News

Lightning moves to South Park Plaza

By Bill Moss, Published: January 31, 2025

The Lightning has moved. I know, it seems like we just said that, and did that. True.

Our new new location is 138 Joel Wright Drive in South Park Plaza to the right of Ingles. We could throw a rock from our last place at 619 Spartanburg Highway to our new office. Directions: From Greenville Highway turn across from Publix onto Cooper Penny Drive or Joel Wright Drive. We're the closest building to Ingles. From Spartanburg Highway, go past the Ingles gas pumps and the store and turn into South Park Plaza. Look for our sign.

Why the move? There's news in the answer. We knew when we moved last November into the Jones Commercial Property building that our stay there would not be permanent. The building is directly in the path of the White Street Extension from Greenville Highway to Spartanburg Highway.

Honestly, we made the calculated assumption that with billions of dollars of repair work after Helene, the NCDOT might not regard White Street as high-ranking. Wrong. Less than two weeks after we moved, an NCDOT eminent domain functionary visited Gary Jones, our landlord, and announced that the bulldozer was indeed coming soon. (Gary first got notice from the DOT that it would condemn his property more than seven years ago.)

Thus the move to South Park Plaza. We're not as visible there as we were on Spartanburg Highway — the traffic count dropping from thousands/day to a few dozen — but it's a great space. Above the flood? Sorry to say, no. Like everything else in the Mud Creek bowl from Publix to Chick Fil-A, South Park became submerged. Just not as much as some lower property. In Gary's building the waterline was 3-4 feet. At our new office it was about a foot and a half. Now, we hope for the best and prepare for the worst. We use the upper drawers of file cabinets. Having endured the Great Flood of '24, I don't know of anyone who marches ahead completely confident that it won't happen again.

So back to the White Street Extension. There's a huge amount of roadwork on the horizon from Publix to the Church-Main-King confluence, including a big roundabout and replacement of the Mud Creek bridge. (There's work under way now, not by DOT, to repair the tunnel that carried Mud Creek under the Fresh Market parking lot.)

 On Thursday's Lightning Radio Show on WTZQ, when I brought up the White Street work, host Mark Warwick asked whether the project would involve any flood prevention. That's precisely the question, isn't it? We witnessed Sept. 27. Here, it seems to me, is the first opportunity for a major public works project — at ground zero of the urban flooding in Hendersonville — to design and incorporate stormwater management improvements. I guess that would involve a really Big Dig or some kind of hydrology solution that I'm unqualified to imagine.

We know that no engineering in the world would have prevented flooding during and after Helene and her 27-inch deluge. But we also know that lesser storms regularly dump enough rainfall to close streets in the Publix area. Observing these many times, I've often muttered to myself, "Must be this month's 100-year-flood."

Those are big challenges for greater engineering minds than mine. My dad was the engineer. I'm a liberal arts man. Y'all figure it out, we'll report it.

In business as in journalism, the way to go forward is to suit up, go outside, make another picture, write more words. We'll be fine in our new South Park Plaza digs. We will, as the great Jim Valvano declared during the Wolfpack's magical march to the national championship in 1983, survive and advance.