By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Murphy, N.C., Nov. 26, 2009 – In this 75th year of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Blue Ridge Parkway, there’s significant work of great environmental importance taking place in two states on 14- and 10-mile stretches of the Appalachian Regional Commission’s Corridor K.
These pieces of four-lane highway between Cleveland, Tenn. and Asheville, N.C., will put down a century or more of asphalt along a route that will take the highway south of the GSMNP to end a bit west of the Parkway.
Playboaters who use a U.S. recreation resource of immense value and beauty know that the North Carolina route tracks well above the Nantahala River Gorge. Meanwhile, a Citizens Resource Team account that Tennessee has “ruled out the Ocoee River Gorge route as an option” is unofficial talk about a very good idea, and it is premature.
Studying the agencies and the mountain people as all this is taking place tells a lot about what is going to happen to the mountains, the water and the air up here.
Here are recent developments in the mostly federally-financed, state-guided engineering projects, identified in the jargon that each state currently employs:
Corridor K Western North Carolina
US 74 Relocation Project, B and C portions of N.C. Transportation Improvement Program Project No. A-9, from U.S. 129 in Robbinsville to N.C. 28 in Stecoah.
The 23 persons testifying at the Robbinsville, N.C., Senior Center Oct. 29 about NCDOT Project A-9 B&C, and almost unanimously condemning it, seemed to me to do so with a hollow, tinny sound.
One said his daughter prayed the road never gets built. Another said this proves how “God is being left out of everything,” though these were the sole, inexplicable divine references of the entire evening’s testimony by citizens or officials.
I sat there wishing a condition of getting your moment at the podium could have been that however your degree of shrillness tonight, you agree to return in 26 months. Then you will disclose whether or not you’ve taken the NCDOT right-of-way cash. It’s being dangled now, and an NCDOT official said payout will begin in 2012.
THE BIGGEST NEWS to come out of merged-process open houses and a hearing (i.e., many federal and state officials gathering at one time for citizens’ benefit) is that granite will be discarded somewhere out here from dual tunnels.
These will be about 60 feet wide and nine football fields long. They will be dug under Snowbird Mountain, one eastbound and the other westbound, with great fans ventilating them. Stacy Oberhausen, who is NCDOT’s manager of Project Development and Environmental Analysis in Raleigh, is in charge of finding a place to put all this rock. Imagine the erosion threat to the countless creeks and streams of the Cheoah River watershed! So there’s a secondary environmental challenge almost as great as the main one of building the highway.
Hayesville Quarry near Hayesville, N.C., is using a series of state Mining Act permits to take down Shewbird Mountain in Clay County and use its granite in roads. Were its owner, Harrison Construction Co.-Division of APAC (and a subsidiary of a company in Ireland) to land the B&C paving contract, because the similarly named Shewbird is located a few miles away, then more of the latter, visible in two states, will be blasted.
The Cherokee Tribe is said to have named Shewbird because it looks like a great bird showing its wings. All that is left of the figurative bird’s head is a rude arrowhead-like shard.
IT HAS BEEN 45 YEARS since Appalachian Regional Commission and its developmental highway system became law in 1964 as part of President Johnson’s Great Society program. According to its web site, ARC has $676.7 million set aside for Corridor K work in North Carolina, in an 80-20 split with state government.
This N.C. leg of the highway has a Federal Highway Administration letter of intent to build that is published in the Federal Register, and as of three months ago, a U.S. Corps of Engineers public notice signaling a go-ahead given by that key manager of U.S. rivers.
A N.C. general statute distributing ARC highway funds across 100 counties, whether a county has mountains or not, makes western-county legislators’ and local government officials’ faces contort in anger and dismay.
Corridor K East Tennessee
Appalachian Developmental Highway System Corridor K, U.S. 64 from west of Ocoee River to SR 168 near Ducktown.
A year ago, as one Corridor K development or another was taking place, I went to see John Carringer of the Murphy Electric Power Board.
“May I have a document giving your organization’s position on Corridor K?” I asked.
“There isn’t any such document,” he said.
He gave his age as “more than 88” and he is the manager of an agency that Dun & Bradstreet reports is 88 years old. It provides Tennessee Valley Authority electric power to this town of 1,568 in far western North Carolina.
“Then may I have copies of your speeches about Corridor K?” I asked.
“We don’t do speeches,” he boomed.
“Then may I have copies of your letters to the editor (in the local weekly newspaper)?”
“We don’t do letters to the editor… THERE IS NO document here!”
John Kennedy’s vision of corridors into the mountains to bring prosperity to Appalachia has extended into the Internet era. State government sites are open and transparent as you see at the following:
https://www.ncdot.gov/projects/corridor-k/Pages/project-documents.aspx
However, local governments and utilities having web sites are mute about their positions on Corridor K. Instead, leaders talk among themselves. They miss an opportunity to enter the American tradition of public debate and disclosure to citizens.
The Tennessee Department of Transportation is at work on a Transportation Planning Report; Environmental Impact Statement; and Context Sensitive Solution/Design, or CSS/D. This will go on for years.
A 2003 draft EIS has been discarded. It’s somewhere on a library shelf as nothing more than an artifact of Tennessee highway history.
Denny E. Mobbs of Polk County, Tenn., is a lawyer, mountain climber and owner of a farm at the Ocoee River Bridge on the western side of the Ocoee River Gorge. His farm is the spot from which any of three routes talked about (before any EIS has been published) for Corridor K would begin and go west toward Ducktown. Mobbs has attended important public hearings in both Benton, Tenn., and Robbinsville, N.C., and spoke up at both for the corridor to be completed; however he told me he has no financial interest in it.
TDOT’s cleanup of the massive rockslide that buried part of U.S. 64 in the Ocoee River Gorge Nov. 10, 2009 is underway. The river is a fabulous play-boating recreation site for enthusiasts from Florida to Maine. If TDOT’s cleanup were finished by January 2010 as guessed at/estimated by the engineers, that would be on time for the start of the 2010 season of 160 days of controlled releases from TVA’s Ocoee Dam No. 2. This creates thrills that are artificial yet very real if you’re in one of the rolling, dipping rafts.
ARC has $527.9 million set aside for Corridor K work in Tennessee, in an 80-20 split with state government.
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.