Posted on 10/27/2024 5:45:15 AM PDT by Libloather
CHIMNEY ROCK, West Virginia — Blue-collar workers prevailed over bureaucracy in Hurricane Helene-ravaged North Carolina by rebuilding a highway at breakneck speed on their own terms – allowing residents to finally return home.
Coal miners from West Virginia – whom locals have lovingly dubbed the “West Virginia Boys” – moved a mountain in just three days to reopen a 2.7-mile stretch of Highway 64 between Bat Cave and Chimney Rock washed away by Helene.
Chimney Rock residents who fled the hurricane one month ago will now be able to return home for the first time within a few days, months earlier than they expected.
“The river swallowed the road, so I haven’t been home since the hurricane,” Robin Phillips, 49, told The Post.
“The West Virginia boys have moved the mountains. All of the roads were just gone, until now. It’s nothing short of miraculous.
“I haven’t been to my house since the flood but I know very soon I’ll be able to. Without their help, who knows, it would be months before I could access our house.”
**SNIP**
The miners, who were all volunteering their time, were too sheepish about building a highway without legal permission to speak on the RECORD.
Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), North Carolina Department of Transportation and the local Sheriff’s office all visited the site but turned a blind eye to the unsanctioned build.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
You bet turned a blind eye - else they would have gotten a black eye.
According to Olivia, the author. And she seems saddened by government not coming down and crushing the road builders.
This is why people who are informed, self-reliant, family and community involved terrify Deep State.
BYW, note to the NYP: Telling people that Deep State has deigned to allow them to save their lives, livelihoods, and communities is not very good propaganda.
See my reply #23.
Also, ask yourselves why FEMA now has around 23,000 employees...
Gotcha.
Absolutely correct.
Good start but they have a long ways to go. Needs a ditch on the top side and occasional culverts from the top ditch to low side. Then it needs many tons of gravel at least. Road mix(gravel/sand/clay) would be better. These guys are miners though so they probably know about that from building mine access roads. If it's pit mining as opposed to tunnel/shaft mining, they definitely know.
This is what men used to live for.
To build something substantial that will stand for a long time and be used by others.
I heard Bill Bruford (one of the great prog-rock drummers: Yes & King Crimson) talk about a stone bridge he helped build in the 1960s. He still takes pride in it standing today.
From NYS...
When I was a Junior in High School, I was forming the foundations of my political beliefs. One of them, which my friends and I discussed a few times, was “I don’t want to live in a world where anything that isn’t prohibited, is compulsory.” And that’s exactly where the current crop of dems want us. Not THEM, mind you; US.
Did they file an environmental impact statement? /s
Precisely why FEMA is a useless entity. Too big, too slow. By the time people are done dying they’re starting to be ready to help....and ‘ready to help’ means weeks and months before anything is accomplished. It is the nature of bureaucracies.
They’ll do their ‘lessons learned’ to be better next time. Next time the disaster won’t look anything like the last one. Rinse repeat.
FEMA budget should be nothing more than a pile of cash ready to be rendered to local people who know *exactly* what can, and needs, to be done. Maybe FEMA should be just enough people to itemize the types of people and equipment across the country that might be helpful in a disaster.
Or drop some cash at local Churches! ...of course, that’d never happen.
Not just Dems.
Not just here.
There is so much pent up creative force and energy in this country just waiting to be unleashed from the Bureaucratic sissy state...too afraid of its own shadow to move and get needful things done for the people!
I’m sick of the stagnation!
I believe that my friends in Bat Cave will benefit from this. After the storm, they had to be helicoptered out.
This is great. I wonder what the residents of Chimney Rock will do with that poor ravaged town. I hope good things.
“Country folks can survive” -HW Jr
Bureaucrats live in fear, which to the rest of us is paradoxical, because they're harder to fire than anybody. But that doesn't mitigate their psychological reality. Hence, the reason in their "minds" for what they do is fear of somebody making a mistake. What they don't live for is to help get things done such that there are fewer mistakes.
These miners build roads all the time. They know very well what they must do to rebuild a road that goes into a river: Dump BIG boulders into it to anchor the fill. The problem is that the roads miners typically build don't have to last very long because they move on once the deposit they're working is depleted. Importantly, these miners are NOT familiar with the history of that particular river.
How big do the boulders have to be for that particular river for the fix to last long enough to justify reconstructing the town? Or are they building it to last only long enough to break it down and get it out of there? If they are fixing it for the long term and there aren's any boulders that big they can move can they be cemented in during an emergency project like this?
Government and engineering firms can be repositories for that kind of information from past projects and failures, which then a "helpful" bureaucrat could share with the guys with the excavators. It could be that getting a concrete truck in there at the right time for a particular arrangement of boulders would fix it more or less permamently, which of course beats a solution that gets washed out fifty years hence.
Is is worth building a whole town that gets wiped out every century? Could be that it is! Consider that quartz mine in North Carolina upon which the world's semiconductor industry depends. Those guys gotta live somewhere! Hence, one can build for the ages (the typical risk-averse bureaucrat mode) or build for what is a reasonable term knowing that the deposit will last only so long, or if it will, how long will the fix last before it has to be done again.
This of course comes in to designing for the scale of events. Upon occasion, my dad did bond financing for flood control in Southern California. He explained to me that they could finance for a 100 year flood, or for a 200 year flood, but the latter would be three times the cost. Was the community infrastructure worth that extra cost? Yes, all of these are estimates, but this is where that historical repository comes in. So how long this is all supposed to last versus how much engineering is involved is rife with trade-offs and uncertain risks as considered against the obvious urgency of the immediate situation. If they took one more day and the fix lasted a century instead of until the next big event, would it be worth it? This is where talented leadership should enter the picture. Information helps mitigate those long term risks.
Probably an environmental violation. I’m surprised FEMA didn’t shut them down.
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