News

Here’s the latest on Helene-damaged road repair

By Bill Moss, Published: June 13, 2025

Anyone who has tried to reach Hickory Nut Gorge via U.S. 64 or go from Saluda to Tryon on U.S. 176 or drive on Davis Mountain or Finley Cove roads in town can see that the state has plenty of work to do.

But a lot of work is under way, and many more jobs will soon be under contract. The biggest projects will take two years or more to complete, to be sure. And the complexity of the road rebuilds has caused delays; the wreckage left behind by Hurricane Helene has depleted the supply of geotechnical engineers to analyze the ground and design new retaining walls.

But work is progressing, Welsey Grindstaff, the chief engineer for the NCDOT division that includes Henderson, Transylvania and Polk counties, told Henderson County commissioners last week during their regular meeting.

“We have, obviously, three large corridor projects in Henderson County, which include Chimney Rock Road, the U.S. 74-A Gerton section, as well as N.C. 9,” said Grindstaff, who was promoted to Division 14 engineer in March. The 74-A project “is scheduled to start in the coming weeks, and it will include actually the intersection of (N.C.) 9 and a large section of N.C. 9 and that area surrounding it. That is a two-year project at a minimum” expected to be finished in the summer of 2027.

Chimney Rock Road, which is still closed to non-local traffic, is under construction.

“We expect that to be an 18-month project to be completed approximately in fall of ’26,” Grindstaff said. “N.C. 9 is scheduled to go to construction in September of ’25. That will be kind of the second half of that road up to Buncombe County.”

Here are updates on other road and bridge repairs in the county:

• Two bridges on South Mills Gap Road. “We had a contractor there to build and then Helene completely changed that scope,” he said. The project is designed; contract to be let in July.
• Middle Fork, Bald Rock and Bearwallow Mountain roads, contract in October.
• Pot Shoals Road, under contract.
• Cascade Lake, Hart and Everett roads, under construction.
• Grant Mountain Road, under construction.
• Henderson County portion of U.S. 176 in Saluda, under construction.
• S. 176 between Saluda and Tryon. “The Polk County portion is a project that we have had a lot of requests to expedite and we are working on that,” Grindstaff said. “Much, much more complex failures there — it’s going to involve a series of large retaining walls. It’s probably going to be October before that one gets under contract. … Our geotechnical experts have evaluated it and it’s not safe even for one-lane emergency traffic right now.”
• Davis Mountain Road, under design, scheduled for contract letting on Sept. 9.
• Highland Lake Road. “The contractor’s told us they expect to be completed Aug. 14 of this year,” Troy Wilson, the NCDOT’s Henderson County engineer, told commissioners. “So hopefully, shortly we’ll have that completed and done. As you’re aware, there was damage from Helene requiring some additional redesign that’s caused the project to be longer than we had anticipated.”

‘We have maxed out’ geo-tech engineering

Commissioner Michael Edney asked whether road contractors had the capacity to do all the work in the post-Helene pipeline.

“The contracting industry itself, yes, has the resources to do it,” Grindstaff responded. “What we’re really bumping into right now is geotechnical design firms. We have maxed out everyone that we can. That’s the controlling factor right now — the borings and the evaluation of the soils and the foundations. There is so many walls we’re having to build.”

A report released last week by TRIP, a Washington, D.C.-based national transportation research nonprofit, analyzed the impact of Helene on Western North Carolina’s transportation network, the initial response, the status of the recovery of the region’s transportation system, the cost of needed repairs and timeline to fully restore WNC’s network of roads, bridges and rail. NCDOT estimated that the storm damaged nearly 9,400 sites, closing 1,400 state-maintained roads and damaging 818 state bridges.

Commissioner Rebecca McCall praised the NCDOT’s speed in repairing hundreds of miles of roads and dozens of bridges destroyed by Helene.

“I want to thank NCDOT for all the work that you’ve been doing and jumping into it so quickly,” she said. “It’s just been amazing the work that you guys have done.”

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