Tropical Storm Helene underscored the dangers of aging dams and flood-control infrastructure in Western North Carolina.
Leading up to the storm, some signs already indicated that something more needed to be done should a natural disaster strike.
A substantial number of aging dams are in poor condition throughout the state with a risk of failure, posing a significant hazard to property or life if they fail. The cost of repairing them is often prohibitive. Instead, dams no longer serving a purpose remain in place despite disrupting a river’s flow, impacting the ecology and posing a public risk as they degrade.
In the hours after Hurricane Helene, American Rivers’ Southeast Conservation Director Erin McCombs found a scarce sliver of cell service near her home in Asheville. Her first instinct was to search online for reports of failed dams.
“A lot of the initial reporting was that many major dams had failed,” McCombs said. Most of those reports were untrue, however, North Carolina documented 41 state-regulated dams that failed or had significant damage from Helene.
The powerful storm underscored the weaknesses of aging dams in Western North Carolina and the need for updated flood management strategies.
While large-scale dam projects are unlikely, experts are focused on better forecasting, targeted dam modifications, and, in some cases, dam removals. With climate change driving more extreme flooding, communities at risk will need to rethink how to protect lives and property beyond traditional infrastructure.
This article is the first in a three-part investigative series, Restraining Rivers, which examines the challenges of water control in the North Carolina mountains. This article examines the scope of the problem and its importance. Upcoming articles will look at why a consistent approach is challenging and identify the types of solutions that may be most effective in various locations.
Dams in the way of Helene’s wrath
One dam at risk of failure during Helene was the Swannanoa River’s Lake Craig Dam, 3.5 miles east and upstream from downtown Asheville.
Nearly 30 inches of rain fell in portions of the Swannanoa River’s headwaters, raising its level 6 feet above its record and overwhelming the river. Rushing through a confined and winding channel, the unprecedented flooding scoured the landscape, uprooted trees, claimed lives and destroyed structures.
Debris hauled by the floodwaters collected against the century-old Lake Craig Dam, which also serves as a bridge. Originally used as a water source by the City of Asheville in 1886, the dam was increased in size in the 1920s to form a recreational lake and to generate electricity. The reservoir, however, was drained in 1952, but the dam structure remained in place, with water flowing through open spillways.
According to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, dam failures often occur when water flows uncontrollably over or around a structure due to inadequate spillway design or debris blockage. When asked by CPP, a spokesperson for the NC DEQ was unable to provide an inspection report for the Lake Craig Dam. During Helene, an earthen embankment on the structure’s south side was washed out during the storm, taking with it, a portion of the bridge.
In the case of Lake Craig Dam, McCombs explained that “the river found its way,” carving a new path by eroding the riverbank and cutting through the dam and bridge, sweeping debris downstream like a toy.
“Rivers need room to move,” she explained. “When we can remove restrictions, communities are safer.”
Among other dams damaged during the storm were the Lake Louise Dam in Weaverville and the Lake Tomahawk dam in Black Mountain. Both were overtopped by water and are “intermediate” or “high” hazard class dams.
A high hazard dam is a dam that can cause significant property damage or loss of life if it fails or malfunctions. This does not mean the dam is at high risk for failure, though it could be. The designation only means that any failure would be catastrophic.
Harnessing water
In the early 20th century, the Southern Appalachians experienced a surge in dam construction, driven by the belief that managing the region’s abundant rainfall and flowing streams could fuel economic growth by generating hydroelectric power, managing floods and providing recreation.
As the South transitioned from a purely agricultural to a more industrial economy, hydroelectric systems were central to modernization, supplementing coal power and enabling urban expansion. The era saw the rise of large-scale water infrastructure projects built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Tennessee Valley Authority, such as dams, reservoirs and canals – all aimed at controlling floods and droughts while powering the textile, tobacco and furniture industries.
But plans to develop a major TVA water control initiative on the French Broad basin never came to fruition, leaving unanswered the question of how such a system might have fared during Helene.
In 1966, the Tennessee Valley Authority proposed 14 dams on tributaries of the upper French Broad River, 74 miles of channel improvements and 1.4 miles of levee along the French Broad in Asheville. The French Broad flows through four counties in Western North Carolina from its headwaters in Transylvania County, eventually spilling into the Tennessee River.
In all, the sprawling project would have captured a total of 19,200 acres of water, created 6,700 acres of lake area and 183 miles of shoreline. Its purpose would not have been to generate power, but rather to promote recreation, attract industry, provide drinking water and control floods.
By the Tennessee Valley Authority’s estimate, the project would have yielded $143 million in benefits with construction costs equal to $96 million with 1966 price levels. In today’s dollars, the project’s benefits would be worth $1.4 billion, and nearly $1 billion in costs. For perspective Hurricane Helene caused more than $60 billion in damages.
The project never came to be. Fierce resistance from a strong coalition of residents allied with the fledgling environmental movement, and aided by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, led the utility to abandon the plans in 1972.
However, the 92-year-old federal agency is still tasked with providing flood control.
James Everett, senior manager of TVA's River Forecast Center, has spent nearly two decades overseeing the complex web of rivers and dams. His job is highly technical, but also deeply personal. He grew up in southwestern Virginia fishing Southern Appalachian rivers he now helps regulate. When Helene unleashed its fury on the region, Everett and his team faced one of their greatest tests.
“An event like this one was staggering,” he said. “The people in these communities, they’re our neighbors, friends and relatives.”
From their centralized state-of-the-art forecast center on the ninth floor of the TVA’s headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee, engineers face multiple computer monitors analyzing incoming data from gauges, computer models and weather radar that measure river flows, lake levels and forecasts.
Covering the wall facing the engineers’ workstations is a wall-to-wall digital map the size of a classroom chalkboard, displaying data for the entirety of TVA’s Tennessee River system that includes 49 dams spanning the 41,000-square-mile watershed that covers five states from southwestern Virginia to western Kentucky where the Tennessee River meets the Ohio River.
The system of tributary dams, Everett said, operates like a tree in which its main trunk, the Tennessee River, branches upstream into dozens of watersheds, including the French Broad, and hundreds of smaller streams and creeks.
During Helene, TVA engineers conducted real-time simulations to predict runoff and manage water releases, keeping a close watch on the tributary dams taking the brunt of the storm. Among them were Douglas Dam on the French Broad River near Dandridge, Tennessee, and the Nolichucky Dam due south of Greeneville, Tennessee, both of which experienced floods-of-record during Helene.
Douglas Lake didn’t reach its capacity. But on Friday evening during Helene, the TVA issued a “condition red,” a precautionary public warning that the Nolichucky Dam could fail. Flood water spilled over the dam’s top, eroding its abutments, the earthen material on the edges of the structure.
The TVA issued the warning out of an abundance of caution, given the unprecedented magnitude of the storm and the massive volume of floodwater, marking the first time in the agency’s 92-year history that such a warning was issued.
Everett said the TVA’s flood control system in East Tennessee performed exactly as intended. Without the capacity to capture flood water in Douglas Lake, it’s likely many cities and towns would have faced costly flooding.
“Before TVA was here, floods that would have run rampant through communities like Elizabethton. Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lenoir City, Florence, Muscle Shoals – were buffered against Helene, which is remarkable given the size of the storm,” he said.
TVA modeling allowed Everett’s team to estimate that flood control efforts prevented roughly $400 million in damage to communities downstream. About 90% of those avoided losses were in Knoxville and Chattanooga, two of the region’s most flood-prone cities on the Tennessee River. Everett said, however, that TVA’s damage estimates only account for potential structural loss and don’t capture the full scope of a flood’s impact, including potential lives lost.
Despite the benefits of TVA flood control operations, they couldn’t prevent severe flooding in portions of East Tennessee, such as Erwin, and Western North Carolina where intense rainfall fell beyond the reach of TVA’s dam and reservoir system.
Costly dam projects less likely in future
Everett and his team are part of a workforce of 7,500 employees who provide power to 7 million people across seven states and oversee river management infrastructure that generates more than $12 billion in annual revenue on the 652-mile river system.
However, dams are costly to construct and difficult to maintain. Altering a river’s natural flow can have significant environmental consequences. Managing a system as complex as what the TVA oversees is no easy task.
Since government agencies now face mounting pressure to downsize operations rather than expand them, it’s not likely that Western North Carolina will see a big, or small, TVA style flood-control system anytime soon.
Will Rinehart, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in his Techne newsletter in October 2024 that complex political forces and public interests have restricted the range of acceptable flood control policy solutions, making large-scale infrastructure projects such as dams politically unfeasible.
“Has anyone seriously proposed revisiting the 1960s TVA project for the French Broad River?” he wrote.
“Public policy should focus on building hard infrastructure. But think about what is not being said about Helene: Even now, when a big water management program could be palatable, there’s simply no talk about a flood management system.”
Rinehart has argued that it’s become too easy to stifle large-scale public good projects, such as expanding the solar grid, affordable housing, water infrastructure projects or broadband networks.
As projects develop there’s an accumulation of “veto players,” Rinehart told CPP, from public agencies to a range of stakeholders. “My sense is this makes it very difficult” to propose or build large-scale public projects.
The sprawling TVA system, built during one of the most ambitious dam-building campaigns in U.S. history, is considered complete. No plans exist to build additional dams on tributaries of the French Broad, Everett said. Instead, the TVA is doing things within its current mandate, such as refining forecasting tools, improving flood response, stewarding shorelines and promoting stream biodiversity.
In collaboration with Oak Ridge National Labs, for example, Everett said the TVA conducted a study to assess potential impact from climate change on its reservoir system and operations. The study examined various climate scenarios to determine the system’s resilience against increasing hydrologic extremes.
Meanwhile, forest hydrologist Nicolas Zegre of West Virginia University warns that flooding in Southern Appalachia is becoming a growing crisis as climate change increases the frequency of extreme rain events, such as Helene and the February 2025 floods in Eastern Kentucky.
At WVU’s Mountain Hydrology Lab, Zegre and other researchers study water resources with a focus on how environmental and climate change affect freshwater security, access and social justice in mountain regions. Catastrophic flooding in southern West Virginia in 2016 was partially mitigated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Summersville Dam on the Gauley River, which prevented severe flooding in Charleston, Zegre said.
But the devastation in Eastern Kentucky this year and Western North Carolina last year are a stark picture of the problem that dams alone can’t solve, such as averting flooding and landslides in communities at the headwater level — in small coves and along creeks that seldom flow.
Dams, while valuable, Zegre said, aren’t a silver bullet. “Dams have a lifespan — maybe 50 years,” he said. “They serve a purpose, but they aren’t the ultimate solution.”
In Appalachia, communities are scattered across remote valleys and steep terrain. “You can’t put a dam in every holler,” he said. “When we’re talking about protecting people and property, we have to think beyond hardened infrastructure.”
In October, CPP reported that large dams on the Catawba River were unable to prevent flooding during Helene. In order to sustain dam safety and power generation, Duke Energy released massive amounts of water from Lake Norman, which surged into the smaller Mountain Island Lake downstream.
Part of Duke Energy’s Catawba-Wateree Hydro Project, the lakes support hydro and nuclear power plants and drinking water for millions. With no spillover capacity, Cowan’s Ford Dam at Lake Norman released surplus water, flooding downstream communities, causing major damage in Mt. Holly, Lucia and Riverbend Township.
The flooding destroyed six structures in Gaston County and severely damaged more than 100 homes, with additional destruction across the Catawba River in Mecklenburg County.
Potential options
Floodwaters from Helene caused widespread devastation throughout the western part of the state with one of the hardest-hit watersheds being the Swannanoa River in Buncombe County.
Efforts to manage floodwaters along the Swannanoa have been a topic of ongoing discussion over many years, but high costs consistently hinder progress.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a report in August 2017 analyzing potential solutions for the flooding problems in the Swannanoa River watershed. Known as a Section 205 study, the 1948 Flood Control Act authorizes the agency to study, design, and construct small flood control projects in partnership with state and local governments.
The feasibility study made in partnership with the City of Asheville recommended flood risk management alternatives for the watershed in response to damages from two tropical storm systems in 2004 resulting in $54 million in damages to public facilities.
Among the alternatives studied was a dry dam on the Swannanoa River on the Warren Wilson College campus, 7 miles east of downtown Asheville. Dry dams are designed to temporarily hold and control floodwaters to reduce downstream flooding. Various designs were considered and an analysis suggested the dam could significantly reduce the flood risk. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers public affairs specialist Michael Davis said higher than expected projected costs were beyond funding limits of the program.
Another project considered were improvements to the Lake Craig Dam. The report examined the possibility of improving the structure and rehabilitation of its spillway to better match the normal flow of the river. According to the report, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said a large storm event would likely cause a breach. The proposed modifications to the dam also exceeded funding limits due to costs associated with the project.
The final recommended plan included a channel modification project in Biltmore Village along the Swannanoa River, two miles south of downtown Asheville, Davis said. Due to budgetary challenges and decreased revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asheville officials terminated the project.
The potential exists for a new feasibility study to address flood risks on the French Broad River, Davis said. In an email to CPP, he explained that for a study to move forward would require funding from Congress and a non-federal sponsor, such as a state or local government, to share the project’s cost.
Still, some costly flood mitigation projects, including dam removals, are moving forward across the mountain region.
Removal of dams
In June 2024, McCombs of American Rivers and Watagua River Keeper Andy Hill watched as a Caterpillar excavator dug its mechanical thumb into the 100-year-old Shull’s Mill Dam near the site of a former lumber town on the Watauga River.
Located 7 miles from Boone, this marked the beginning of a roughly two-week process to demolish the dam and restore the river’s natural flow.
The Shull’s Mill Dam project is one in an expansive effort to remove obsolete and aging dams in Western North Carolina and throughout the U.S. Shull’s Mill Dam was one of roughly 27,000 dams throughout North Carolina, many of which, McCombs said, are no longer serving a purpose.
Among the objectives of the project was to restore the river’s natural course and stabilize the habitat for river creatures, including Eastern Hellbenders, a giant salamander that has long inhabited the rivers of the Eastern United States.
American Rivers is a leader in the movement to remove dams and hopes to raze 30,000 by 2050. In 2023, 80 dams were removed nationwide to prevent catastrophic failures, and in some cases, improve a river’s ability to handle flood waters by reconnecting the waterway’s natural flow with its floodplain, potentially allowing high water to spread out.
American Rivers isn’t acting alone. The U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 included $75 million to remove high-hazard dams in which a failure could cause loss of life.
According to Hill, the century-old Shull’s Mill dam would likely have failed during Helene.
“But when a dam is removed, the river can flow naturally, allowing floodwaters to disperse their energy and velocity more gradually,” he said. “We're learning from these kinds of devastating hurricanes. There are things we can do to set ourselves up to be more resilient in the future.”
The removal of aging dams, such as Shull’s Mill Dam, is just a singular component of a much larger reckoning for flood-prone communities in Southern Appalachia and throughout the nation. Communities must also consider where to rebuild homes and infrastructure, how to best steward streambanks, and which policies to select, such as zoning rules and construction standards.
Building more flood-resilient cities and towns, however, requires collaboration between community advocates, federal funding, state agencies, and local governments, each with their own incentives, priorities, timelines, and constraints. A significant hurdle to confront future flood waters is finding common ground among them to minimize future costs and to protect lives.
Editor's note: The Restraining Rivers investigative series is supported in part by the Pulitzer Center, whose mission is to champion the power of stories to make complex issues relevant and inspire action; Sugar Hollow Solar, a B-Corp certified, locally owned full-service renewable energy company; and by readers like you.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Carolina Public Press is an independent, in-depth and investigative nonprofit news service for North Carolina.