The North Carolina Department of Transportation will soon be mining rock in the Pisgah National Forest as part of efforts to rebuild a hurricane-damaged Interstate 40 in the western part of the state.
The department plans to extract rock from a 33-acre site in the Pigeon River Gorge that lies across the river from I-40 and will store overburden material at an adjacent 11.5-acre site. Using the nearby rock instead of trucking in materials will reduce estimated construction costs and shorten timelines, the agency says.
After being heavily damaged by Hurricane Helene in September 2024, I-40 in North Carolina partially reopened in March of this year.
In the coming months, work will begin on building a temporary bridge across the river and preparing the site for mining. Current construction plans for I-40 have crews using both roller-compacted concrete walls and interlocking O-pile walls.
Work is underway to build a causeway adjacent to the river corridor to access the interstate’s base and gather data for designing retaining walls. The project’s contractor, Ames Construction, aims to build these retaining walls without additional road or lane closures on I-40.
Mining this rock from the forest requires that a temporary transfer of the land from the USDA Forest Service, which owns the Pisgah National Forest, be given to the Federal Highway Administration. The FHWA then issued a temporary easement to NCDOT to extract stone.
Additionally, the Forest Service granted NCDOT a special-use permit to test up to seven extraction sites to determine the most beneficial one for the project. The selection process included field surveys of natural and cultural resources and site ingress and egress design refinements. The three agencies are currently developing a long-term plan for forest restoration and wildlife habitat improvements after mining and construction is completed.
