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NCDOT wins national acclaim for Helene response

By Lightning Reports, Published: August 5, 2025

A national association has honored the N.C. Department of Transportation for its collaborative, swift and dynamic emergency response to Hurricane Helene.
 

The department received the overall top honors during this year’s National Operations Center of Excellence’s Transportation Systems Management & Operations (TSMO) Awards; the winners were announced last week in Maryland during an annual meeting of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Committee on Transportation System Operations.

The NCDOT took home two top awards: the “Best TSMO Project” and “Best Overall Winner.”

The state agency was lauded for serving as a central coordination point for road conditions that local, state and federal agencies relied on for their response and recovery operations. The department used its advance flood-warning system to help pre-position Incident Management Assistance Patrol crews in locations where staff believed they could help save lives, and shared critical safety information on its traveler-information website at DriveNC.gov.

“This award is quite an honor and recognizes the tremendous effort by our Department to use technology to help inform the traveling public in what was a very fluid situation during this storm,” said Jennifer Portanova, the state TSMO engineer for NCDOT. “We also were able to collaborate with our partners who needed this same important information.”

NCDOT helped maintain mobility and access for emergency supplies in the affected counties, while prioritizing travel for responders and preserving limited resources for storm victims. These efforts not only protected the community, but also laid the foundation for more efficient, cost-effective responses during future disasters, Portanova said.

The flooding from Hurricane Helene devastated the transportation network in western North Carolina, washing out numerous roads, highways, bridges, and isolating multiple communities.  NCDOT estimated the storm damaged nearly 9,400 sites, resulting in the closure of 1,400 state-maintained roads and damaging 818 state-maintained bridges. In response, NCDOT deployed more than 2,000 employees to restore and rebuild the damaged transportation network.

The annual awards program celebrates TSMO strategies and tools that leverage existing infrastructure to increase safety and reliability; the success of those programs and strategies are shared with other state highway departments.