Why Helene road repair in Western NC may lead to poorer road conditions statewide
The federal government is expected to provide most of the billions of dollars it will cost to repair Western North Carolina roads and bridges damaged by the remnants of Hurricane Helene.
Now state officials are asking the feds to pay for all of it. Otherwise, they say, the N.C. Department of Transportation will have to defer road maintenance elsewhere in the state.
NCDOT estimates that its share of Helene road reconstruction costs under normal formulas will top $900 million. That would mean diverting money from repaving, repairs and other work to maintain the state’s existing highways, says Secretary of Transportation Joey Hopkins.
“The short of it is, there will be impacts to us if we don’t get any help for that match,” Hopkins told lawmakers last week. “All of that money, to start with, comes out of our highway fund, which is our maintenance and operations.”
Hopkins and Gov. Josh Stein have asked federal officials to pay for all of the Helene-related repairs and reconstruction, rather than roughly 80%. They made the request in a letter dated Feb. 19 to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other federal officials.
“Without additional federal assistance, the restoration of state-maintained roads and bridges will be delayed for years,” they wrote. “Please help North Carolina so that we can quickly restore the region’s mobility and economic prosperity.”
The letter notes that Congress has provided 100% reimbursement for disaster costs before, most recently after Hurricane Fiona caused severe flooding in Puerto Rico in 2022 and after a container ship struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore last spring.
An NCDOT spokesman said the state has not yet received a response to its request. The Federal Highway Administration has not responded to a request for comment from The News & Observer.
The most expensive disaster in NCDOT’s history
NCDOT has never faced a challenge like Helene. The department estimates that rebuilding roads and bridges destroyed by the storm will cost $5 billion. The Office of State Budget and Management puts that figure at $6 billion, factoring in inflation and other cost increases as the work takes place in coming months and years.
Before now, the most expensive storm in NCDOT history was Hurricane Florence in 2018.
“At a cost of over $250 million, it was challenging for NCDOT to meet that storm’s financial needs,” Stein and Hopkins wrote. “NCDOT does not have the resources to address the state’s share of the $6.0 billion in Hurricane Helene damage.”
Two agencies, the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will reimburse the state for much of the cost. Using its own estimates of $5 billion in damage, NCDOT expects the federal government would provide a little more than $4 billion, said Mark Newsome, the department’s chief financial officer.
The state’s share would be an estimated $917 million, Newsome told lawmakers. Factoring in lag time while it waits for federal reimbursements, the department will have as much as $1.4 billion tied up in Helene repairs, Newsome said.
Putting off $1.4 billion in maintenance work over 3 to 5 years would cause road conditions to worsen statewide, as repaving and other maintenance projects are delayed, said Mark Gibbs, who oversees NCDOT operations in Western North Carolina. The cost of catching up will be significantly higher as roads deteriorate, Gibbs said.
“If maintenance has to be deferred, we do expect that the future year cost will be $3 billion to reestablish our system to its current maintenance condition,” he told lawmakers last week.
NCDOT has identified about 9,370 sites damaged by Helene, ranging from collapsed shoulders and lanes covered in landslides to the disappearance of miles of pavement or entire bridges. More than five months after the storm, 149 roads remain closed, down from a peak of 1,454.
The state has spent about $432 million so far on roads and bridges damaged by Helene. It has received about $81 million in reimbursements from FEMA and the Federal Highway Administration.
This story was originally published March 3, 2025 at 1:40 PM with the headline "Why Helene road repair in Western NC may lead to poorer road conditions statewide."
