July 10, 2013. The North Carolina Department of Transportation crews will close N.C. 88 in western Watauga County near the Tennessee state line on Thursday, July 11, to replace a 30-inch pipe that was washed out by the heavy water volume brought on by several days of rain in the area.
NCDOT crews will close N.C. 88 at 7 a.m. on Thursday morning to begin work replacing the pipe with a 36-inch pipe that carries a small stream under the roadway. Weather permitting, the road could be open as soon as Friday morning.
A message board will be in place Wednesday around the work zone with information. A detour route has been set up around the area that has motorists using N.C. 88 to Big Laurel Road into Tennessee (where it changes to Forge Creek Road/TN 167) to U.S. 421/TN 34 to TN 67 back to North Carolina and N.C. 88.
For real-time travel information at any time, call 511 or follow NCDOT on twitter. Another option is NCDOT mobile, a phone-friendly version of the NCDOT webste. To access it, type m.ncdot.gov into the browser of your smartphone and bookmark it to save for future reference.