News

First flood mitigation project taking shape on Mud Creek

By Bill Moss, Published: March 6, 2026

There’s no doubt that Hurricane Helene served as a powerful provocation for examining how well prepared we were for a catastrophic flood.

It takes a historic perspective going back a long ways to pinpoint why flooding is so bad.

Michael Huffman has done the research.

The city’s stormwater director, Huffman is the tip of the spear for a project that is demonstrating visibly for the first time a major effort to address the root of the problem. When he first started looking at Mud Creek as it flowed through the city, Huffman read a study back in 2003 that laid out a stream restoration plan. As he looked deeper, he realized that the story of Mud Creek flooding is much older. It’s a problem “175 years in the making,” he said, “if you go back to when we started straightening out the streams.”

Huffman is the lead manager of a project under way now at ground zero of Helene’s damage to food stores and other shops, restaurants and businesses. Flooding of Mud Creek, Wash Creek and Johnson Ditch inundated Harris-Teeter and the Fresh Market with several feet of water. Publix and Ingles experienced more minor flooding. Harris-Teeter reopened last June after an eight-month repair job; Fresh Market is still undergoing repairs. Wendy's is gone for good, United Federal Credit Union abandoned the Fresh Market shopping center and other businesses are gone, too.

The stream restoration project along Lower Mud Creek around Southside Square, the railroad tracks and South Grove Street is the first of two major projects designed to fix what human beings have wrecked many times, for a long time.

“We know that flooding occurs here, and it occurs, from documentation, on average, about every 20 years,” Huffman told the Local Government Committee for Cooperative Action during its regular meeting back in January. “So why does that happen?”

Onto the screen popped a grainy image of a map from the late 1800s showing Mud Creek in its original alignment.

“It's very sinuous. It meanders a lot in a very squiggly line,” he said. “Fast forward to today, and you can see Mud Creek and the main streams have all been straightened out and channelized, and that creates issues that exacerbate the flooding. The water in those channels is then not able to spread out onto the floodplain and disperse in a way that reduces flood risk.”

Report with a warning was ‘put on a shelf’

Flooding, even catastrophic flooding, is not new. The “Great Flood of 1916” brought nearly as much rain and water as Helene 108 years later — there just were a lot fewer homes and businesses in its path. Nor is it new for engineers to make a post-flood examination that aims for a solution.

TVA engineers issued a report in 1958 after they studied many decades of flooding of waterways at the city’s core — Mud Creek, Bat Fork, Devil’s Creek and King Creek. The study contained “a very detailed description of the development around this intersection, and there was some specific guidance to avoid heavy, dense commercial development,” Huffman said, describing the Greenville Highway-Spartanburg Highway area. Since obviously the opposite happened, “I guess that study got put on a shelf somewhere,” never to be acted upon.

The engineer went on to narrate more slides: “You can see the drastic change in the amount of infill and impervious surfaces that were added into the floodway and the floodplain in that 20-year span (decades ago). And so with increased impervious surfaces and a lack of stormwater regulations at the time, you have more water going into straightened streams faster — causes more erosion, causes more flooding. Additionally, there's filling of the existing floodplain.”

“So in a nutshell,” Huffman concluded, “what this project is trying to do is restore the natural floodplain functions along Mud Creek, specifically in the south side of Hendersonville, through reconnecting the flood plains that are adjacent to the streams and restoring over 3,000 linear feet of stream channel."

Besides stream restoration, expanded flood storage and road safety, the project will result in trails and natural green spaces for walking, bird watching and other passive recreation.

From headwaters to French Broad

One LGCCA member taking all this in was Carey O’Cain. Besides being the mayor of Laurel Park, he is owner, with his wife Lutrelle, of Wild Birds Unlimited. Their shop in Southside Square was flooded by more than 3 feet of water during Helene.

While he praises the city projects around South Grove Street and south of Publix, O’Cain, who has a construction management background, says that’s just a fraction of the whole picture.

He’s working with Conserving Carolina, businesses and others on an application for a $250,000 grant to study the 110 miles of Mud Creek and its tributaries “to figure out what are the possibilities.” Although Wild Birds Unlimited, UPS, McDonald’s owner Chuck Edwards and Henderson Oil Co. owner Bill McKibbin have donated $1,000 each, $16,000 more is needed to create a $25,000 match.

“The overall plan basically is to do what we’re doing on Greenville Highway and Publix all the way up to the headwaters by DuPont,” O’Cain says.

For now at least, along South Grove, earthmovers and dump trucks are working to restore nature and make the next flood less destructive.

At the LGCCA meeting, O’Cain predicted that the restored floodplain would become a perfect habitat for wood ducks, and he offered to donate bluebird boxes. The expanded flood storage, he told Huffman, is already working better than the old manmade channels.

“I went down there two weeks ago when we had a two-plus inch rain, and it was working perfectly,” he said.