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Site of rock slide has always been cause of worry to road engineers
All means tried to stop slides since roadwork was started have failed
AP Photo
An aerial view of the recent rock slide on Interstate 40 near the Tennessee border shows rocks as large as mobile homes blocking traffic lanes.
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Published: November 2, 2009
ASHEVILLE - An engineer involved in building Interstate 40 through a portion of Western North Carolina said more than 40 years ago that workers had problems finishing the project because of rock slides.
The engineer said in 1968 that workers could barely finish blasting and leveling some sections before there would be another slide.
Before the dedication of that section of interstate in 1968, a newspaper also quoted engineers from both Tennessee and North Carolina as saying that slides would likely be a major problem for many years.
The latest problem occurred one week ago, when a rock slide on I-40 near the North Carolina-Tennessee line shut down all four lanes. It's expected to keep the interstate closed in Haywood County for at least four months.
Despite rain, contractors worked on Saturday, hammering boulders at the base of the slide.
When the road was initially proposed, leaders from Madison County and the Asheville area had pushed for another route, one that would have sent I-40 through the French Broad River Valley in Madison, close to where U.S. 25/70 runs now.
Jody Kuhne, a state engineering geologist with the N.C. Department of Transportation, said that the two routes, geologically speaking, really presented no good choices.
The Hot Springs-French Broad River route has "crazy geologic (stuff) you can't even wrap your mind around," he said, explaining that it has "rounded quartz rock." It also has just as much low- to medium-grade metamorphic rock -- which is more prone to slides -- as the Pigeon River Gorge.
In an Oct. 6, 1968, an article in the Asheville Citizen Times quoted a Tennessee engineer who said, "It seemed like the rock and dirt had been oiled. We would blast it out, level it, ditch it, and then it would slide almost before we could get the machinery out of the way."
Shortly after the dedication, the forecast by the engineers came to pass. Early in 1969, a landslide blocked traffic on all four lanes.
"There was always an issue of rock falls there," said Russell Glass, 69, who was the DOT's area geologist for years before retiring in 2001. "We used to run a 24-hour patrol there to push rocks out of the way."
A new round of work, which continued through the mid-1980s, included moving the eastbound lanes to where the westbound lanes were and then adding more room on the Pigeon River side for new westbound lanes.
In 1997, a study found 49 places along I-40 near Tennessee with potential slide problems.
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