Hurricane Helene destroyed thousands of state-maintained roads and bridges. But the storm washed away even more private crossings, leaving homeowners stranded. Nine months later, many folks still aren’t able to access their homes. A new engineering class at UNC Charlotte aims to fix that.
A bright orange excavator rumbled through a stream about 45 minutes north of Boone. These large machines, with their caterpillar tracks, clear debris. They can change the entire structure of a stream in the process. That’s a problem for Uriel Vaca, who’s deg a bridge to cover this crossing.
“Two months ago, it was so much thinner,” Vaca said. “So it extended, and they also cleared out a lot of debris, so the creek widened. So now we're looking to see if the bridge is still adequate for the situation.”
A white house sits stranded on the opposite bank. Hurricane Helene washed away the only crossing connecting this house to the road. The homeowner — 82-year-old Herman Cox — has been living in a nearby trailer ever since.
Cox isn’t the only Ashe County resident that Helene displaced. Hurricane Helene damaged more than 7,000 private bridges, roads and culverts in western North Carolina. These bridges can cost as much as $150,000 in materials alone — and the maximum Federal Emergency Management Agency payout covers less than a third of that.
Vaca hauled a metal pole into the water to remeasure the width and depth of this stream.
“We're going to survey, but it starts all the way from the road, that's zero elevation, and we run it through all the way over here, through the water to see how deep it goes,” Vaca said.
Lansing’s Bridge to Recovery will use those blueprints to get Cox back home. Emily Davis and her husband, Leeth, started the nonprofit to identify projects, coordinate volunteers and local contractors, and put donated materials to use.
Lansing's Bridge to Recovery has rebuilt over 90 bridges, roads and culverts. Given their limited budget, about $425,000 in private donations, they’ve gotten creative about stretching those dollars further. Davis, a UNC Charlotte graduate, reached out to her former professor Shen-en Chen in the engineering school.
“Dr. Chen was very happy to get involved and very quickly developed an actual class that started in January,” Davis said.
Shen-en Chen created a three-credit hour course for his sophomore students that would give them practical, real-world experience in civil engineering and help Ashe County residents move back into their homes.
“We put the students into three, three teams, focus on three bridges,” Chen said.
Each team functioned like a mini engineering firm. They modeled flood scenarios and measured soil erosion for each site. They used GIS data to make blueprints, calculated material costs and sketched shop drawings for manufacturers.
“It became a very real project at that point and everybody played a role,” Chen said.
Emily Schuman is a junior at UNC Charlotte’s engineering school. She said this class was very hands-on.
“It felt like I was more in the workplace than what I would probably end up doing once I graduate than most of the other classes,” Schuman said.
The workplace brought real-world challenges. One bridge was built while the class was still deg it. Storms and debris cleanups widened the streams. In one instance, the owner ed away before they finished the design. Despite the setbacks, Schuman said she fulfilled more than a degree requirement.
“Knowing who you're helping really affects the project a lot,” Schuman said.
Chen is teaching his bridge class again this summer.
“Talking to the locals, we realized that we need a lot more people to help,” Chen said.
And he found that help at Tennessee State University. Next semester, students in Amber Spears’ class at TSU will Chen’s class and design bridges for people in Ashe County. They’ll use the data that Vaca and others have collected out in the field.
“The goal is basically to increase the amount of students so that more bridges can be designed within a given semester,” Spears said.
A byproduct of the class is the creation of a standardized process for deg temporary bridges after a disaster.
“There's no standard,” Chen said. “We're trying to come up with design charts so that people can do this easier without going through extensive engineering calculations.”
Lansing’s Bridge to Recovery plans to build Vaca’s and at least one other bridge this year — more if they can find the money.
“I just want to kind of see it through,” Vaca said. “I'm at an age where experience, any experience, is useful and I just, I love it, [its] something I enjoy to do.”
