LELAND, N.C. (WECT) – When it comes to hurricane preparedness, it’s always good to plan ahead — so Leland is taking a hard look at its evacuation routes.
The Town of Leland recently received a $950,000 grant from the North Carolina Emergency Management Transportation Infrastructure Resiliency Fund from the N.C. Department of Public Safety, which will go towards identifying “critical routes within and surrounding Town limits.”
“Being a coastal community and a low-lying community, we’re subject to flooding from large rain events, natural disasters, named storm systems specifically,” said Public Services Director Brannon Richards. “After Florence, Leland was isolated a lot. We had flooding on 17 that closed two sections of that road. Old Fayetteville Road was flooded and closed.”
That led to a myriad of issues as people tried to recover from that storm. People couldn’t get supplies and even worse, emergency services had trouble responding to people in need.
“We want to eliminate those closures so that we can have access during emergency times when life, health and safety are of utmost importance,” said Richards.
The Leland Resilient Routes Project aims to study roads like U.S. 17, Highway 74 & 76, Old Fayetteville Road and NC 133 to come up with solutions that may prevent flood issues. Crews will conduct hydraulic modeling to better understand what weather events may lead to adverse conditions along those routes.
The project may also result in design solutions to prevent flooding. However, those solutions coming to fruition may take a bit longer.
“The funding [for solutions] is something we haven’t identified yet,” said Richards. “We will pursue grant opportunities for construction, but we’ll also look and work with the WMPO and NCDOT who have funding and see if we can work with them to combine funding and implement some of these in the future.”
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