TED Baker felt a heaviness in his chest, then collapsed near his kitchen.
His wife, fearing her 76-year-old husband was having a heart attack, called 911. But she knew the ambulance would never reach their doorstep.
Their private bridge, the only way to cross the Cane River to their home in Burnsville, North Carolina, had been swept away by Hurricane Helene in 2024.
They had applied for a state programme to get it fixed.
Now months had passed without progress, and an emergency crew was on the other side of the river, trying to figure out how to reach Baker.
The medics inched along a steel beam the Bakers had been using as a makeshift crossing.
Evelyn Baker watched them through the living room window as she held her husband.
“Please hurry,” she thought.
The Bakers are among the hundreds of households across western North Carolina still missing a private bridge two years after Helene devastated the region.
That is despite a US$175mil state recovery programme to rebuild such private bridges and roads, which are prevalent across a mountainous region carved by creeks and rivers.
A document obtained by The New York Times shows the state programme had rebuilt only 44 private bridges as of Sept 15.
Hundreds of sites are still in need of private bridge assistance, and some estimate that number could near 1,000.
Living without a bridge in that region is dangerous and lonely.
Emergency crews can’t reach houses, making house fires and medical scares more hazardous.
Friends rarely come over because driving through a shallow creek is difficult and damages vehicles.
Older residents worry about another winter walking on steel beams prone to icing.
“They want to help us,” Evelyn said, referring to the state. “But they get tied up in all that red tape.”
Contractors, recovery leaders and former and current state officials said stringent new requirements on contractors, bridge plans and non-profits imposed by the state had led to ballooning costs and long delays.
“There’s a lot of hurdles to jump over,” said Marquis Ferguson, whose construction company, WMF Land Services, worked with the state to rebuild private bridges in the past.
“They’ve slowed down even more now.”
North Carolina officials say the programme is prioritising making new bridges more resilient so they will outlast the next disaster.
Frustrations about the programme unfolded during pivotal mid-term races in the state.
North Carolina Democrats highlighted the Trump administration’s deficiencies with Helene recovery.
Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, has also made Helene recovery a top priority of his administration.
He criticised President Donald Trump’s joke about withholding Helene funding if Michael Whatley, his chosen candidate for Senate, did not win.
Democrat candidate Roy Cooper ended up defeating Whatley in the Senate race as part of the “blue wave” in the mid-terms.
More than 100 people were killed; officials estimate the storm caused nearly US$60bil in damages.
And the destruction to private bridges in particular was unlike that in any natural disaster in memory.
“They just forgot about us,” said Heidi Hawkins, 65, whose bridge was damaged during Helene.
“They’re treating this with no level of urgency. It’s abysmal.”
Hawkins still drives across her cratering bridge because her back pain is too severe to carry groceries.
The steel is warped and it appears on the brink of collapse, but her US$900-a-month income cannot cover costs for a new one.
On a recent drive out, she crossed her fingers and felt the 5m bridge rumble and creak.
For generations, families settled near bodies of water across North Carolina’s mountains, building bridges made from locust logs and steel that had survived decades before Helene.
Nowadays, the price of new private bridges can range from around US$50,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars – steep costs in a largely poor region.
That is why people were hopeful about the state’s private road and bridge programme.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is of little help with private bridge repairs because its individual assistance grants for all types of property damage are capped at around US$40,000.
But recovery efforts faced challenges right away, several local leaders said, because of a decision by the Stein administration to disband a programme that had rapidly repaired private bridges destroyed during a 2021 storm.
Many in deeply conservative and government-wary communities still praise that programme, which used a small team to find and pay trusted local contractors to make the repairs following county regulations.
With only US$15mil, the programme completed hundreds of private road and bridge projects about a year after the storm.
It is unclear why that programme or its tactics were not used for Helene recovery.
Under the current programme, the projected price of rebuilds and repairs appears to have grown significantly over time.
On that June afternoon, medics made their way to Ted Baker. They hoisted him onto a rescue stretcher for rough terrain and raced back across the long steel beam to the ambulance.
He survived.
The Bakers have been told by a state programme official that their bridge won’t be finished until next year.
The numbers weigh heavily in Ted’s mind: five heart bypasses, three heart stents, one pacemaker and who knows how many more days without a bridge. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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