Welcome to the Roadscapes Wednesday segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Roadscapes Wednesday will feature roads and infrastructure related topics. Geek Alabama Editor / Publisher Nathan Young is often called the “road geek” for a good reason, Nathan loves roads and loves talking about roads!
In 2024, Hurricane Helene washed portions of Interstate 40 into the Pigeon River, severing a critical connection between North Carolina and Tennessee. Now, crews are undertaking an enormous emergency reconstruction project designed to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
We traveled to western North Carolina with Ames Construction to see how they’re rebuilding I-40 inside a narrow mountain gorge where floodwaters completely erased sections of the highway.
At the center of the project is the ARC, a massive wall built from roller-compacted concrete (RCC). During another major flood, the structure is designed to deflect the Pigeon River away from the rebuilt interstate. But the ARC is only one part of the solution. Nearly 400,000 linear feet of interlocking pipe piles help protect against scour, while a massive temporary soil-nail wall stabilizes the remaining highway carrying traffic above the construction site.
The scale of the operation gets even crazier behind the scenes. Ames established a temporary quarry specifically for the project, where crews blast and excavate roughly 1.5 million cubic yards of rock. An enormous crushing operation then processes material for the two on-site RCC batch plants, eliminating the need for hundreds of thousands of over-the-road truckloads.
Then, every night, the real action begins.
Thousands of yards of RCC travel down the gorge before specialized equipment places the material in one-foot lifts, almost like a giant concrete 3D printer. By the end of the project, crews will have placed roughly 800,000 cubic yards of roller-compacted concrete to help protect the new interstate from future flooding.
Hurricane Helene took only days to destroy the highway. Rebuilding it to withstand the next major flood will take years of around-the-clock work.
A huge thank you to Ames Construction and everyone on the project for giving us an inside look at this incredible operation.
