A hillside along Route 775 in Lawrence County, Ohio is getting stabilized with $705,915 in federal funding, a small but telling example of how intensifying rainfall and aging rural roads are colliding in one of the state's most geographically isolated corners.
Lawrence County sits at the very tip of southern Ohio along the Ohio River, where steep river valley hills and narrow flood plains make roads uniquely vulnerable to slope failures. When a hillside gives way on a highway like Route 775, there are often no easy detours through the rugged terrain, leaving residents and emergency responders stuck with long roundabout routes until repairs are complete.
The money comes from the federal PROTECT program, a first-of-its-kind grant created under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that gives states dedicated funding to harden transportation networks against natural hazards including landslides, flooding, and extreme weather. Before PROTECT, states largely had to compete for traditional highway dollars to address resilience problems, often losing out to bridge and pavement projects with broader constituencies.
The underlying problem has been building for decades. Ohio's rural highways in the Appalachian region were largely built in the 1950s through 1970s, without the slope engineering standards used today. Meanwhile, the Midwest has seen a 42% increase in heavy precipitation events since 1958, according to the National Climate Assessment. Heavier, more frequent rainstorms saturate already-stressed hillsides, accelerating failures that can be among the most expensive per-incident road hazards to repair.
ODOT has long faced a backlog of slope repair needs across southeastern Ohio, and counties like Lawrence, one of the state's most economically distressed with poverty rates well above the state average, have virtually no local tax base to address them independently. Ohio's total PROTECT formula allocation runs roughly $277 million over five years, and projects like this one represent the program quietly reaching rural roads that rarely make headlines.
Similar federal resilience investments have been flowing to aging infrastructure across the region, including a flood-resilience upgrade to a 19th-century stone bridge in Lower Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania, as states use PROTECT and related programs to address long-deferred vulnerabilities.
ODOT has not yet announced a construction timeline for the Route 775 slope work.
