Officials in Asheville say the city’s water systems were “severely damaged” in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Precise assessments are hard, since roads have washed away.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Many people in Asheville, N.C., have gone without tap water for nearly a week. They lined up for hours to get bottled water to drink, and they’re collecting water from swimming pools, creeks and rain buckets for bathing and for flushing their toilets. NPR’s Pien Huang reports that bringing back – bringing fresh water back won’t be easy or quick.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Alana Ramo lives in east Asheville. Her faucets ran dry last Friday. Now, she’s got a leaky house full of buckets.
ALANA RAMO: So we’re just going around the house labeling buckets as, like, flush-only or, you know, tap water not filtered and then filtered water or drinkable.
HUANG: Tropical storm Helene crushed the roof in her bedroom and rain poured into the house, but she counts herself lucky. Her home is standing, and there’s flowing water nearby.
RAMO: Now, we’re pulling from creek water and having to boil it and then filter it through kind of a small water bottle.
HUANG: She’s using camping gear – a small cookstove to boil water, a camping filter for contaminants. Now, the city of Asheville does not recommend using creek water, but it took days after the storm for the county to set up sites to give out bottled water. Ramo says it’s been hard to get there.
RAMO: Yeah, and we also have very limited gas in the car, so we really just can’t be driving around and then realize it’s out.
HUANG: Ramo is among tens of thousands of people in and around Asheville who still don’t have running water. Ben Woody, assistant city manager in Asheville, says they’re working on the water problem around the clock, but the water outage is expected to last for a few more weeks at least.
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BEN WOODY: The damage to Asheville’s water system is catastrophic. I want to underscore that. We have a severely damaged water system.
HUANG: Mike Holcombe served as the city’s water director in the 1990s. He says Asheville has three water treatment plants, one down by the airport and two up in the mountains.
MIKE HOLCOMBE: The two mountainous water plants have been totally disconnected from the rest of the system.
HUANG: A bypass line created as a backup also got washed out. He says the infrastructure problems go beyond the pipes.
HOLCOMBE: Highways that go to those water treatment facilities are flooded out, washed away. So you can’t get heavy equipment in, which is what is going to be necessary to effect those repairs until the roads are reconstructed.
HUANG: Holcombe says those two water treatment plants in the mountains are critical.
HOLCOMBE: It’s really a nightmare. Those two lines – two main transmission lines serve about 70% of the actual water system.
HUANG: Holcombe lives in south Asheville, and his water comes from the one water plant that’s still working. In his house, the faucets have started running for a few hours each night, but he expects that homes and businesses in east, west and north Asheville will be out of water for a while yet.
Now, this isn’t the first time Asheville has dealt with water outages from extreme weather. In 2004, the water went out for a week after a tropical storm. In 2022, the water went out for nearly two weeks after a cold snap caused pipes to freeze. Holcombe served on a committee that reviewed that outage.
HOLCOMBE: The Christmas 2022 incident was like a fender-bender, if you will. This situation here is a head-on, 65-mile-an-hour collision in comparison.
HUANG: Holcombe says there’s just no way for their mountain-based water system to be ready for a storm like this.
Pien Huang, NPR News.
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