Hundreds of Storm-Ravaged Roads, and No Timeline for Fixing Them

The small roads made of dirt and rock had been there for generations, twisting byways that carried families up and down the mountains of western North Carolina. The asphalt highways were newer, built along cliffs and over rivers to connect the region with South Carolina and Tennessee.

But flooding fueled by the remnants of Hurricane Helene washed many of those roads away last week and grievously damaged many others, stranding people in more remote locations and requiring lengthy detours through much of the area.

More than 1,600 state transportation employees and contractors have already worked to reopen some roads and portions of major highways, including interstate lanes around Asheville. But as of early Saturday, there were just over 700 incident reports noting a portion of road still listed as closed, impassable or otherwise affected by the storm.

“People’s lives and livelihoods are on the line, and there’s going to be very little patience for delay,” said Tabitha Combs, an assistant professor focused on transportation planning and policy, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Referring to the rebuilding ahead, she added, “It’s going to be a big political challenge. It’s going to be a big planning challenge. It’s going to be just a lot of conversations — a lot of really hard conversations — that people need to have about what we can prioritize.”

Perhaps the most consequential destruction is on Interstate 40, where a mudslide slammed through the portion of highway that winds over the rugged Pigeon River Gorge and connects western North Carolina with eastern Tennessee.

Officials estimated that an average of 25,000 to 30,000 drivers crossed the gorge each day, carting supplies, packages and people on routes that go well beyond the two states. One example of the severe damage in that area: About four miles of road have either lost all four lanes or the two eastbound lanes.

Even as other parts of the interstate reopened this week, public safety alerts warned against nonemergency travel and said that it was still impossible to get to Tennessee that way. Officials also pleaded with people to stay away from the tourist destinations and wait a year to see the golden and auburn fall leaves popping into view, and avoid an urge to see the damage for themselves, which could further clog the roads and stress the remaining infrastructure.

“Everyone has adapted and adjusted and sort of refocused their lives around the interstates,” Dr. Combs said. “And now that those interstates, that traffic, that commerce, is not flowing — it’s going to make it a lot tougher on a lot of people.”

Bringing Interstate 40, as well as many other highways and roads, back to full capacity is likely to take months, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars, though officials cautioned it was too early to make formal estimates. As of Thursday afternoon, the department had reopened 130 roads, said David Uchiyama, a spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

“The best way to describe that closure is indefinite,”Mr. Uchiyama said. “Everybody in the state realizes the importance of this stretch of I-40 for its residents and its visitors.”

Wendy Payne, the division engineer for some of the state’s western counties, said that the department was beginning to wrestle with how to shore up the mountain slope and any remaining piece of lane before discussing how to rebuild the road.

“It’s not going to be an event that will be back to normal next week,” she said, adding that she hoped the temporary repair could be done by the end of the year.

Another major highway, Interstate 26, has been used in the past as a detour to get repair materials and workers from Tennessee to North Carolina after rockslides or flood damage. But it, too, has been heavily damaged.

“Our forefathers that did this route and decided to build an interstate here — I mean, they weren’t afraid of a challenge,” said Steve Borden, the director and assistant chief engineer overseeing eastern Tennessee at the state’s Department of Transportation.

He said his staff was working to reopen one westbound lane in the coming weeks on still shuttered parts of interstate as a way to ease the traffic constraints and help get supplies closer to North Carolina. Because of the extent of the damage, contractors were having to make their way down a mountainside to the river and build a temporary workplace.

Even as smaller roads open up, the lack of highway access will prove challenging for heavy trucks that cannot detour through small mountain roads. A public safety alert from the North Carolina Department of Transportation on Thursday warned that “tractor-trailers must stay on the Interstates, otherwise you will get stuck.”

“This will exacerbate financial losses around the area,” said Oriana Calderón, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee who focuses on freight shipping. “The detours will have cascading effects on traffic patterns.”

Mike Morgan, a spokesman for Henderson County, N.C., estimated there were about 35 to 40 areas in the county where people cannot go in or out by car. Teams were bringing them supplies on foot or A.T.V., while helicopters were helping some people evacuate.

“We’re still so much in the trying to get to people and trying to figure out what we can do mode that we’ve kind of not forecast into the future too much,” he said on Friday, one of multiple officials who declined to offer a timeline for fixing the roads. “Right now, we’re truly living in the present.”

Roads aside, some people no longer have transportation after losing their cars to the storm. In North Carolina, one woman, her car trapped behind a fallen tree, wondered how costly it would be to visit her mother about 80 miles north in Johnson City, Tenn.

Business owners worried about what it would mean to lose the revenue they count on from commuters or tourists who stop on their drive between counties or states.

“It hurts all the businesses,” said Tim Glance, 49, the owner of Old Grouch’s Military Supplies in Clyde, N.C., surveying the muddied jackets and bags drying outside his store. “It makes everything more expensive to get here.”

There are even more challenges for communities that had grown comfortable relying on unpaved roads to get to their homes in the mountains.

In Cruso, N.C., the volunteer fire department was using A.T.V.s to drive food and oxygen tanks uphill to isolated homes.

When firefighters arrived at a home, carefully navigating around a yawning hole in the road, they were greeted by Jackie Henson, 65, who had arrived the previous day to care for an 80-year-old man with dementia.

It took her about seven hours to make her first trip after the storm to her patient’s home, she said, far longer than her usual commute.

“Neighbor helping neighbor — that’s how we survived the last time,” she said.

In Tennessee, the cluster of people who rode out the storm in Poga, a tiny community in the mountains of Carter County, began referring to themselves as “the island” after they were cut off when the floodwaters washed out two bridges that had been their only way in or out.

They pushed two 40-foot flatbed trailers into the water and chained them together as a makeshift bridge but remain wary about driving too much weight over it.

The National Guard has delivered supplies by helicopter, including on Friday, but otherwise, the nearest source of food is now 40 or 50 miles away, said Bob Trivette, 67, who runs a small store in Poga. People are having to drive an extra 90 minutes to get to their jobs, he added, using “a lot of gas that we don’t have.”

“It’s going to be tough,” Mr. Trivette said. “We need roads in.”