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It has been nine months after Hurricane Helene, and many North Carolinians still cannot move back home. The storm washed away small bridges over streams and creeks, cutting off access to houses in the mountains of Appalachia. In our ongoing series Here To Help, Zachary Turner with member station WFAE reports on how one nonprofit has a unique way of rebuilding those bridges.
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ZACHARY TURNER, BYLINE: In the weeks after the storm, helicopter pilot Leeth Davis ran supplies to stranded residents in Lansing, North Carolina, using his off-road vehicle. Here's Davis in October of last year.
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LEETH DAVIS: We've got a bunch of private bridges up here that, you know, aren't under DOT's purview. So it's going to be a while before, you know, those folks are able to, you know, drive to their house.
TURNER: Hurricane Helene damaged more than 7,000 private bridges, roads and culverts in western North Carolina. Many folks still can't reach their homes by car. In the mountains of western North Carolina, there is limited space to build houses. That means they pop up in valleys alongside streams and creeks, often with only one road in. So Leeth and his wife, Emily Davis, a structural engineer, went from running supplies over damaged roads and bridges to repairing them.
EMILY DAVIS: Now we're getting people, you know, their bridges and their driveways and their culverts put back together. And we're also putting money back into our community.
TURNER: They founded the nonprofit Lansing's Bridge to Recovery, where volunteers and local contractors rebuild these bridges. Many of the residents they've helped are low-income and often elderly. A single bridge can cost around $150,000. The maximum FEMA payout covers about a third of that. For every dollar the nonprofit raises, they're able to build $2 worth of infrastructure because of volunteers and donated materials, like when Emily Davis reached out to her former professor. Civil engineer Shen-en Chen started a class at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to train students to design some of these bridges.
SHEN-EN CHEN: She actually gave us 13 addresses, and we have 13 students, so they each take ownership of one.
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URI OBAKA: Careful, careful.
TURNER: Uri Obaka (ph) took the class last semester. Now he's marching out into the stream holding a pole with a transmitter on it to record the water's depth.
OBAKA: Our goal was to build a bridge that's able to hold 20,000 pounds, dedicated for an ambulance. That's the heaviest it could hold.
TURNER: The road, or, in this case, bridge to recovery has been a long, unexpected one for Leeth Davis and his wife. Many weeks, it's like a second job. But he's not mad about it.
L DAVIS: At the end of the day, the motivation is exactly what it always has been, and that's we have the ability to leave it better than we found it. And we intend to do that.
TURNER: Lansing's Bridge to Recovery has already rebuilt over 90 structures, and nearly 150 projects remain in their queue.
For NPR News, I'm Zachary Turner in Lansing, North Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF CURTIS MAYFIELD'S "THINK (INSTRUMENTAL)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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