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Corridor K,
a federal highway project that will carve a path through and
under the Blue Ridge Mountains, clears some approval hurdles
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition Inc.
Murphy, N.C., Nov. 26, 2009
– In this 75th year of the Great Smoky Mountains National
Park and Blue Ridge Parkway, there’s significant work of
great environmental importance taking place in two states on
14- and 10-mile stretches of the Appalachian Regional
Commission’s Corridor K.
These pieces of four-lane highway between Cleveland,
Tenn. and Asheville, N.C., will put down a century or more
of asphalt along a route that will take the highway south of
the GSMNP to end a bit west of the Parkway.
Playboaters who use a U.S. recreation resource of
immense value and beauty know that the North Carolina route
tracks well above the Nantahala River Gorge. Meanwhile, a
Citizens Resource Team account that Tennessee has “ruled out
the Ocoee River Gorge route as an option” is unofficial talk
about a very good idea, and it is premature.
Studying the agencies and the mountain people as all
this is taking place tells a lot about what is going to
happen to the mountains, the water and the air up here.
Here are recent developments in the mostly
federally-financed, state-guided engineering projects,
identified in the jargon that each state currently employs:
Corridor
K Western North Carolina
US 74 Relocation Project, B and C portions of N.C.
Transportation Improvement Program Project No. A-9, from
U.S. 129 in Robbinsville to N.C. 28 in Stecoah.
The 23 persons testifying at the Robbinsville, N.C.,
Senior Center Oct. 29 about NCDOT Project A-9 B&C, and
almost unanimously condemning it, seemed to me to do so with
a hollow, tinny sound.
One said his daughter prayed the road never gets built.
Another said this proves how “God is being left out of
everything,” though these were the sole, inexplicable divine
references of the entire evening’s testimony by citizens or
officials.
I sat there wishing a condition of getting your moment
at the podium could have been that however your degree of
shrillness tonight, you agree to return in 26 months. Then
you will disclose whether or not you’ve taken the NCDOT
right-of-way cash. It’s being dangled now, and an NCDOT
official said payout will begin in 2012.
THE BIGGEST NEWS to come out of merged-process open
houses and a hearing (i.e., many federal and state officials
gathering at one time for citizens’ benefit) is that granite
will be discarded somewhere out here from dual tunnels.
These will be about 60 feet wide and nine football
fields long. They will be dug under Snowbird Mountain, one
eastbound and the other westbound, with great fans
ventilating them. Stacy Oberhausen, who is NCDOT’s manager
of Project Development and Environmental Analysis in
Raleigh, is in charge of finding a place to put all this
rock. Imagine the erosion threat to the countless creeks and
streams of the Cheoah River watershed! So there’s a
secondary environmental challenge almost as great as the
main one of building the highway.
Hayesville Quarry near Hayesville, N.C., is using a
series of state Mining Act permits to take down Shewbird
Mountain in Clay County and use its granite in roads. Were
its owner, Harrison Construction Co.-Division of APAC (and a
subsidiary of a company in Ireland) to land the B&C paving
contract, because the similarly named Shewbird is located a
few miles away, then more of the latter, visible in two
states, will be blasted.
The Cherokee Tribe is said to have named Shewbird
because it looks like a great bird showing its wings. All
that is left of the figurative bird’s head is a rude
arrowhead-like shard.
IT HAS BEEN 45 YEARS since Appalachian Regional
Commission and its developmental highway system became law
in 1964 as part of President Johnson’s Great Society
program. According to its web site, ARC has $676.7 million
set aside for Corridor K work in North Carolina, in an 80-20
split with state government.
This N.C. leg of the highway has a Federal Highway
Administration letter of intent to build that is published
in the Federal Register, and as of three months ago, a U.S.
Corps of Engineers public notice signaling a go-ahead given
by that key manager of U.S. rivers.
A N.C. general statute distributing ARC highway funds
across 100 counties, whether a county has mountains or not,
makes western-county legislators’ and local government
officials’ faces contort in anger and dismay.
Corridor
K East Tennessee
Appalachian Developmental Highway System Corridor K, U.S. 64
from west of Ocoee River to SR 168 near Ducktown.
A year ago, as one Corridor K development or another
was taking place, I went to see John Carringer of the Murphy
Electric Power Board.
“May I have a document giving your organization’s
position on Corridor K?” I asked.
“There isn’t any such document,” he said.
He gave his age as “more than 88” and he is the manager
of an agency that Dun & Bradstreet reports is 88 years old.
It provides Tennessee Valley Authority electric power to
this town of 1,568 in far western North Carolina.
“Then may I have copies of your speeches about Corridor
K?” I asked.
“We don’t do speeches,” he boomed.
“Then may I have copies of your letters to the editor (in
the local weekly newspaper)?”
“We don’t do letters to the editor… THERE IS NO document
here!”
John Kennedy’s vision of corridors into the mountains
to bring prosperity to Appalachia has extended into the
Internet era. State government sites are open and
transparent as you see at the following:
http://www.ncdot.gov/projects/US74Relocation/ http://www.tdot.state.tn.us/corridork/
However, local governments and utilities having web
sites are mute about their positions on Corridor K.
Instead, leaders talk among themselves. They miss an
opportunity to enter the American tradition of public debate
and disclosure to citizens.
The Tennessee Department of Transportation is at work
on a Transportation Planning Report; Environmental Impact
Statement; and Context Sensitive Solution/Design, or CSS/D.
This will go on for years.
A 2003 draft EIS has been discarded. It’s somewhere on
a library shelf as nothing more than an artifact of
Tennessee highway history.
Denny E. Mobbs of Polk County, Tenn., is a lawyer,
mountain climber and owner of a farm at the Ocoee River
Bridge on the western side of the Ocoee River Gorge. His
farm is the spot from which any of three routes talked about
(before any EIS has been published) for Corridor K would
begin and go west toward Ducktown. Mobbs has attended
important public hearings in both Benton, Tenn., and
Robbinsville, N.C., and spoke up at both for the corridor to
be completed; however he told me he has no financial
interest in it.
TDOT’s cleanup of the massive rockslide that buried
part of U.S. 64 in the Ocoee River Gorge Nov. 10, 2009 is
underway. The river is a fabulous play-boating recreation
site for enthusiasts from Florida to Maine. If TDOT’s
cleanup were finished by January 2010 as guessed
at/estimated by the engineers, that would be on time for the
start of the 2010 season of 160 days of controlled releases
from TVA’s Ocoee Dam No. 2. This creates thrills that are
artificial yet very real if you’re in one of the rolling,
dipping rafts.
ARC has $527.9 million set aside for Corridor K work in
Tennessee, in an 80-20 split with state government.
* * *
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek Community west
of Murphy is a Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition member and volunteer.
E-mail him at
farblumtn@gmail.com
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