The Southeast High-Speed Rail project covers over 200 miles of rail and over 100 miles of new roadway from the Potomac River to Raleigh, North Carolina. To comply with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, we assisted the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation and the North Carolina Department of Transportation with cultural resource studies, consulting party outreach, and preparation of effect documentation. We also conducted extensive consulting party dialogues in Virginia and North Carolina engaging almost 100 communities and 11 governmental stakeholders to negotiate and prepare multiple Memorandum of Agreements/Programmatic Agreements to address project impacts on historic properties.
For this ongoing project, we recorded over 200 archaeological sites and over 4,000 architectural properties at the Phase I level, completed archaeological testing at two dozen sites, conducted determinations of eligibility for over 200 architectural properties, and crafted almost 300 chains of title for properties along the entire corridor. We continue to work on mitigation to impacted sites through HABS and HAER documentation, oral histories, GIS-based StoryMaps, public talks, signage, and excavations.
