Storm damage in places along the Blue Ridge Parkway "just defies description."/NPS

Through the years, Mike Litterest has been assigned storm recovery duties in a dozen or so national parks, but he's never seen devastation like that visited on the Blue Ridge Parkway from the remnants of Hurricane Helene.

"I can say, really without hesitation, that the destructive force of what hit the Blue Ridge Parkway is unlike anything I've seen at any of the other ones," he said during a phone call Friday. "Part of that is what we're seeing. Roads washed away. The tangle of trees. And not just trees down, it's the density and how they're all sort of tangled together, which is a problem. 

"... If you're in the Caribbean or you're on the Florida Gulf Coast, you expect to see that," Litterest, a National Park Service spokesman helping with damage cleanup and assessment on the parkway, added. "A hurricane that's moved this far inland should have lost its power by the time it got to this point."

But Helene carried its fury more than 600 miles north after smashing into Florida near midnight on September 26.

The North Carolina State Climate Office said, "[T]orrential rainfall from the remnants of Hurricane Helene capped off three days of extreme, unrelenting precipitation, which left catastrophic flooding and unimaginable damage in our mountains and southern foothills. It was close to a worst-case scenario for western North Carolina as seemingly limitless tropical moisture, enhanced by interactions with the high terrain, yielded some of the highest rainfall totals – followed by some of the highest river levels, and the most severe flooding – ever observed across the region."

Flooding, power outages, and downed trees were among the calling cards the storm tossed about, but as Park Service crews managed to get back on the ground after the storm passed they found tens of thousands of downed trees littering roadways and forests, landslides, mudslides, undercut roads. 

Undercut roads add to the challenging nature of rebuilding sections of the Blue Ridge Parkway following Helene/NPS

"We're tracking about three dozen rock and earth slides along [200 miles of] the parkway" in North Carolina, said Litterest. "Nine of those have significantly damaged the road bed."

The landslides likely were not a surprise. A geologic resources inventory of the parkway completed by the Park Service in 2020 noted that, "[T]he primary geologic hazard in the parkway is slope movements. Slope movements may include rockfalls, landslides, and debris flows. ... [U.S. Geological Survey and North Carolina Geological Survey] geologists have photographed and analyzed hundreds of locations with the potential for slope failure along the parkway."

The report also noted that "parkway resource managers submitted a technical assistance request in 2015, stating that with the likelihood of landslides increasing in the southern Appalachians, the parkway needs a defensible strategy criteria for parkway closures based on potential weather events."

Assessing the damage, and working to clear it away, were nearly 400 Park Service and interagency employees, including more than 100 employees from Blue Ridge Parkway.

Litterest struggled Friday when asked to describe what he saw on the North Carolina portion of the parkway, a beloved 469-mile ribbon of asphalt that connects Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.

"It really, in a lot of ways, just defies description," he said. "One of the pictures we sent out shows [a vehicle] in the middle of what looks to be a treeless landscape that two weeks ago was a heavy forest."[Top photo]

A  view of the slide at Ferrin Tunnel No. 3/NPS

Storm runoff carved a gaping hole in the parkway near Ferrin Tunnel No. 3, the spokesman said, and when he and others went to look for the spot on Google Maps they quickly realized that a clearing they spotted near the road "had been a forest before the slide took all the trees away."

"There are just areas that are absolutely shocking with what the power of the water was and what it must have looked like to see this force of nature come through something that had just been a meandering little creek a couple days earlier, and the amount of water that came down and moved some of these facilities or washed away these roads."

Most of the campgrounds seem to be in good shape, he said, though some do have a good number of downed trees that need to be removed.

The worst damage along the North Carolina stretch of the parkway runs about 180 miles.

"While the entire 252 miles of parkway in North Carolina has been impacted, the most significant, and in some cases, catastrophic, damage occurred between milepost 280 to milepost 469," said Litterest.

How long will it take to repair the damage is the question that doesn't yet have an answer. While most of the parkway reopened Friday in Virginia, aside from roughly 25 miles, it could take a year or longer to fully restore the parkway in North Carolina, said Litterest.

"We've got three assessment crews right now that are working the parkway in North Carolina. One of those crews is civil engineers specializing in roadways. They're taking a look, they're going to do the report that will determine how the repair is going to be made, how long it's going to take, and what the cost is," he said.

Back in 2004, said Litterest, the parkway was hit by back-to-back hurricanes that did similar damage to what Helene did and it took 18 months in some cases to reopen the damaged sections.

"I think we are safe in saying that for some of these areas the timeline [to complete repairs] is probably going to be measured in years," the spokesman said.