An east Tennessee freeway in the sky is one of the incredible Corridor K construction schemes that could straddle the Hiwassee River watershed, costing billions to build and posing severe environmental threats
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Murphy, N.C., May 15, 2007 – The remote Kimsey Mountain Road runs east from Tennessee Highway 30 near Reliance, up and over peaks as it takes you toward Murphy. This is a rugged 12-mile-long gravel trail high up in Tennessee’s Little Frog Wilderness, managed by the U.S. Forest Service. I drove it today in my pickup truck. Rounding curve after curve, you bounce along over gravel, even boulders, as you grip the wheel with both hands and your tires hug a two-lane path along the rim of a breathtaking horseshoe-shaped valley. This powerful scene of mountain splendor is dotted with rhododendron, mountain laurel and wild azalea. Elevation changes here are dramatic, ranging from 1,200 to 3,332 feet and the runoff from the steep slopes on the northern rim of the horseshoe drains into the Hiwassee River.
It is along this northern rim that Denny E. Mobbs said is a good place for Tennessee DOT to build the Corridor K highway. Mobbs is a leading advocate of this Little Frog Wilderness site now that proposed routes through the nearby Ocoee River gorge have been exposed, he said, as “an environmental disaster.”
Mobbs lives in Polk County, the Tennessee county that abuts North Carolina’s Cherokee County, where Murphy is located. He has a civil law practice in Cleveland in nearby Bradley County. He readily acknowledges that he is a member of a steering committee of citizens in three states formed to advocate building the Corridor K highway.
“If you take the road out of the Ocoee River gorge, which is the only place suggested by TDOT, and if you go to the South, you go through the Big Fog Wilderness,” Mobbs said. “If you go north, then you have to go to the north side of Little Frog Wilderness.
“This was rejected (by Tennessee planners) because it was not feasible,” he continued. “But no study was done. It was rejected in part for historical reasons. The road up there was built in the last century and it is intact and someday, somebody might say, ‘Let’s put it on the National Register of Historic Places.’
“Wright Brothers Construction Company has told me they could build a road through the Polk County mountains,” Mobbs continued. “It would be an incline plane and a rampart, and that would take a lot of work. But if you build the road straight through, and if you do the cuts and fills, then lineally it’s 10.5 miles in a straight line along the ridge. You might use part of the old Kimsey road, or you might go above or below it.”
Mobbs told Cliff Hightower of the Chattanooga Times Free Press that using this Polk County mountain route for Corridor K “could cost $686 million.” Congress would have to pass, and the president sign, a law permitting a highway through U.S. Forest Service land.
(Wright Brothers, of Charleston, Tenn., in Bradley County, is the company that currently is building the $50 million relocation of 4.9 miles of U.S. 64 in Murphy. This includes a bridge over the Hiwassee River that will feature a 331-foot-span of steel, longest in North Carolina history, so that there will be no piers in the river.)
FOUR 4-LANE TUNNELS AND 30 BRIDGES THROUGH THE OCOEE GORGE
Other highway-minded Tennesseans are scrambling to document greater citizen support for this latest revival of Corridor K. It is a part of the alphabet soup of cross-mountain highways envisioned in 1965 by the then-new Appalachian Regional Commission.
A Corridor K Draft Environmental Impact Study by Tennessee DOT was presented in 2003 but summarily halted the next year because the agency doesn’t have the $1.4-$1.5 billion needed to build it, according to Denny E. Mobbs. Or, in an entirely different explanation, the Draft EIS came out in 2003 and then it “was not acted upon within a required three-year period,” according to Wes Hughen, TDOT project manager.
I asked Linda Harris, of the Tennessee Valley Authority how I could obtain a copy of this document. “I’m told TDOT has one copy left,” Harris said.
U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp is a Republican who represents Tennessee’s Third District, which is made up of 11 counties including Polk and Bradley. He is very much in favor of Corridor K. The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported the following on March 6:
“Rep. Wamp said road supporters need to band together because environmentalists who oppose the road will be organized. ‘The naysayers they will import from Timbuktu will stop this thing,’ he said.”
Well, Timbuktuans, is it any wonder that some choruses of nays might be heard, considering what Denny E. Mobbs says is in it? By his account, the DEIS proposes two alternative routes through the narrow, precipitous Ocoee River gorge — which is like saying you will drive your car along alternate paths out of your garage. The plan would involve digging four 4-lane tunnels and building 30 bridges, according to Mobbs.
The gorge is traversed now by a narrow, two-lane road. Motorists with white knuckles share it with buses of hikers and canoeists, and large trucks. An oil-company truck bringing fuel for the bulldozers and cranes of the Wright Brothers Construction Co. crew at the U.S. 64 project in Murphy overturned in the gorge on April 18, spilling 3,300 gallons of fuel, said Dink Jones, the company’s Murphy project manager. The fuel was replaced but the project is now delayed, Jones said. A series of four-lane tunnels and bridges could bring more safety to the gorge, yet how would it alter the aesthetic beauty of one of the most scenic drives in the Blue Ridge?
John Cartwright is director of Regional Planning and Research for the Appalachian Regional Commission and based in Washington, D.C. He attended today’s “Strategic planning meeting” held at the Ocoee Whitewater Center and hosted by advocates of Corridor K.
“We don’t have an agenda that we’re going to drive through this gorge,” Cartwright said.
A LACK OF MONEY, or an approval deadline that expired, or John Cartwright’s pledge today, or the harm this project could do to the environment… None of these factors appear to have put the brakes on Corridor K going ahead in one form or another, as these recent events attest:
The Southeast Tennessee Development District based in Chattanooga has a subset of itself called the Southeast Regional Planning Organization. This body voted Jan. 31 to make “Corridor K through the Ocoee River Gorge” the number one highway project it will recommend to TDOT, according to the Cleveland, Tenn., Daily Banner. The federal government “has appropriated approximately $500 million for Corridor K,” according to the newspaper. It quoted Mike Stinnett, Polk County Executive, as saying: “That funding is going to expire in 2009. The federal budgets are just as tight as our local budgets. If we do not act now, I have a strong feeling this money is going to be pulled”; and
The Chattanooga-Hamilton County-North Georgia Transportation Planning Organization voted today, May 15, to instruct Tennessee DOT to “look at new routes” for Corridor K, according to Mobbs.
Just as they don’t agree on dating of the DEIS or why it apparently has been shelved for awhile, or where it should go, Tennesseans can’t agree on why it’s needed.
“The primary purpose of the road is to get rid of impoverishment,” Denny E. Mobbs told me. “If you own a bed-and-breakfast, that’s fine. But you cannot raise a family on the wages of a waitress or maid. We want prosperity. You cannot have a pristine landscape to have prosperity. If we have to fragment the forest a little bit, the road has to go someplace. If it goes on Kimsey Mountain Road, then there’s going to be some additional fragmentation. My point is to reach a compromise with environmental groups so that it is going to have the least adverse effect.”
However, Rep. Zach Wamp has a different reason why the road is needed: “The Corridor K project would create a four-lane highway linking Cleveland to Ducktown,” Wamp wrote. “Eventually it would give us a major highway link from Chattanooga to Asheville, North Carolina. And this might help us recruit the next major auto plant.
“One of the things that Toyota asked about (as it was turning down Tennessee in favor of Mississippi for the location of a new auto-assembly plant) was getting products to the ports on the East Coast without having to go through Atlanta. This (Corridor K) is one way to open up the eastern United States.”
SO MASSIVE STIRRING-UP of ridges and riverbanks is being talked about on the western edge of the upper Hiwassee River watershed, costing perhaps as much as $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, what’s going on elsewhere in the watershed?
As you can see on its website, North Carolina DOT Division 14 in Sylva has plans for project A9 in Cherokee, Graham and Swain counties. It is “Corridor K US19-74-129 at Andrews to NC 28 east of Almond, a four-lane divided highway primarily on new location.” There will not even be right of way purchase on sections of it until 2011, and completion is projected for fiscal year 2013. The 27.1 miles will cost $888 million. “Much of it is unfunded at this time,” said Christian Brill, a NCDOT spokesman. “We still have to build a section in Stecoah Gap that includes a tunnel and a huge bridge,” said Jamie Wilson, Division 14 construction engineer. Denny L. Mobbs of Cleveland, Tenn., has traveled to Sylva to consult with NCDOT Division 14. After interviewing him, Cliff Hightower of the Chattanooga Times Free Press wrote that North Carolina is “finishing their part” of Corridor K. When built, the southern terminus of this highway at Andrews will carry pollution from vehicles into the Valley River, which joins the Hiwassee at Murphy. The combined cost in May 2007 of Corridor K projects straddling the Hiwassee River watershed is almost $3 billion.
THE ANDREWS BYPASS opened in 1978 and the Murphy bypass a year later, according to the Sept. 7, 1979 edition of the Asheville Citizen. “When the Murphy-Andrews link is completed, there will be a four-lane highway from the Tennessee line west of Murphy through Andrews, part of Appalachian Corridor K,” the newspaper reported.
TODAY’s “Strategic planning meeting” hosted by the Southeast Tennessee Development District at Ocoee Whitewater Center was uncomfortable for me. I went to gather information, but along with a roomful of others, I was drawn into working on the purported markup of an “economic development strategic plan.” I had written my name, phone number and e-mail address on a sign-up sheet. Now the organizers saw that no one crumbled up their handout in disgust and stormed out. So it’s conceivable they’re going to report to TDOT, the Federal Highway Administration, legislators and others that all in the room support Corridor K.
For the record, here is the STDD’s vision statement: “A strong regional economy that balances the quality of our natural environment with a vibrant and prospering economic base in such a way that we preserve our cultural heritage; respect the natural resources of the region; and foster a renewed reverence for our history as we encourage the growth of quality jobs and new investments enabling our people to prosper.”
And here is how I rewrote it on my form: “A strong regional economy that EMPHASIZES the quality of our natural environment OVER a vibrant and prospering economic base in such a way that we preserve our cultural heritage; NEVER HARM the natural resources of the region; and foster a renewed reverence for our history as we encourage the growth of quality jobs and new investments enabling our people to prosper, BUT NO FREEWAY.”
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community near Murphy, N.C., was a retired newsman, Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member/volunteer/donor and recipient of the 2015 Holman Water Quality Stewardship Award. Tom died on December 28, 2020.