Kentucky crews helping repair damaged roads in North Carolina after Helene

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – The recovery process in North Carolina is lengthy. Many roads are having to be completely rebuilt.

Kentucky Transportation Cabinet crew members have been down there helping all they can.

“We went down there, and there are just pockets of complete devastation. You might be driving down a road that looks perfectly fine, and then you come across a community where the road is gone, houses had 3 to 4 feet of water in them at times,” said Logan Murphy of Kentucky Transportation Cabinet District 7.

Murphy said the scenes in North Carolina remind him of some of the natural disasters that have recently happened in Kentucky.

“We knew what it’s like. We’ve had disasters in western Kentucky with the tornadoes and eastern Kentucky with the flooding, so we knew what they needed. We knew how hard it is to rebuild after situations like this,” said Murphy.

Murphy was involved with a crew that was down there for two weeks.

“We were able to work on five or six roads. A couple of them were impassable. There was one section of roadway where all it took was one pipe to be clogged up and the river rechanneled, took out the road,” Murphy said.

The joy of helping others is what fuels people like Murphy to do things like this.

“It’s very fulfilling work because I know we are doing a good job. I know we are helping speed up the process of recovering because it’s going to take them a long time to recover in some of these areas. Just anything our crew could do to help speed it up just a little bit,” Murphy said.

Murphy said he would be headed back down to North Carolina to relieve some of their crews on Friday.

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