Options that would swing well to the north and south are “gone” from Corridor K planning in east Tennessee
TDOT and URS Corporation, along with Quantum the computer and lots of citizens’ advice, are down to six possible routes upon the topography of the Ocoee River gorge
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition
Copperhill, Tenn., March 28, 2011 – Jeff Koontz isn’t saying how many tunnels and bridges he and his fellow engineers are likely to recommend in the next environmental impact study for the construction someday of four lanes of traffic through or around the Ocoee River gorge.
“We’re starting to whittle it down and narrow our focus,” Koontz told me at tonight’s Tennessee Dept. of Transportation Corridor K public meeting at Copper Basin High School.
Koontz is senior project manager for the Nashville, Tenn., office of URS Corporation. It’s an engineering design firm based in San Francisco that goes after big government contracts. The examples of them in the field of surface transportation, according to the URS web site, include the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Central Texas Turnpike and Pennsylvania Turnpike Reconstruction.
Now URS Corp. is at work here in the mountainous southeast corner of the Volunteer State. If you ask the dispatchers for the nation’s trucking companies, it’s a big headache. They would prefer to see a big fat red line dissecting it on their maps. And who’s on the other side of the issue? It’s the Americans who consider the scenic Ocoee River gorge and surrounding National Forest a premiere recreation and tourism destination.
Jeff Koontz is a likable engineer who stands about 6-feet-4. He is a native West Virginian and the son of a professor at Marshall University. For his own education, Jeff went to North Carolina State University, the starting point for many an engineer working these mountain ranges, and he received his degree in roadway design engineering in 1988.
Tennessee Dept. of Transportation’s latest attempt to write an EIS for the remaining 14 miles in Tennessee of Appalachian Regional Commission’s Corridor K is, as far as I can tell, painstaking, laborious and transparent.
Options for the path of the four-lane that would have taken wide loops to the north and south of the gorge until reaching Tennessee 68 here in Copperhill are missing from the ubiquitous Foamcore charts that TDOT public relations lives by.
A northern option that somehow would have clung to the north slope of Little Frog Mountain “would have needed to be a road on stilts, one like the last segment that was built on the Blue Ridge Parkway at Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina,” I said to Jeff Koontz.
“The Linn Cove Viaduct,” he said, finishing my sentence. “My buddies and I used to go to the Linn Cove Viaduct visitor center and hike from there to the point at which you get a good view of it,” he said.
So mountains and appending roads to them are something he’s studied from up close. He’ll be on the hot seat as more details emerge about how to get concrete and mortar to stay on rock that has a penchant for moving.
The north side of the Ocoee River gorge tumbled down onto U.S. 64 and the river at mile 17.6 in November 2009. This closed the road for five months. The work-up afterwards put in a barrier that looks like the Berlin Wall, did some widening and took off a sheer wall or two, but this is still no place to be driving at night. In 2003, at a time when a big revision of the existing path in the gorge was the focus, an environmental impact study envisioned four four-lane tunnels and 30 bridges. It’s been taken off the Internet.
At each public meeting, the engineers are careful to point out that it’s the Quantum software for planning highways that has come up with paths for this one so far, and there is a Citizens Resource Team that gets to have its say.
The six East Tennessee Corridor K “alternatives recommended for further analysis” that are in tonight’s meeting handout, with their assigned numbers surviving from earlier iterations when there was a total of 11 of them, are:
- Option 1, don’t build anything at all and worth considering in my opinion;
- Option 2, significant improvements to the entire length of existing U.S. 64 through the project limits;
- Option 4, build “north of the section of existing U.S. 64” through the Ocoee gorge;
- Option 5, build on the north side of the gorge along a route similar to option four but nearer Parksville Lake;
- Option 8, improve existing U.S. 64 and also build on the north side “a roadway in a new location toward the Little Frog Wilderness area” and tie back into U.S. 64 west of Whitewater Rafting Center; and
- Option 8A, like option five build nearer Parksville Lake, and then like option eight, build on the north side toward Little Frog Wilderness” and link up with existing U.S. 64 at the Whitewater Center.
Corridor K options that would have taken a new four-lane highway in expensive and sweeping loops around the gorge “have been grayed out,” I said to TDOT’s, Chester Sutherland. I had not met him before at the public meetings here at Copper Basin High School, and I was trying to win his confidence by quoting the PowerPoint show and talking the approved language.
“They’re gone,” Sutherland said.
Chester Sutherland is a plain-speaking man with a homespun touch. He now officially has the title of TDOT project manager for Corridor K (while his colleague Wesley Hughen remains on scene, knowledgeable and a good source for information about the project).
How far in miles above existing U.S. 64 lies the common path on the north side where options four through eight A are drawn? “From the centerline of the 2,000-foot shared corridor of options 4, 5, 8, and 8A down to existing U.S. 64 along the Ocoee River and Lake varies from 0.96 miles maximum down to 0 and averages 0.71 miles,” said Chester Sutherland.
HOW UNSTABLE is the Blue Ridge here, as proven at mile 17.6 two years ago? What is the steepness and extent of grade? What are the Federal Highway Administration and environmental standards that this road scheme must hurdle (that is, were Congress ever to approve, and the President sign a law permitting a federal highway through the Cherokee National Forest)?
For a state or federal engineer like Chester Sutherland, you can take up the balance of your career on a project of this nature, which already dates to the Kennedy years in the White House.
“The Episcopal liturgy on the third Sunday of Lent this week was from Romans chapter five in the Bible,” I said. “It talks about how tribulations bring patience and patience brings experience and experience brings hope.” He smiled and, after one of those moments when searching for what to say, he replied, “It’s a great book.”
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.