North Carolina Department of Transportation employees in Sampson County should get well-deserved kudos for their diligent work on roads damaged during Hurricane Matthew back in October.
After the devastating storm, more than 100 roads across our county were closed, stymieing activity and forcing major re-routing just to get children to and from school each day.
With as much expedience as humanly possible under extreme condition, DOT staff have methodically ticked away at the problems, patching where necessary to allow for safe travel and then repairing as quickly as they could. Nearly six months after the devastating storm, all but four of those roads are now open. Still closed are: Mosley Avenue near state road 1145; Hayne Stretch Road; Daughon Road near state road 1624 and Bucktown Road.
While six months seems like a long time to many, particularly those who have had to find varying routes to travel Sampson, truth be told, restoring the roads has moved along at a steady pace, and the roads have been repaired a lot quicker than we actually anticipated. Those who saw many of those roads within the first few weeks after Hurricane Matthew understand. At that time, repairing them seemed nearly impossible.
But today, the deep ravines and washed away pavement seem a distant nightmare. And that is to the credit of a hard-working DOT staff that have tirelessly worked to achieve a seemingly insurmountable task.
We don’t always praise our local DOT crews the way we should, taking for granted the work that gets down on our highways, but when devastation occurs, as it did during Matthew, we are reminded just how much we need them and just how much we appreciate their diligence in getting the job done.
We tip our hat to the local DOT for keeping at the difficult task they faced and opening roads to safe travel as quickly as we think they possibly could have.