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An east Tennessee freeway in
the sky is one of the incredible Corridor K construction
schemes that could straddle the Hiwassee River watershed,
costing billions to build and posing severe environmental
threats
By Tom Bennett
Special to Hiwassee River Watershed Coalition, Inc.
Murphy, N.C., May 15, 2007 – The remote Kimsey
Mountain Road runs east from Tennessee Highway 30 near
Reliance, up and over peaks as it takes you toward Murphy.
This is a rugged 12-mile-long gravel trail high up in
Tennessee’s Little Frog Wilderness, managed by the U.S.
Forest Service. I drove it today in my pickup truck.
Rounding curve after curve, you bounce along over gravel,
even boulders, as you grip the wheel with both hands and
your tires hug a two-lane path along the rim of a
breathtaking horseshoe-shaped valley. This powerful scene
of mountain splendor is dotted with rhododendron, mountain
laurel and wild azalea. Elevation changes here are
dramatic, ranging from 1,200 to 3,332 feet, according to
www.wilderness.com and the runoff from the steep slopes
on the northern rim of the horseshoe drains into the
Hiwassee River.
It is along this northern rim that Denny E. Mobbs said
is a good place for Tennessee DOT to build the Corridor K
highway. Mobbs is a leading advocate of this Little Frog
Wilderness site now that proposed routes through the nearby
Ocoee River gorge have been exposed, he said, as “an
environmental disaster.”
Mobbs lives in Polk County, the Tennessee county that
abuts North Carolina’s Cherokee County, where Murphy is
located. He has a civil law practice in Cleveland in nearby
Bradley County. He readily acknowledges that he is a member
of a steering committee of citizens in three states formed
to advocate building the Corridor K highway.
“If you take the road out of the Ocoee River gorge,
which is the only place suggested by TDOT, and if you go to
the South, you go through the Big Fog Wilderness,” Mobbs
said. “If you go north, then you have to go to the north
side of Little Frog Wilderness.
“This was rejected (by Tennessee planners) because it
was not feasible,” he continued. “But no study was done.
It was rejected in part for historical reasons. The road up
there was built in the last century and it is intact and
someday, somebody might say, ‘Let’s put it on the National
Register of Historic Places.’
“Wright Brothers Construction Company has told me they
could build a road through the Polk County mountains,” Mobbs
continued. “It would be an incline plane and a rampart, and
that would take a lot of work. But if you build the road
straight through, and if you do the cuts and fills, then
lineally it’s 10.5 miles in a straight line along the
ridge. You might use part of the old Kimsey road, or you
might go above or below it.”
Mobbs told Cliff Hightower of the Chattanooga Times Free
Press that using this Polk County mountain route for
Corridor K “could cost $686 million.” Congress would have
to pass, and the president sign, a law permitting a highway
through U.S. Forest Service land.
(Wright Brothers, of Charleston, Tenn., in Bradley
County, is the company that currently is building the $50
million relocation of 4.9 miles of U.S. 64 in Murphy. This
includes a bridge over the Hiwassee River that will feature
a 331-foot-span of steel, longest in North Carolina history,
so that there will be no piers in the river.)
Four 4-lane tunnels and 30 bridges through the Ocoee
gorge
Other highway-minded Tennesseans are scrambling to
document greater citizen support for this latest revival of
Corridor K. It is a part of the alphabet soup of
cross-mountain highways envisioned in 1965 by the then-new
Appalachian Regional Commission.
A Corridor K Draft Environmental Impact Study by
Tennessee DOT was presented in 2003 but summarily halted the
next year because the agency doesn’t have the $1.4-$1.5
billion needed to build it, according to Denny E. Mobbs.
Or, in an entirely different explanation, the Draft EIS came
out in 2003 and then it “was not acted upon within a
required three-year period,” according to Wes Hughen, TDOT
project manager.
I asked Linda Harris, of the Tennessee Valley Authority
how I could obtain a copy of this document. “I’m told TDOT
has one copy left,” Harris said.
U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp is a Republican who represents
Tennessee’s Third District, which is made up of 11 counties
including Polk and Bradley. He is very much in favor of
Corridor K. The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported the
following on March 6:
“Rep. Wamp said road supporters need to band together
because environmentalists who oppose the road will be
organized. ‘The naysayers they will import from Timbuktu
will stop this thing,’ he said.”
Well, Timbuktuans, is it any wonder that some choruses
of nays might be heard, considering what Denny E. Mobbs says
is in it? By his account, the DEIS proposes two alternative
routes through the narrow, precipitous Ocoee River gorge --
which is like saying you will drive your car along alternate
paths out of your garage. The plan would involve digging
four 4-lane tunnels and building 30 bridges, according to
Mobbs.
The gorge is traversed now by a narrow, two-lane road.
Motorists with white knuckles share it with buses of hikers
and canoeists, and large trucks. An oil-company truck
bringing fuel for the bulldozers and cranes of the Wright
Brothers Construction Co. crew at the U.S. 64 project in
Murphy overturned in the gorge on April 18, spilling 3,300
gallons of fuel, said Dink Jones, the company’s Murphy
project manager. The fuel was replaced but the project is
now delayed, Jones said. A series of four-lane tunnels and
bridges could bring more safety to the gorge, yet how would
it alter the aesthetic beauty of one of the most scenic
drives in the Blue Ridge?
John Cartwright is director of Regional Planning and
Research for the Appalachian Regional Commission and based
in Washington, D.C. He attended today’s “Strategic planning
meeting” held at the Ocoee Whitewater Center and hosted by
advocates of Corridor K.
“We don’t have an agenda that we’re going to drive
through this gorge,” Cartwright said.
A LACK OF MONEY, or an approval deadline that expired,
or John Cartwright’s pledge today, or the harm this project
could do to the environment… None of these factors appear to
have put the brakes on Corridor K going ahead in one form or
another, as these recent events attest:
The Southeast Tennessee Development District based in
Chattanooga has a subset of itself called the Southeast
Regional Planning Organization. This body voted Jan. 31 to
make “Corridor K through the Ocoee River Gorge” the number
one highway project it will recommend to TDOT, according to
the Cleveland, Tenn., Daily Banner. The federal government
“has appropriated approximately $500 million for Corridor
K,” according to the newspaper. It quoted Mike Stinnett,
Polk County Executive, as saying: “That funding is going to
expire in 2009. The federal budgets are just as tight as
our local budgets. If we do not act now, I have a strong
feeling this money is going to be pulled”; and
The Chattanooga-Hamilton County-North Georgia Transportation
Planning Organization voted today, May 15, to instruct
Tennessee DOT to “look at new routes” for Corridor K,
according to Mobbs.
Just as they don’t agree on dating of the DEIS or why it
apparently has been shelved for awhile, or where it should
go, Tennesseans can’t agree on why it’s needed.
“The primary purpose of the road is to get rid of
impoverishment,” Denny E. Mobbs told me. “If you own a
bed-and-breakfast, that’s fine. But you cannot raise a
family on the wages of a waitress or maid. We want
prosperity. You cannot have a pristine landscape to have
prosperity. If we have to fragment the forest a little bit,
the road has to go someplace. If it goes on Kimsey Mountain
Road, then there’s going to be some additional
fragmentation. My point is to reach a compromise with
environmental groups so that it is going to have the least
adverse effect.”
However, Rep. Zach Wamp has a different reason why the
road is needed, and states it on his campaign web site,
www.wampcongress.com
“The Corridor K project would create a four-lane highway
linking Cleveland to Ducktown,” Wamp wrote. “Eventually it
would give us a major highway link from Chattanooga to
Asheville, North Carolina. And this might help us recruit
the next major auto plant.
“One of the things that Toyota asked about (as it was
turning down Tennessee in favor of Mississippi for the
location of a new auto-assembly plant) was getting products
to the ports on the East Coast without having to go through
Atlanta. This (Corridor K) is one way to open up the
eastern United States.”
SO MASSIVE STIRRING-UP of ridges and riverbanks is
being talked about on the western edge of the upper Hiwassee
River watershed, costing perhaps as much as $1.5 billion.
Meanwhile, what’s going on elsewhere in the watershed?
As you can see on its website, North Carolina DOT
Division 14 in Sylva has plans for project A9 in Cherokee,
Graham and Swain counties. It is “Corridor K US19-74-129 at
Andrews to NC 28 east of Almond, a four-lane divided highway
primarily on new location.” There will not even be right of
way purchase on sections of it until 2011, and completion is
projected for fiscal year 2013. The 27.1 miles will cost
$888 million. “Much of it is unfunded at this time,” said
Christian Brill, a NCDOT spokesman. “We still have to build
a section in Stecoah Gap that includes a tunnel and a huge
bridge,” said Jamie Wilson, Division 14 construction
engineer. Denny L. Mobbs of Cleveland, Tenn., has traveled
to Sylva to consult with NCDOT Division 14. After
interviewing him, Cliff Hightower of the Chattanooga Times
Free Press wrote that North Carolina is “finishing their
part” of Corridor K. When built, the southern terminus of
this highway at Andrews will carry pollution from vehicles
into the Valley River, which joins the Hiwassee at Murphy.
The combined cost in May 2007 of Corridor K projects
straddling the Hiwassee River watershed is almost $3
billion.
THE ANDREWS BYPASS opened in 1978 and the Murphy bypass
a year later, according to the Sept. 7, 1979 edition of the
Asheville Citizen. “When the Murphy-Andrews link is
completed, there will be a four-lane highway from the
Tennessee line west of Murphy through Andrews, part of
Appalachian Corridor K,” the newspaper reported.
TODAY’s “Strategic planning meeting” hosted by the
Southeast Tennessee Development District at Ocoee Whitewater
Center was uncomfortable for me. I went to gather
information, but along with a roomful of others, I was drawn
into working on the purported markup of an “economic
development strategic plan.” I had written my name, phone
number and e-mail address on a sign-up sheet. Now the
organizers saw that no one crumbled up their handout in
disgust and stormed out. So it’s conceivable they’re going
to report to TDOT, the Federal Highway Administration,
legislators and others that all in the room support Corridor
K.
For the record, here is the STDD’s vision statement: “A
strong regional economy that balances the quality of our
natural environment with a vibrant and prospering economic
base in such a way that we preserve our cultural heritage;
respect the natural resources of the region; and foster a
renewed reverence for our history as we encourage the growth
of quality jobs and new investments enabling our people to
prosper.”
And here is how I rewrote it on my form: “A strong
regional economy that EMPHASIZES the quality of our natural
environment OVER a vibrant and prospering economic base in
such a way that we preserve our cultural heritage; NEVER
HARM the natural resources of the region; and foster a
renewed reverence for our history as we encourage the growth
of quality jobs and new investments enabling our people to
prosper, BUT NO FREEWAY.”
* * *
Tom Bennett of the Martins Creek community west
of Murphy is a board member and a volunteer for Hiwassee River
Watershed Coalition.
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