In far western North Carolina, a $50 million, five-year river road relocation project continues on 4.9 miles of U.S. 64.
First responders will need to be trained to activate a spill basin in case there ever is an accident involving hazardous waste 50 feet up on the longest steel-span bridge in state history.
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Murphy, N.C., Nov. 3, 2006 — The project superintendent for the $50 million relocation of a stretch of U.S. Highway 64 here says he and his employees and subcontractors are doing “everything possible” to keep from harming the scenic Hiwassee River.
Now in its 16th month, this project has not rated much coverage in the local newspapers here. It hasn’t scored even a mention on the otherwise deep, comprehensive web site of the non-profit organization that bears the river’s name, the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition. The latter has explained that what’s happening now was approved years ago, before HRWC’s incorporation. HRWC views the work as a foregone conclusion it can do little about.
Here in the Blue Ridge, large engineering projects may seem commonplace. Rivers are spanned, and the spaces between mountains are sealed up with concrete, creating dams. Yet the current U.S. 64 work is impressive in its size and scope.
That is clear from interviews I had today with Jamie Wilson, division construction engineer for the North Carolina Dept. of Transportation Division 14 in Sylva, and Daniel “Dink” Jones, the U.S. 64 project superintendent for Wright Brothers Construction Co. of Charleston, Tenn., who works out of an office in a house trailer on Harshaw Road in Murphy.
The $50 million cost of this 4.9-mile-long project puts it at about $10 million per mile. Work began in June 2005. The scheduled completion date is September 2009.
A main bridge now under construction in east Murphy will be “the largest single steel span bridge in the history of the state of North Carolina, three hundred and thirty-one feet,” said Wilson, the division construction engineer. Up until now, the largest such bridge of this type in the state has been one in the Outer Banks, he said.
This Murphy project now has on site two large cranes, one with the lifting capacity of 250 tons and the other a lifting capacity of 150 tons. These will be used to swing into place the large steel parts for the bridge roadway that will be 50-55 feet above the water. At the center of the span, they will weigh 2000 pounds per foot of beam. In just one web splice of a single bridge beam, there will be 300 bolts.
I asked: “So it will be strong enough to support even, say, a lumber truck with 17 white oak-tree logs?”
“Yes,” Wilson said.
In recent weeks, passers-by have watched with rapt interest the work being done high up by two large machines, a D-6 Caterpillar driven by a man from California named Javier Lopez and an excavator driven by a man from Alaska named Eric Snyder. They and their tractors have scurried busily up and down two steep slopes, sometimes appearing to go almost straight up or straight down. These elevations on which they have been working rise 248 feet, according to Jones. They directly overlook U.S. 64 and the Hiwassee River.
As these daring men complete their dizzying work, other machines spray a custom mix of rye and millet. Then a compound is spewed out and it forms a mat. The purpose is to keep the soil in place, and not see it slide down on the roadway and in the river. So far, this process appears to be succeeding. Eventually, the matting will disintegrate and mix in with the soil. In all, this project is moving three million cubic yards of dirt, Wilson said, and the hourly pay is modest.
Fifty-five acres are involved in the project in which NCDOT received a permanent easement from the Tennessee Valley Authority, according to the TVA’s February 2005 supplemental environmental assessment. There are 21 stream crossings including two bridges across the Hiwassee River and for crossings of Martins and Hampton creeks. The remaining 17 stream crossings involve pipe or box culvert installations. On the Martins Creek side, the TVA also is relocating its Murphy-Blairsville transmission line to make way for the new roadway.
“No designated wild and scenic rivers, or streams on the Nationwide Rivers inventory or their tributaries, or unique or important aquatic habitats occur at or adjacent to the project area,” TVA wrote.
“The commitment in the 1994 Federal Highway Administration environmental assessment to relocate the town of Murphy’s raw drinking water intake has been completed.”
I asked the NCDOT’s Wilson: What is the purpose of all this work and expense?
“As you drive the old U.S. 64, you can see just how antiquated and unsafe it is,” Wilson said.
It also could speed tourists faster and more safely on their way to Highlands, Cashiers and other mountain getaways. The hundreds of real estate salespersons working the Murphy area will watch closely to see how the road relocation affects sales and homebuilding.
Golfers bound for Cherokee Hills County Club and dependent on winding Harshaw Road will enjoy in the new U.S. 64 a direct route to their recreation. Harshaw has hairpin turns and sharp slices to the left and right, and these will be eased. If only the golfers could imitate NCDOT and achieve the same kind of straightening out as they take their shots with their number one wood clubs off the course’s tee boxes.
The U.S. 64 project could mean shorter delivery times for ambulances to reach Murphy Medical Center with stricken patients from Murphy, Ranger, Bear Paw, Bellview and Martins Creek, and possibly save lives. There will be easier travel to class for students at Tri-County Community College than if they were to continue to drive the old roadway that winds through hills and, at a scenic farm valley with red barns, skirts the banks of the Hiwassee. Yet how much of a tradeoff is being made, and what does this mean for the future of the river?
‘THE AGENCIES SUGGESTED WE NOT GO IN THE WATER’
Jamie Wilson is a graduate of Andrews High and he received his degree in civil engineering from North Carolina State in 1986. He is one of the key managers keeping track of 60 NCDOT projects that are in varying stages of conception, approval and construction in 14 far western counties of North Carolina.
He is tall and a bit taciturn, but contacted me within two days after my request for information about this project went to the Communications office in Raleigh. Jamie Wilson is a person in whom NCDOT has invested a lot of authority since he is tracking 60 projects in a state government department spending, at least in Murphy, $10 million a mile. He responds in the atmosphere of openness that you sense in using the department web site, and in a state that is one of three in the South with open government in the state constitution, and not just in statutes. (The other two with this distinction are Arkansas and Florida.)
The thick plans for the U.S. 64 project in Murphy are in drawers of a gray cabinet on a wall in Jamie Wilson’s office. Each sheet is in metrics and he patiently uses a calculator to convert the numbers to feet and yards for a reporter.
A dense overlay of approvals for the Murphy project appears to be summed up in TVA’s 2005 supplemental environmental assessment. You can read it in a portable document format on the TVA’s web site. Wilson worked for TVA in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and helped design the giant utility’s manufacturing facilities for fertilizer while he was an N.C. State student. Yet he is not ready to affirm the 14-page TVA document as the single guide for how he and his colleagues are protecting the Hiwassee River, including staying out of it by erecting a 331-foot-long steel span, longest in state history.
“There have been a lot of studies,” he said. “The agencies working on this suggested we not go in the water.”
One of the 10 “mitigation measures” that jumps out at you from a 1994 NCDOT environmental assessment is that “construction techniques will be used that do not allow wet concrete to contact water in the rivers or streams.”
“We do that on all our jobs,” Wilson said in today’s interview. “Wet concrete will kill just about everything in a river.”
He talked about the mitigation measures used up on the slopes such as seeding and matting to control erosion, and revealed that these steps are busting NCDOT’s budget for this project.
“There’s no telling how much over budget we are because of the soil erosion matting, but we’re doing it,” Wilson said. “You don’t spare any money when it’s erosion or safety.”
“Here it is,” he added, as he turned to a page in one of the documents on his desk. “We’re one million dollars over budget on soil erosion for this project.’
SOME HOT BUTTONS have to be pushed to move a project through the federal and state governments, and in this one, there also were “hot rocks.”
“A hot-rock issue moved us to the other side of the river,” Wilson said.
Twenty years ago, preliminary design studies showed “the significant potential of exposed ‘hot rock’,” according to the 2005 TVA supplemental environmental assessment. “The underlying geological formation was known to contain hot rock that when exposed to the elements could produce acidic runoff that could cause adverse impacts to aquatic ecology. NCDOT proposed to relocate this portion of U.S. 64.”
Federal roadways 74 and 64 are asphalt paths important for North Carolina tourism. They make an abrupt right angle in Murphy. Now the need to take the relocated portion of 64 from the east to the west bank of the Hiwassee River is going to create a hairpin curve in a federal highway. This is to be mitigated, and safer approaches to the intersection are to be ensured, by not only relocating old 64 but also rebuilding a 1000-yard stretch of it. This will take it up over one of those 248-foot slopes. Those are the elevations just excavated and dressed by heavy-equipment workers from California and Alaska.
On both the relocated new U.S. 64 and the old rebuilt 64, there will be only two lanes. However, the bridges on the new stretch are to be wide enough for four lanes, should these be deemed necessary in the future.
As you can see, this is a project that has been defined in studies over the past two decades Another standard that the relocated road will meet is that of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Engineers for 60 mile-an-hour travel, according to Wilson.
“Sixty-four is one of our strategic highways, and we’re meeting the design standards for it,” he said.
The best management practices that NCDOT is using include putting in silt fencing and doing seeding and mulching. “We have a policy governing our design and installation of devices so that they’re being done properly,” Wilson said.
The latest document in what must be a library shelf of them governing this project is the ’05 TVA supplemental environmental assessment. It identifies in table two what the TVA says are the one crayfish, six mussel, one snail, and two fish species in the vicinity of this work. That’s far short of the 72 plant and animal species that are “endangered, threatened, of special concern or considered rare by the N.C. Natural Heritage program,” as cited in the first five-year update of the Hiwassee River Basinwide Water Quality Management Plan approved by the NC Environmental Management Commission in May 1997, and coming up for an update next year.
While TVA named two fish in the area of the road alignment, the water management plan stated that 68 fish species have been collected from the Hiwassee River basin.
ANYONE WHO EVER HAS parked a vehicle in a garage knows that despite your best efforts and regular trips to the dealer for service, your engine’s crankcase oil and other pollutants can leak out onto the floor.
“There is a collection system on the (U.S. 64) bridges,” Wilson said. “All the deck drains go into a pipe and are carried to the bank and run to buffer areas. None of the water on our bridges gets into the river.”
He agreed that a “worst-case scenario” might be a collision up on the roadway, say between logging and gasoline trucks.
“There will be a hazardous spill basin with a sluice gate,” Wilson said. “If the emergency responders can get there in time, they can close the gate and all the hazardous waste can come to the spill basin.
“Before we turn the job over, the maintenance people will be made aware of this. I’m sure there will be a groundbreaking, and everyone will be there to be in the photo.”
‘I GO WHERE THE JOB GOES’
Daniel “Dink” Jones is a courteous, tanned and thick man with the frame of a ‘dozer driver and the personnel and management skills to be Wright Brothers Construction Company’s superintendent for a $50 million project in Murphy.
He is from Loudon, Tenn., and he has a high-school education. He is a tough man and outside his office is a bulletin board and one of the memos there states that there will be no “back talk” from employees.
This is a no-nonsense approach that the nation’s taxpayers surely will appreciate, for they’re the ones paying for all of this work.
I asked Dink Jones if he and his men and women on the job are doing all they can to protect the river.
“Yes, we are,” he said. “We are doing everything possible, because we like to drink water, too.”
He seems grateful that someone wants to put on the record the names of the two heavy-equipment men who graded the slopes above the road and river, and discounts the dangers involved.
“It’s something you get used to quick,” Jones said. “It looks dangerous, but it’s really not. And they all wear seat belts.”
Wright Brothers Construction, which makes roads and not bicycles or airplanes, sends its superintendents to live in the area of a project with a long life. “I go where the job goes,” Dink Jones said. “I am a resident of Warne.”
That means he drives home each day on old U.S. 64 along Brasstown Creek – and the following are my words, not his. In this daily commute he sees up close how this road’s original designers likely did not take as their first consideration the protection of the Hiwassee River.
“Yes, that work was in 1923,” he says, and he learned this from the dates carved into bridges. “There are places where they put the road right up against the river.” That’s all he said about it, and I didn’t press him to explain how the 2006 work is learning from that of 83 years ago; the federal and state studies have seen to that.
Brasstown Creek east of Clay’s Corner and in the stretch near the Creamery and Ogden School is the site of the Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition’s current cleanup. It received 2.1 million from the North Carolina Clean Water Management Trust Fund in 1999. Its purpose is to “restore more than five miles of stream, create and protect 45 acres of riparian buffer, and re-vegetate 160 acres of critically eroding bare areas,” according to the article “TVA watershed teams” on TVA’s web site.
Section 303(d) of the federal Clean Water Act requires states to list streams not meeting water quality standards. These fouled-up streams are where “the effluent limitations… are not stringent enough” and “controls of thermal discharges… are not stringent enough to assure protection of and propagation of a balanced indigenous population of shellfish and wildlife.” As of the writing of this watershed’s management plan in 1997, Brasstown Creek east of Murphy was the stream here receiving this rueful designation. It’s not good, but at least the superintendent of the ’06 road relocation is seeing this polluted tributary of the Hiwassee River each day as he drives to work.
Dink Jones said that the work has not yet begun on the hazardous spill basins for two bridges, basins that must work and be operated properly in time if toxic substances are never to go over the sides and fall 50-55 feet into the Hiwassee River.
Meanwhile, the little 100 X 100 ryegrass-seeded bowl of earth on Harshaw Road near its intersection with Martins Creek Road is a storm runoff catch basin.
There are piles of heavy stone in the water around huge concrete abutments. It is on this rip-rap that the two big cranes will crawl when they get ready to do the job of lifting into place the heavy bridge beams. That day will be an important one for the ecology of the river. Swimming in it are fish species numbering somewhere between two and 68 and as the big cranes start work, the fish may be able to sense that something big is going on up there.
About 35 persons work for Wright Brothers here, and had best check the bulletin boards regularly. Counting part-timers and consultants that come in and out to check on things, there are about 50 persons working on this project.
Wright Brothers Contracting is the excavator and prime contractor. Simpson Contracting of Cleveland, Tenn., is the builder of five bridges in all. Carolina Landscapes of Hendersonville is the landscaper. The overall project is being coordinated by NCDOT Division 14’s Andrews Office, where Trent Anderson is resident engineer. Four counties are served by the Andrews Office, according to the NCDOT web site.
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.