In the week after Hurricane Helene flooded western North Carolina, personal off-road vehicles growled through the main street of Lansing, 45 minutes north of Boone. Helicopter pilot Leeth Davis ran supplies to stranded residents using his off-road vehicle.
"We've got a bunch of private bridges up here that aren't under [the Department of Transportation's] purview," Davis said. "So it's going to be a while before those folks are able to drive to their house."
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.
"Now we're getting their bridges, driveways and culverts put back together," Davis said. "And we're also putting money back into our community."
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.
"She actually gave us 13 addresses. We have 13 students, so they each took ownership of one," Chen said.
Uriel Vaca 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 width and depth.
"Our goal was to build a bridge that's able to hold 20,000 pounds, dedicated for an ambulance," Vaca said. "That's the heaviest it could hold."
The measurements that Vaca takes today will help students draw up plans pro bono for this stream.
Lansing's Bridge to Recovery has already rebuilt over 90 structures. And nearly 150 projects remain in their queue. 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.
"At the end of the day, the motivation is exactly what it always has been," Davis said. "We have the ability to leave it better than we found it, and we intend to do that."
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