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Final Hurricane Florence road closure re-opens

PRE News & Ideas | By George Olsen
Published April 16, 2019 at 10:56 AM EDT
NC Department of Transportation

The last of road closures attributed to Hurricane Florence last September has re-opened. Zion Church Road, a two-lane stretch east of Mount Olive, re-opened to traffic last week following inspection of a new bridge on the road and adjustments to a new guardrail. The Wayne County road was the last of about 2500 road closure sites reported during the storm to re-open. A press release from the state Department of Transportation said Zion Church Road was one of many roads that were re-opened with improvements in order to be more resilient in future storms. In this case, engineers determined a pipe carrying water under the road was not adequate to handle future flooding and constructed a bridge as a better long-term solution.
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NC DOTZion Church Road
George Olsen
George Olsen is a 1977 Havelock High School graduate. He received his B.A. in Broadcast Journalism from the University of South Carolina in 1982 where he got his first taste of non-commercial radio working for their student station WUSC. After graduation he worked about five years in commercial radio before coming to work at Public Radio East where he has remained since outside of a nearly 3-year stint as jazz and operations coordinator at WUAL in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the early 1990s. On his return to eastern North Carolina he hosted classical music for Public Radio East before moving into the Morning Edition host position and now can be heard on All Things Considered. He also hosts and produces The Sound, five hours of Americana, Roots Rock and Contemporary Folk weekday evenings on PRE Public Radio East News & Ideas, and is a news and feature producer for Public Radio East.
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