North Carolina Department of Transportation officials updated their progress on connecting several communities in the Hickory Nut Gorge four weeks after Helene brought devastating flooding to the area. Engineers said Friday that the Broad River, at its peak during the storm, reached between 50 and 70 feet wide, but some other areas saw widths around 200 feet. They added they had to put the river back to about where it was before the storm to start work on a temporary road.”What we’ve done is a temporary relocation using survey data that we had prior to the storm,” engineer Nathan Moneyham said. “We’ve tried to approximate the river location just to create room, basically, to build some temporary roads to provide access.”NCDOT said since the storm, the department has reopened around 870 roads and identified around 7,700 damaged sites. Engineers said reconstructing a temporary road to provide access to residents, business …