Heartbreaking scenes across the Southeast along the path of Hurricane Helene from Florida up through Georgia and into the Carolinas and beyond have been the norm since the storm made landfall Thursday evening. Transportation infrastructure has proven outmoded in the task of weathering an intense amount of rainfall in multiple states, but nowhere more dramatically than in Western North Carolina. Note NCDOT's tweet this morning:
Closure of principal east-west route I-40 through the Pigeon River Gorge near the North Carolina-Tennessee line could be a fairly long-term proposition with a mudslide that washed away much of I-40 EB along the river at NC mile marker 3. Eastbound as of Saturday morning was closed at exit 432 in Tennessee.
Truckers can likely expect at least long-term bottlenecks on, if not complete closures of, the I-40 route over the mountains into and out of North Carolina give the extent of the damage.
Other major ateries around the region were impacted by the Friday deluge of rainfall, include I-26 in Unicoi County, with closures in both directions after bridge washouts, and also I-40 EB east of Asheville, North Carolina, in the Black Mountain area.
WJHL in Johnson City, Tennessee, reported a total loss for a section of I-26 in Unicoi County with river flooding there, eliminating one alternate east-west route (I-81 to I-26 back to I-40) from Tennessee into North Carolina.
Keep an eye on your state's DOT website and local reports for the most up-to-date information. Overdrive has long aggregated state 511 and DOT accounts in this list on the X/Twitter platform: Roads 511.
