As it flows north into Asheville, the French Broad River passes under Interstate 40 and takes a hard right, paralleling the highway for about a mile before turning again toward the city’s River Arts District.
As the N.C. Department of Transportation braced for Hurricane Helene, this stretch of I-40 was not a place engineers expected to worry about, despite its proximity to the river. That changed when the department’s two-year-old flood warning system began predicting the French Broad would put as much as two feet of water onto the highway.
“I was shocked when they told me that,” said Chad Franklin, NCDOT’s intelligent transportation systems engineer for the region that includes Asheville. “It had never flooded before.”
The initial prediction from the flood-warning system came on Wednesday, Sept. 25, a day before Helene had even come ashore in Florida. As the storm moved inland and the rainfall predictions grew more dire, so did the predicted flooding.
Before dawn on Friday, Sept. 27, Franklin dispatched NCDOT safety patrol trucks to I-40, with orders to shut it down as soon as water reached the pavement. Just before 1 p.m., as the remnants of Helene were moving out of Western North Carolina, they and state troopers closed the highway as the French Broad continued to rise.