Contractors begin building walls for I-40 along the Pigeon River

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]A borrow site in the national forest is directly the trees right there right across the bridges. And we're using explosives to blow up the the bedrock in the forest to bring out boulders roughly 3T in diameter and off-road trucks across the bridges you see there where the off-road truck is hauling. Stop pile that material directly to my left. That material is then loaded on this crushing site directly behind me as well. We crush that down to various smaller sizes to make the roller back concrete. That stockpile at the end of that operation is right here. We then take material from that stockpile to the RCC batch plant behind you. Add cement and other various materials to make the actual concrete. Once the concrete is produced from that plant is loaded in an off-road truck and then taken down to the site.

[00:00:43]The past interstate was constructed on smaller aggregate such as this material you see right behind me and nothing bonding that aggregate together. So we have a large rain event that it's very um scourable material and just leaves the site. So we're basically taking similar material but bonding it together with cement. That's called the roller compacted concrete. Then we're bonding that all in one giant mass. That roller compacted concrete is 30 ft wide somewhere between 30 and 50 ft tall. And then that material is more resilient and not as scalloped. The intent of our design is to withstand a similar event such as Helen. So that's hard to map and figure out exactly what that event is, but we put extensive amount of time into using hydraulics and hydrarology analysis to figure out what we think will be a large event similar to a leak.

[00:01:37]So our intent is that that will last event like that in at least 100 years.