This is an op/ed by Raleigh communications consultant Matthew Eisley, who is keenly interested in transportation issues.
ASHEVILLE – Interstate 40 from Asheville west into Tennessee is a vital artery for commerce, leisure travel, emergency response, and national defense. Yet more than half a century ago, when politics trumped wisdom, our predecessors built the highway in the wrong place, along the wild and remote Pigeon River Gorge, where from the first months it has failed time and again. It has been the notorious scene of repeated landslides, fog-induced crashes, fatalities, and floods.
Every few years something closes I-40, sometimes for weeks or longer, imposing enormous economic and social costs. Four months after Hurricane Helene’s deluge washed it out near the state border, the highway remains shuttered, a shattered monument to hubris and obstinacy.
For now, we have no choice but to repair and reopen the treacherous hairpin highway. But we should start planning to relocate about 70 miles of I-40 where it belonged in the first place: roughly following the route of U.S. 25 along the lower, wider, more gently sloping French Broad River to the north, reconnecting at Newport, Tenn.
Congressman Chuck Edwards and U.S. Senators Thom Tillis and Ted Budd should secure a Federal Highway Administration study of the possibility as part of the federal government’s multistate contribution to our long-term recovery from Hurricane Helene.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance program, which provides funding for long-term solutions that reduce the impacts of future disasters, could come into play. Mitigation response breaks the cycle of disaster damage, reconstruction, and repeated destruction. When we rebuild, we should always rebuild better.
A cursed corridor
When the I-40 Pigeon River route opened in October 1968, after a decade of construction through rugged and inhospitable terrain, N.C. Gov. Dan Moore reportedly crowed, “The genius of modern man has shown itself to be superior to the adversities of nature.”
Alas, nature has mocked us ever since. In February 1969, just a few months after the flawed and risky highway opened, a rock slide closed it for months. Engineers acknowledged then that “the road will be bothered by slides for years to come.” They were right. It happened again in 1977, closing the highway, and kept on happening: in 1978, 1981, 1982 and so on.
The reason is simple. Steep cliffs of shale riddled with faults frame the gorge. Most of the highway was built on the side of the river where sheets of shale slope toward the roadway, instead of away from it. When they rip loose and slide, they hurtle toward the highway.
By 1985, engineers had shifted the highway away from the cliffs and toward the river, building concrete walls and metal nets to catch tons of falling rocks. But every choice is a trade-off, and moving the road closer to the river increased the likelihood and potential severity of flooding.
Later that same year, after the on-site relocation of several miles of roadway, a rock slide closed the highway for almost nine months. Massive slides cause still more closures in 1997 and 2009.
A retired state highway engineer conceded after the 2009 shutdown: “Today, if we had no road [there], 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. It’s just an area that’s full of nothing but fractured rock waiting to fall off.”
The results have been as deadly as they were predictable. The cursed corridor has twice the accident rate of any other N.C. interstate. When slides and wrecks occur, there’s little room to maneuver around them. State troopers have died making traffic stops there. It’s a frighteningly fatal freeway.
Relocating highways
Hurricane Helene flooded the French Broad River, too, some note. But its valley is wider, its elevation lower, and its slope more gradual, making the route safer, more accessible, and more easily maintained. Think how much faster recovery crews got to work in Marshall, Hot Springs, and Del Rio, Tenn. via U.S. 25 — in a matter of days, not weeks or months.
Planning and building highways takes years, complex environmental reviews, and billions of dollars. So does rebuilding them — an estimated $1 billion this time alone, with more outlays to come with each future failure. Not to mention the cumulative costs over decades of repeated highway closures, including lost work time, delivery delays, and the excess air pollution from trucks and other vehicles detouring hundreds of miles.
Relocating part of I-40 might seem preposterous at first blush. But we can no longer tolerate the untenable on such a vital national transportation artery. Hurricanes and other storms will keep coming more fiercely. Our rivers will roil again and vulnerable roads will wash away. Meanwhile, teetering mountainsides will continue crashing onto I-40.
To keep throwing good taxpayer money after bad indefinitely in the steep, narrow, remote Pigeon River Gorge is a prime example of the sunk cost fallacy and the status quo bias. It’s time for us to face facts, cut our losses, and start planning now to move the ill-conceived highway.
Picking a new route
Highways can’t be removed or relocated, some might assume. Tell that to folks in Boston, San Francisco, Oakland, Seattle, or New York City. When the long-term benefits justified it, we’ve even moved entire towns out of harm’s way.
Building mountain highways always is a challenge. But some routes are more sensible than others. Today’s engineers and political leaders with a greater appreciation of geology (and perhaps more humility) can identify the best route, generally along U.S. 25 and the French Broad River.
What to do with the existing interstate? It would seem to make sense to maintain the freeway to its intersection with U.S. 276 at Exit 20 in Jonathan Valley, perhaps as a spur of the newer Great Smoky Mountain Expressway. A two-lane state route might be worth keeping to Fines Creek Road, which serves the community at the top of Waterville Lake on the Pigeon River.
The new interstate alignment could tie into existing I-40 at Newport, Tenn, providing a safer, more reliable route through the mountains. Tennessee could maintain its own spur of the old route as far as Wilton Springs or the Foothills Parkway.
Between the two, on either side of the state line, we should remove the hapless highway and give the gorge back to nature.
Think of our collective choice this way: Looking back from another 60 or 100 years in the future, which will seem wiser – having rebuilt the highway repeatedly in the wrong place, or rerouting it for good in a much better place?
To err is human. But to stick stubbornly to past error is foolish.
Let’s finally acknowledge our understandable mistake, fix it and keep rolling.
Eisley is a veteran North Carolina journalist who has been a communications manager and consultant for 15 years. He’s a native of Iredell County and a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill.
