The Mountaineer

Cleanup expected to take months

A rock slide that included three boulders, each the size of a small garage, has closed both east and westbound lanes of Interstate 40 nearly three miles inside the Haywood County line.

The slide was reported at about 2 a.m. Sunday. Three vehicles were hit with falling rock, authorities said but only minor injuries were reported.
Joel Setzer, the division 14 engineer for the N.C. Department of Transportation, said getting the interstate reopened will be a top priority, but could take months.
No damage estimates are yet available, he said, but noted it is on par with a 1997 slide that closed the road from early July to mid-September.
Tentative plans call for removing rock from the top of the mountainside first.
“It is unsafe to remove rock from the bottom,” Setzer said. “We need to find a way to build a road around the slide, find a stable zone and begin working from the unstable material on down.”
An estimated 22,000 to 25,000 vehicles a day travel the interstate between Newport and Waynesville, he said, and about 45 to 50 percent of the traffic is from large trucks.
“We realize this is a bad time to have I-40 closed in the middle of leaf season and going into the holidays,” he said, “and we will pursue this aggressively. The economic impact of closing I-40 is tremendous.”
But keeping employees and contract workers safe and providing a safe roadway for the traveling public must be priorities, he said.
Because of the emergency situation, a contractor could be hired without going through a lengthy bidding process, and Setzer said Phillips and Jordan is on the job. Company representatives, along with dozens of other DOT and N.C. Highway Patrol personnel were on site Sunday afternoon as wrecked vehicles were towed away, motorists were turned around and barricades were erected at all the exits. Geotechnical engineers have to analyze the situation, and the department needs to work closely with the U.S. Forest Service since the the state only has an easement through the forest service land.
Setzer said the slide, which totally blocked the westbound lane and spilled over into the eastbound lane, could even be more extensive that the 1997 slide, depending on how far back into the mountain workers will have to go to stabilize the area.
Work done along the route after the 1997 slide likely helped minimize the damage from Sunday's slide, he indicated
“In an attempt to make it stable, we performed a lot of work with rock bolting,” he said, motioning up the mountain where rock bolts were sticking out. “Had it not been for that, the slide would have been much more significant and would have occurred years before.”
He speculated that heavy rainfall in late September and early October, as well as an early freeze, were factors in destabilizing the mountainside. Repairing the roadway, he said, could cost between “$2 to $10 million. It's hard to say.”
There's some funding available in contingency for these types of emergencies, he said, and it is possible the federal government could help defray the cost.
A detour has been set up. Motorists traveling west to Tennessee should take I-40 West to I-240 West in Asheville to I-26 West and follow I-26 West from Asheville to I-81 South in Tennessee, back to I-40. Eastbound motorists will follow the reverse directions.
For regular updates, highway patrol officers urge motorists to call 511 for construction work and detour information.