Boiling Spring Lakes dam construction, road closures continue to frustrate residents

BOILING SPRING LAKES, NC (WWAY) — Several dams in Boiling Spring Lakes were damaged in 2018 by Hurricane Florence and a few of them have impacted East Boiling Spring Road.

Since then, the city has received assistance from the state and federal government to rebuild the dams but East Boiling Spring Road has remained closed, making it difficult for residents, like Ashley Lee to get from one area of the city to the other.

“We’ve already come to accept we don’t have water,” Lee said. “Can we have our road? Can we just have the road to get to the end of 87? The dam, we don’t know if we’ll ever have that back. But can we have our road?”

The road was supposed to reopen last October, but damage from the storm last fall pushed that back.

Mayor Jeff Winecoff said there have been other delays to the project due to the need for federal assistance.

“We learned that, you know, they take a lot of time,” Winecoff said. “There’s a lot of red tape you have to go through and there’s rules and regulations that we have to follow. It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Oh, let’s go do it and we’re gonna do it.’ There’s money that needs to be raised and its not an easy thing to do. When inflation hit, it tripled the cost of this dam.”

But Winecoff added that East Boiling Spring Road is expected to reopen sometime this spring, something Lee was excited but also nervous to hear about.

“A timeline is all we need, an expectation because the timelines we’ve been given have up to this point have come and gone. So if I can believe in a new timeline, that’d be great. I’d love to, I’d love to believe that I don’t have to drive on that curve anymore.”

Winecoff said the expected completion date for the dams has been pushed back to 2027.