NCDOT workers from the coast are used to hurricanes. Helene’s aftermath is different

The hurricane caused historic flooding in North Carolina. Battle Whitley, an engineer for the N.C. Department of Transportation, looked at a map on the wall that showed more than 100 roads and bridges in his county alone that needed repairs. Whitley wondered how his crews would fix them all.

It'll take days at each site, he thought. This will never end.

Then Whitley stepped outside to see a convoy of dump trucks, bulldozers, backhoes and men arriving from Winston-Salem.

"And I'm not embarrassed to tell anybody, I literally broke down in tears when I saw that convoy coming in to help," he said.

The storm was Hurricane Floyd in 1999. Whitley was in charge of highway maintenance in Nash County, just east of the Triangle, one of the hardest hit by flooding.

Now Whitley is the highway maintenance engineer for NCDOT's Division 3, a six-county area in the coastal southeastern corner of the state. The memory of feeling overwhelmed and seeing that convoy arrive is one reason he's more than happy to be lending a hand in the mountains after Hurricane Helene.

Whitley led a group of 21 Division 3 workers to Hendersonville, with equipment and supplies, on Oct. 2, five days after Helene brought torrential rain and wind to the region. They were relieved by about 28 more NCDOT workers from the division a week later, part of a rotation in and out that he expects will extend through Thanksgiving and possibly Christmas.

All of them volunteered for the extra duty, which involves 12-hour days away from home clearing trees and mudslides and reconstructing washed-out roads. Many of the men recall when the mountain NCDOT divisions came to Eastern North Carolina after Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and Hurricane Florence two years later.

"It's kind of return the favor," said Sanford Williams, who has done road maintenance in Division 3 for 19 years. "And part of our job is helping the public, kind of like a volunteer firefighter. It's just something we do."

Since Helene, thousands of state and local government workers have poured into Western North Carolina, including firefighters from Cary, utility crews from Raleigh and police from the small Union County town of Waxhaw. More than 1,500 search-and-rescue teams, public health nurses, veterinarians and others from 38 states have also come to help under a mutual aid agreement called the Emergency Management Assistance Compact .

Mountain storms are different

NCDOT has its own mutual aid system that pairs each of its 14 geography-based divisions with another. Division 3 is paired with Division 14, based in Hendersonville, on the assumption that a storm will wallop only one end of the state at a time.

The men from Division 3 are accustomed to hurricanes, and in some ways the work in the mountains is familiar.

But the steep terrain and what it does to water is not. On the coastal plain, two feet of rain causes an almost slow-motion flood that can take days to work its way to the ocean.

"We're low and flat. So the water just rises and it just floods everything," said Jeff Garrett, NCDOT's Pender County maintenance engineer. "But it doesn't have any speed to it, for the most part. So it rises, crests and it goes back down, and you're just dealing with what's left."

Two feet of rain in the mountains, in contrast, creates torrents of water that cascade downhill, funneled into streams and rivers with such force that it carries trees, boulders, houses, cars and anything else in its path. That power is something the guys from Division 3 don't normally see.

"Everywhere we went has been a big surprise," Williams said.

A tributary of the Big Hungry River, normally a stream, brought down so many trees and so much debris that it created a logjam 150 feet wide in front of the culverts under Deep Gap Road.

"I don't know that we could have put that logjam in there as thick as the storm put it in there," Williams said. "It was a full day of removal to get it out."

Dustin Johnson, an equipment operator from Duplin County who says he can "run just about anything with a steering wheel or levers in it," was part of a Division 3 crew that reached a washed-out portion of N.C. 9 between Black Mountain and Bat Cave.

"There was a gap. Nothing. The road was gone," Johnson said. "We were like, 'How we going to get across?' They're like, 'You're going to build it.'"

They set about pulling soil and rock up the slope and tore up some of the surviving asphalt to move dirt from underneath into the gap, creating a road again. Johnson loved it and asked Whitley if he could stay on another week.

"When things slow down, I'll be ready to go back," he told him. "But as long as I'm still hot and ready to go and there's stuff to be done — big stuff to be done — I thrive for that stuff."

Worst storm in history for NCDOT

Helene has done more damage to the state's roads and bridges than any other storm in history , state Transportation Secretary Joey Hopkins said Monday. Nathan Tanner, a construction engineer who is coordinating the response in two counties in Division 14, can't argue with that.

"It's been way more extensive for us than we ever imagined," Tanner said. "It's not common for us to lose entire roadways."

As the major highways reopen and life appears to get back to normal, hundreds of mostly secondary roads remain closed.

Among them is Big Hungry Road, where men from Division 3 worked. A normally shin-deep stretch of the Hungry River washed over a 20-foot-high steel-and-concrete bridge, carrying most of it downstream and cutting off more than 70 people who live on Big Hungry Road.

NCDOT and a contractor used pieces of the destroyed bridge to build a walkway across the river and assembled a steel stairway up the steep slope, so people can get across. It will be more than a month or two before a temporary car bridge will be in place, Tanner said.

The partnership with Division 3 has been a godsend, Tanner said, as have the offers of help from other divisions.

"If you call a coastal county and say I need 72-inch pipe by tomorrow, they find a way to get you 72-inch pipe by tomorrow," he said.

Hot meals, showers, laundry and a cot

The men of Division 3 are sleeping on cots in a warehouse owned by the Biltmore Church, which donated the space off Interstate 26 near Flat Rock.

NCDOT normally puts people in hotels but wasn't sure what it would find given the widespread power and water problems after Helene. It has room for 250 of its out-of-town employees in the warehouse. A contractor from Texas provides meals, water, portable showers and toilets and laundry services.

Whitley said the first group from Division 3 wasn't sure what the accommodations would be like.

"So we said, 'Look, guys, when you're going up there pack as if you're going camping for seven days,'" he said. "We wanted to be self-sufficient so we weren't a burden on anybody up here."

Williams said they brought grills and 50 pounds of pork chops, smoked sausage, hot dogs and baloney, which they managed to eat between meals.

"Nothing went to waste," he said.