N.C. Mountain Planners Learn to Look Out for Landslide Dangers

August 10, 2007

Landslides like the one that killed residents of a western North Carolina community three years ago are a more common threat to mountain dwellers than they might seem, so the region’s planners are trying to learn how to prepare for them.

Trouble spots are pinpointed in new landslide surveys for Macon County, which borders northeast Georgia and was the site of the fatal slide, and will be outlined in surveys under way in Buncombe and Watauga counties. Landslide surveys also are planned for Haywood, Henderson and Jackson counties next year.

The data will help planners decide how to engineer roads and housing developments to protect lives and property, said Rick Wooten of the state Geological Survey’s Asheville office.

Wooten briefed about 85 planners from around the state this week at a conference of the North Carolina chapter of the American Planning Association. He described how landslides that have scoured the mountain landscape are likely to hit the same areas in the future.

“The visual impact of those geological surveys are going to be important for laypeople to see what’s happening on steep slopes,” said Kristen Carter, community planner for the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

The lesson was quickly absorbed by Vickey Wade, director of Western Carolina University’s Local Government Training Program, who lives three miles outside of Cullowhee.

Wade said she loves the green pastures and huge boulders that surround her home, but now realizes they have a more ominous side.

“It’s obviously a debris fan,” she said.

Wooten said the debris fan – remnants of past landslides – are usually triggered by torrential rain caused by tropical storms.

One such storm was Ivan, the downgraded hurricane that ripped through the mountains in September 2004 and caused a slide that killed four people, including a pregnant woman, in the Peeks Creek community of Macon County.

The storm, which hit ground soaked nine days earlier by Tropical Depression Frances, brought water and mudslides that caused at least $11 million in damage to a 40-mile section of the Blue Ridge Parkway and collapsed one side of Interstate 40 at the Tennessee line.

Another hurricane in 1940 caused landslides and killed 14 people in Watauga County. Since then, about 139 new homes have been built in those slides’ paths, and they cross county roads in 521 places, Wooten said.

Fourteen of those slide paths were reactivated by Ivan and other tropical storms that went through the mountains in 2004.

Geologists later established that landslides had occurred along the same path about 370 years ago and as long ago as 23,000 years ago.

“I like to have big boulders in my yard – I’m a geologist after all. But I want to know how those boulders got there, too,” Wooten said. “Part of planning is knowing what to expect.”

On the Net:

N.C. Geological Survey: http://www.geology.enr.state.nc.us/

Information from: The Asheville Citizen-Times,
http://www.citizen-times.com

Topics North Carolina

Was this article valuable?

Here are more articles you may enjoy.