An engineer involved in building Interstate 40 through a portion of western North Carolina said more than 40 years ago that workers had problems finishing the project because of rock slides.

The Asheville Citizen Times reported Sunday that the engineer said in 1968 that workers could barely finish blasting and leveling some sections before there would be another slide.

Prior to the dedication of that section of interstate in 1968, the newspaper also quoted engineers from both Tennessee and North Carolina as saying slides would probably be a major problem for many years.

The latest problem occurred one week ago, when a rock slide on I-40 near the North Carolina-Tennessee line shut down all four lanes. It's expected to keep the interstate closed in Haywood County for at least four months.

Despite rain, contractors worked on Saturday, hammering boulders at the base of the slide.

When the road was initially proposed, leaders from Madison County and the Asheville area had pushed for another route, one that would have sent I-40 through the French Broad River Valley in Madison, close to where U.S. 25/70 runs now.

Jody Kuhne, a state engineering geologist with the N.C. Department of Transportation, said the two routes, geologically speaking, really presented no good choices.

The Hot Springs-French Broad River route has "crazy geologic (stuff) you can't even wrap your mind around," he said, explaining that it has "rounded quartz rock." It also has just as much low- to medium-grade metamorphic rock - which is more prone to slides - as the Pigeon River Gorge.

In an Oct. 6, 1968, Citizen-Times article previewing the dedication of the road later that month, the writer quoted a Tennessee engineer who said, "It seemed like the rock and dirt had been oiled. We would blast it out, level it, ditch it, and then it would slide almost before we could get the machinery out of the way."

Shortly after the dedication, the forecast by the engineers came to pass. Early in 1969, a landslide blocked traffic on all four lanes.

"There was always an issue of rock falls there," said Russell

Glass, 69, who was the DOT's area geologist for years before retiring in 2001. "We used to run a 24-hour patrol there to push rocks out of the way."

A new round of work, which continued through the mid-1980s, included moving the eastbound lanes to where the westbound lanes were and then adding more room on the Pigeon River side for new
westbound lanes.

"After that was done, they came back and scaled the slopes, knocked the loose rocks off and did some isolated blasting," Glass said. "Then they spotted places to put in rock bolts and some wire mesh."

That was finished up in 1985, about the time a massive slide near the tunnel at mile marker 4 closed the highway for half a year.

In 1997, a study found 49 places along I-40 near Tennessee that were potential slide problems.

"When we went putting in those rock bolts many years ago, we knew we weren't fixing that permanently," said Ron Watson, the division engineer for Division 14 who retired earlier this decade.

"We were trying to fix it so it would last several years, reduce maintenance costs and protect lives. There's only one way to fix it so it won't slide, and that's to just flatten the slope out. And you might have to blast all the way to Tennessee to do that."