple, co-valedictorian of his high school class, did well in the business world without a degree, working first as a dispatcher for a trucking company and later owning a freight brokerage company. More recently, he has worked as a project manager for a precast concrete company.
As he grew older, Apple began to wish that he had finished college.
“Many of the people I deal with are engineers,” he said. “There are people with master’s in business administration degrees. There are lawyers. There is just a myriad of higher education that I am dealing with every day.”
He is not alone. There are an estimated 1 million North Carolinians who left college before earning their degree, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.
The University of North Carolina System is working with a company, ReUp Education, to help students like Apple return to college even decades after they left. Ten universities in the UNC System are participating, including UNC Greensboro, where Apple has reenrolled thanks to guidance from the program.
He expects to earn his degree by the end of this year at the age of 55.
“I sent in a request for information and within minutes I got an e-mail and we set up a time for a phone call,” Apple said. “It was a super easy process to get started. All my questions were answered immediately.”
His first class was a summer course in U.S. History. It was a lot different than the college classes he remembered.
“The world changed from 1990 to 2024,” he said. “There was no such thing as a laptop computer when I quit college. Now we are doing everything online.”
This time around, Apple has taken his college classes much more seriously than he did in the first round.
“I am a much better student than I ever was,” Apple said.
Shun Robertson, the system’s senior vice president for Policy and Strategy told the Center Square University System President Peter Hans has a “keen interest” in adult learners.
Since 2023, more than 600 North Carolina students have earned their degrees through the Reup program, Robertson said. The Legislature has funded financial aid options for the returning students as well.
“These are students who have already invested in their education but had to pause before completing their degree,” Robertson said. “ReUp gives us a proactive way to say, ‘We haven’t forgotten about you. We are going to help you finish what you started.”
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 article primarily reports on an educational initiative without expressing a clear ideological stance. The content focuses on the personal story of a student returning to college and the University of North Carolina System’s program to support returning students. The language is factual and neutral, showcasing details such as the ease of re-enrollment, changes in education over time, and legislative support for financial aid. There is no evident framing or tone that favors a specific political ideology; rather, it highlights a nonpartisan effort to improve access to education for adults. Thus, the article adheres to neutral, factual reporting rather than promoting a particular political viewpoint.
