After Helene, many Asheville, N.C., residents remain without drinking water : Shots

An estimated tens of thousands of people in and around Asheville, N.C., are still without running water, six days after the tropical storm Helene.

The faucets ran dry in Alana Ramo’s home last Friday after the storm swept through. She resorted to creek water and rainwater.

“We [were] going around the house labeling buckets as ‘flush only’ or ‘tap water not filtered’ and then ‘filtered water’ or ‘drinkable,’” Ramo says. She and her boyfriend kept different buckets for drinking and washing dishes, for the plants, for the dog, for flushing the toilet, she says, “so that everybody stays safe and doesn’t drink contaminated water.”

They used camping gear — a small cookstove and a water bottle with a filter — to purify the water for drinking.

The City of Asheville does not recommend drinking creek water. But it took days after the storm for the county to set up sites to give out bottled water. Ramo says those sites have been hard to access. “We have very limited gas in the car, so we can’t be driving around and then realize it’s out,” she says.

She’s since decamped to South Carolina to do laundry and restock supplies.

The City of Asheville says they’re working on the problem around the clock, but the water outage for many residents is expected to last for a few more weeks at least.

“The [water] system was catastrophically damaged, and we do have a long road ahead,” said Ben Woody, assistant city manager in Asheville, at a press conference Wednesday.

Roads washed out, treatment plants offline

Asheville has three water treatment plants: one down by the airport, and two up in the mountains.

“The two mountainous water plants have been totally disconnected from the rest of the system,” says Mike Holcombe, a longtime Asheville resident who served as the city’s water director in the 1990’s.

A bypass line, created as a backup, also got washed out. “That’s how the flood and the deluge was,” says Holcombe. “It washed away not only the mainline, but it washed away the line that they had put in to prevent this situation.”

The infrastructure problems go beyond the pipes. The topography is mountainous, and some parts of the system are hard to access even in sunny weather, Holcombe says.

“Highways that go to those water treatment facilities are flooded out, washed away,” he says. “So you can’t get heavy equipment in until the roads are reconstructed.”

Those two water treatment plants in the mountains are critical. “It’s really a nightmare,” says Holcombe. “Those two main transmission lines serve about 70% of the actual water system.”

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 other parts of Asheville will be out of water for awhile yet.

Stay or go? Water uncertainty drives residents away

That uncertainty has been stressful for residents, including many who left the region temporarily.

“Is it worth it to go home if the power comes back, or should I just stay gone and figure something else out?” asks Page Marshall, an Asheville resident who’s currently staying with a friend in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Last Friday, Marshall rode out the storm for 30 hours in her car, after she ran out of gas trying to leave the city. A friend managed to bring her a gallon of gas, and she returned home to her apartment in south Asheville, long enough to share the perishable food in her refrigerator with neighbors and leave a lot of food and water for her two cats.

Since power and water were both out, Marshall left to stay with a friend for a few days. “I didn’t realize until I got here, it had been five days since I’d taken a shower, five days since I’d been able to wash my hands with soap,” she says. “I had wet wipes, but they only do so much.”

As of Tuesday, the city’s potable water ration for resident pickup was set at 2 gallons per day for individuals.

“My toilet alone takes at least a gallon of water to flush,” Marshall says, “So me, as a full-grown human and two cats, with a gallon of water a day [for consumption], and another gallon to flush my toilet once a day … I don’t know how that works out out, because I need something to drink,” she says.

County officials recommend residents use non-potable water such as pool water or creek water for flushing toilets, if this water is available.

Marshall plans to head back soon to check on her cats, and figure out whether it’s feasible to return home more permanently.

Extreme weather v. infrastructure

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.

“That 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,” says Mike Holcombe, who served on an independent committee that reviewed the outage.

Holcombe says there was just no way for their mountain-based water system to be ready for a storm like this. “It can’t be overstated, the intensity and destructiveness of this storm,” he says. “I don’t know that any mountainous water system like this would have fared much better.”

The size and severity of hurricanes is increasing with climate change, says Jerald Schnoor, professor of environmental engineering at the University of Iowa. Rebuilding from storm-related destruction can take years, and may require adaptations for climate change, he says. Schnoor has seen how cities recovered after huge floods in Iowa.

“We have a mistaken impression that infrastructure should last forever,” he says. “[Instead], we need to continuously invest in our infrastructure to make it adequate for today and better for tomorrow.”